US Culture Blog from VOA

I've just been having a look an interesting blog from Voice of America journalist Ted Landphair.

The blog has a good collection of well written articles with some really nice images, that go behind the stereotyped view of the USA.

The postings are quite long and the English is quite challenging so they are probably best used with higher level EFL ESL students, though they are nicely chunked into sections with good clear paragraph headings, and the way the images are used with good captions, supports the overall understanding of the text.

You could divide the text up for split reading and get different students to read each chunk and then share what they have learned in groups.

Ted also includes a 'wild words' section which gives definitions of some of the more challenging words in the text, so they have made some provision for people whose first language isn't English.
I have to say that I found the blog pretty interesting (but I am in my 40s) and really liked the images. I created this activity, Where in America?, based around it for my Daily English Activities Blog.

Hope you like and enjoy reading Ted Landphair's America.

Related links:

• Create EFL / ESL Lesson Plans in Mins
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Prompting reading speeds
• More Reading Activities
• Where in America?

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Coffee With Kim Anubis

This Sunday 14th December (GMT 18.00 = 10.00 PST) will see the third in our series of 'Coffee With ..' educational chat shows on Edunation III in Second Life, so please do come along, join our audience and meet other people interested in developing education and learning within Second Life.


In this show I'll be interviewing Kim Anubis (aka: Kimberly Rufer-Bach) is owner, designer & producer of The Magicians (www.TheMagicians.us), a 3D interactive software development company that specializes in creating innovative Second Life content.

Kim is also co-author of 'Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life'. Some of her company's clients include:

• British Council
  
• University of California-Davis Medical Center
  
• Global Kids
  
• Languagelab.com
  
• New York Law School

In the show Kim will be talking about the potential of Second Life for educational development and will be helping us to understand what's involved in working with a development company and managing projects within Second Life.

This is a unique opportunity to come along an interact with one of the leading developers within Second Life.

If you would like to come along and watch the show and join in the discussion, then go along to Edunation III and click the sign-up terminals or email Gavin at: dudeney@theconsultants-e.com. The event is free, but we are limited to 100 places. The show starts at GMT = 18.00 (GMT is 8 hours ahead of Second Life time, so that's 10.00 PST and 19.00 CET)


If you don't have a Second Life avatar but would like to know how to set one up then you can download instructions from here. Setting up a Second Life avatar

Related links:

• Coffee With Kyle Mawer
• Coffee with Gavin Dudeney
• Filming in Second Life 1
• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• More Second Life Tutorials
• Building in Second Life
• Lip Sync for Second Life
• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos

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Edublog Awards 2008 Nomination

Well wonder of wonders, my Learning Technology Blog has been nominated for an Edublog Award.
It's been nominated within the Best Resource Sharing category, which means there is some VERY stiff competition. To be honest, my money ( and actually my nomination) is on Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day/ but it's still nice that someone has seen fit to nominate one of my blogs.

If you haven't already, it's well worth checking out the list of blogs that have been nominated as there's some really excellent ones there, which makes it that much more of an honour to get one of mine in there. You can see all the categories here: Edublog Awards 2008

And you can see my nominations here: My nominations

Hope you find some interesting stuff there.

Related links:

• My learning technology blog
• My nominations
• Naming My Sources: Part 2
• Naming My Sources: Part 1
• Creating a personal homepage

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ESL Information Digests

I've just been browsing through the website of the Centre for Adult English Language Acquisition (CAELA) and although it couldn't possibly be described as fun and sexy, there is a lot of potentially really useful information there especially for anyone involved in teacher training and development.


There are 72 quick Q & A digests that deal with a broad range of subjects from methodology to program design and technology.

There's also a handy Tools section that has guidance for Instructors and Program developers.

You can email in a question and get it answered at Ask CAELA and even sign up for a free newsletter.

Hope you find something useful there.

Related links:

• Create your own social network 7 steps
• Using wikis for teacher development
• ELT classroom videos
• Training Teachers to Use Blogger
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos

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Are You a Celebrity Lookalike?

This is a nice site that you can use to have some fun with your students and of course to generate some language and learning activities. It's called Celebrity Matchup. All you do is choose the gender and then upload a picture of yourself or one of your students. The site then scans their image and selects a set of celebrities that they look like. Here are some of my matches!
Can't really say I'm flattered! I also tried matching myself to female celebrities (just curiosity) and got these results. Could I really be the Carmen Electra of ELT? Um! Doubt it!


Well I'm not really sure that Celebrity Matchup works, but I think you could have a lot of fun and discussion with your students deciding which is the closest match and what the differences and similarities of the facial features are. I'm sure there's a really good facial characteristics lesson in there somewhere with lots of vocabulary.

Anyway, if you or your students really like the matches you get you can even get a widget to add your results to your blog or website.
Just by clicking on the image you see above once you've matched up and pasting the code into your blog.

Well I hope you enjoy that and match up to some flattering celebrities, but do watch out for the advertising.

Related links:

• Photo Fun with Your Students
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• A Picture's worth
• Manga images for EFL ESL
• Create an English Cartoon
• Guess the Word
• Play Games and Improve Your Vocabulary

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Monty Python on YouTube

This is great news. Monty Python team at last have their own Monty Python channel on YouTube. For as long as video has been used in the ELT classroom, I'm sure that Monty Python videos have been part of that and they can now be found at legitimate and stable locations on YouTube.

Here's the team telling you a little bit more about the reasons for this development.


So far there are 24 clips on the channel. Each one is about 3 mins long and of good quality. They are also allowing access to the embed code for anyone who wants to embed them into blogs and websites. I have to admit, that not all of these are suitable for use with students, but the Job Interview is there and also Ministry of Silly Walks

For those of you with a real appatite for all things Python, you can also see lots of news and other information at Pythonline

Hope you enjoy this from the originators of SPAM.

Related links:

• Video Clips for Teaching English
• Tutorial: Using Videos from YouTube
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Language Learning through Communal Video
• Exploiting a Video Viral

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Rod Bolitho on TeachingEnglish

Over the last few months the BBC | British Council's TeachingEnglish website has been featuring a number of the ELT greats from the UK. These have included both Jane Willis and Dave Willis, as well as Barry Tomalin and most recently Mario Rinvolucri.

This month the guest blogger will be Rod Bolitho. Each feature includes video interviews, biography and almost daily blog postings.

Here Rod talks about the future of English language teaching and the growing relevance of CLIL

This is a great opportunity for teachers all around the world to learn from and interact with some really first rate UK ELT experts. You can see the rest of Rod's interview here: Rod Bolitho Interview

Hope you manage to get along.

Related links:

• ELT classroom videos
• Would you recommend this?
• English Online
• Conference presentation videos
• Coffee With Kyle Mawer

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Nik Peachey Read More..