Learning Kids Games

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Understanding Irony

Understanding humour and irony in a foreign language can be incredibly challenging, but is also very important. I think this is especially true of British humour which can be very dry. That's why I think one of the new features on BigThink is so useful. There are a series of clips of British writer, actor and comedian Ricky Gervais on the site and some of these give excellent examples of this kind of humour.

What's also really useful is that the site also provides tape scripts, so it is possible for students to read first and then see how the intonation, facial expression and other paralinguistic features change the meaning of the words.

An excellent example of this is a short clip of Gervais talking about how the economic recession has effected Celebrities.

Celebrities

Quick suggestion

To use this you could introduce the topic by getting your students to think about their opinions on this topic.
Then get them to read the tape script and see if they agree with the celebrity.
Then watch the clip and indicate on the tape script where they think he is joking or being ironic and when he is being serious.
You could also get your students to try identify the paralinguistic features that indicate that he isn't serious.

If you would like to contrast this with more serious clips then you could try

All of these clips also have great examples of very natural speaking, with lots of pauses, repetition, self correction and 'fillers'.

Check out the rest of the series: Ricky Gervais
Check out more EFL ESL video based activities

Hope you and your students enjoy this material.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Friday, March 13, 2009

Exploiting Travel Images

I have to say that I do really enjoy the multimedia pages on the New York Times website. I think they really demonstrate how web based journalism can add new dimensions to a story.

One of the things that I particularly like is the multi media slide shows, and I think these are great to use with students as the images are strong and can arouse their curiosity, and the amount of authentic text isn't too much so students with a reasonable intermediate level of English they will be prepared to struggle through it. They are also nicely categorised around themes, which makes it easier to use a group of them to design materials around.

Suggestion for a travel lesson

This is a very simple idea that I came up with for exploiting the travel slide shows.

Just give your students the links to 3 or 4 of the different travel destinations.
Ask them to watch and read the slide shows and decide which of the places they would most like to visit for a holiday.
Make sure they justify their decision, the ask them to discuss or write about what they would do or see there and who and what they would take with them.
If your students choose different destinations you could pair them and ask them to persuade their partner to change destinations and come to the place they want to go.

Here are some of the destinations they could choose:

Well I hope you and your students enjoy some of these marvelous images. You can find more activities based around images on my Daily Activities blog

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Ideas for Creative Writing

The Movie Plot generator is a handy site if you want to get fun ideas to get your students doing creative writing.

It's very simple, it automatically generates new movie plots each time you refresh your browser
The plots are very simple and based around two characters and an, often strange, scenario.

The ideas are ideal though to stimulate your students' imagination. You could ask them to produce a short script for a scene from the movie.

Scene where hero and heroine meet
Scene where they realise they are in love
Opening scene
Final scene
etc

Or you could use it to generate five or six scenarios and get students to vote of the one most likely to succeed / worst etc.

Or they could just write the story in more detail based around the plot.

Lots of quick, simple, creative language practice.(Some scenarios may not be suitable for younger learners)

Hope you enjoy it.

Check out 20+ writing activities on my Daily English Activities site.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities

I've always loved and been moved and inspired by great photographs and I have always found them to be powerful prompts for language and communication. I think the power of images goes all the way back to cave painting which was our earliest form of asynchronous communication.

So whenever I see site with great images on I try to think about how they could be used with language students. Simon Hoegsberg's site is one such site. It's not just that these are great images, they are also powerful themes and he has also understood the potential of websites to deliver these images.

You can see some of his photographic projects at: http://www.simonhoegsberg.com/

Some of the projects I think would have the most immediate use would be 'Faces of New York'. A collection of images of 10 New Yorkers talking about their faces. This could act as a nice model to get students doing a similar thing or be great as a split reading with students having information about the different people and having to connect it to the correct face.

I also like this one with the rather morbid title of 'We're All Gonna Die Sometime - 100 Metres of Existence' which is a 100 meter long horizontal image of people taken walking over a bridge. It's a great one for getting students to identify people by their descriptions and to describe them.

Anyway, it's certainly worth checking out the other projects, though some of the image are quite strong and not recommended for younger learners.

Hope you enjoy these. If you like using images in language teaching it's also well worth checking out the Images4Education group, a group of educators who collaborate to develop teaching ideas that exploit web based image technologies. You can also find image based activities for learners here on my Daily Activities site.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Monday, March 9, 2009

Coffee with Leon Cych

This Sunday 15th March 09 (GMT 18.00 = 11.00 PST) will see the next in our series of 'Coffee With ..' educational chat shows on Edunation II 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 Leon Cych (aka: Eyebeams Electricteeth) Leon Cych is a web designer, coder, teacher, poet, artist, broadcaster, journalist, independent consultant, advisor, teacher in ICT in education in the UK.

He is passionate about advancing the sound pedagogical exploitation of new technologies within the state school environment. Among the things we'll be discussing are his involvement in projects like Schools of the Future, the G20 Summit, the Holodeck project and his work on developing narrative based learning and learning communities within Second Life. Leon also has his own Learn4Life island in Second Life

If you would like to see some of his work and find out a bit more about him, checkout these links:

Guardian article: 'A question of training':
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/sep/18/link.link10
His Learn4 Life blog:
http://www.l4l.co.uk/
His multimedia art work on BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/multimedia/yourwork/a_cych.shtml
You can also check him out on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/eyebeams

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 7 hours ahead of Second Life time, so that's 11.00 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

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Best

Nik Peachey

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Great Source of Animated Movies

I've just been enjoying some great animated movies on the Aniboom.com site. The site is like a YouTube for aspiring animators. they can upload their videos and interact on the Aniboom communities. The site pushes the quality videos to the front page so it's quite easy to find the 'good stuff'.

These kinds of movies are great to use with students as they are short and engaging and a lot of the communicative message is covered by the visual aspect, so you can even exploit many of these videos with lower level language learners.

There's a section of the site called 'Produce' which has series of animated movies that have been created for the site, so you could use these to build up a series of lessons for your students.

I also really like the 'Create' section which has a couple of nice tools to get students creating their own short animated movies and gifs.

One is called 'Shapeshifter' and it's a free online software for creating 2D animation. There's a video tutorial here showing how it works: Shapeshifter tutorial

The other is called 'Micro-Smotion' and it allows students to create animations using their webcam. They can then post these to blogs, Facebook etc or email them to friends.

There are even some free basic lessons in animation on Animate 101

So lots to do on Aniboom and well worth a visit. As with any website, be sure to check anything you use with your students before letting them see it.

Hope you enjoy this site.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Monday, March 2, 2009

Image and Video Search

Tag Bulb is a great tool to make images and videos accessible within the classroom. It's also incredibly simple to use. Just type in your keyword and click. It searches through a range of video and image sharing sites and displays the results as thumbnails. You can just toggle between videos or images.

Tag Bulb is a great fast way to access visuals from your classroom and really handy if you have a data projector or IWB. It can become an instant picture dictionary or great tool for helping you stimulate discussion or brainstorm vocabulary around a topic.

Of course be careful about what you or your students search for as you/ they could come across some more adult orientated images, but on the whole this is a really useful tool.

Hope you enjoy using it.
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Nik Peachey Read More..