Breaking News English Lessons and Jing

First, Breaking News English.  This is literally about Breaking News, because Sean Banville posts a current news text every three days on this site and, with it, a huge range of linked activities.  Unlike many text-based English language sites which offer quantities of comprehension questions designed to keep students quiet, his tasks are largely intended to have the opposite effect.  The tasks are mostly designed to be downloaded as pdf and mp3 files, but there are also some  clever little on-line interactive reading activities.  The paper-based tasks are ideal for classroom use because they include speaking and group activities.  If the text has been meaningfully explored in the classroom, the interactive tasks would be good to set for self-study: they would be motivating  and extend the range of reading sub-skills and vocabulary development. 

There's no login, it's free and there's no chance your students will have met the material before.  Click on the screen below and I will take you through one of the news items.

However...
Any cons?  None, really.  Like anything else, it might be tempting but, don't overuse it. 

 http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/ 



Sharing websites like this is just one of the many possible uses of Jing.  This tool enables you to 'draw' a screen around a text and then activate a video recorder so you can record a commentary,highlight or move the cursor to the part you're talking about and at the same time scroll down. Your recording can be stored in your own account but, more usefully, you can sent the URL to whoever you want to share it with.  You can embed your video recording like this into a blog, but I've starting using it more frequently to comment on lesson plans my trainees send me before their teaching practice.  I e-mail them the link: they click and run the video.  I know some people prefer to see their feedback in black and white, so I checked with them and, so far, they've been very positive.  I suspect it feels like a (one sided) tutorial but it has the added bonus of being able to rewind your tutor and for your tutor it's so much quicker to do.  Though I haven't explored this possibility yet, there is no reason why your students shouldn't download this tool onto their own computers at home and start using it to record and send reading and pronunciation homework. Most people should manage with the free version, though there is a paying pro version for longer recordings and larger storage space.  

However...
The recordings in the free version only run for five minutes. 
 
http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html?gclid=CPbV49aTma4CFcEntAod0TTxJw

my.Brainshark

This is a great tool for bringing the outside world into the classroom and giving students a real focus for speaking and listening. I've used it to prepare a presentation I could use as a listening activity.  Pairs would then prepare their own presentations about a familiar area or country.  It's a very task-based learning activity and the recording encourages students to pay greater attention to their accuracy.          



Once your students have registered for this - and it couldn't be more straightforward - they download their powerpoints, pictures or videos and click the record button.  They will need headsets.  They are offered an infinite number of opportunities to re-record and preview, which is ideal.  As long as it's done collaboratively, I would expect a lot of planning and talking before they come up with the final presentation.

However...
The main problem I've had is trying to sequence the pictures.  They seem to pop up in the presentation quite randomly.   If anyone has got this one sorted...? It would be particularly hard if students were using them to tell a story.

http://www.brainshark.com/mybrainshark

Word Clouds

TagCrowd is one of easiest but not the prettiest word cloud tool I've tried out.

adult africa amused birmingham blog born camping childhood country decided different discovered earth english esol holidays kingdom later local married nightmare parents parts primary round school siblings sons spent studied teacher teaching things training united university variety wandering years

created at TagCrowd.com

http://tagcrowd.com/

I've been trying to make my own word clouds for years, but there are these wonderful tools that do a much better and quicker job and have huge visual appeal. Copy a text into the site and you get all the content words to appear in different sizes depending on their frequency in the text.  The more I look into this tool, the more ideas I get.  Here are a few which I've come up with, inspired by Nick Peachey's blog. 

• Paste a reading text or transcript in, print it off or put it on your smartboard and students can predict  its content, register, title or genre,  before reading or listening.  They can also use the words to compose a list of yes/no questions about the text.  You can answer them and students can compose their own text before reading the original.  Otherwise the questions just make a good focus for reading and listening. Nick Peachey's idea of using the word clouds to review these texts later in the term is  great one. The 'gorilla joke' word cloud was made in 'wordle', a more visually attractive tool.  If you don't know the joke, you're welcome to guess how it goes.  It's at the end of this post, if you're interested.  It demonstrates quite well how useful variable wordsize is in helping you to guess the main characters, setting, etc.

• Dialogues could be put into a word cloud to get students guessing and reconstructing.  The tool can be set to include all the words from the text so students can reconstruct it fully.  Spot  the way this word cloud highlights the informal emotive register of an 'embarrassing accident' anecdote below. Make sure your students notice the sizing isn't just random.  There must be many other ways of exploiting frequency analysis with this tool. 
  
  

• I love the idea of using these for reviewing vocabulary.  Over the years I've kept boxes of cards to pull out for a ten minute review at the end of a lesson.  You can see how a stock of these on your computer would be immediately more memorable and appeal to the visual learner in everyone. 
•  I also like the idea of students pasting texts about themselves into wordle, printing them off, randomly distributing them and asking each other questions to help identify the writer. Beginner literacy students can use it more like a word search, looking for recognisable words they have recently met in a text. 

The previous two word clouds are made with http://www.wordle.net   

At the moment, these tools seem to me to be wonderful for teachers and classrooms.

However...
I haven't found enough ideas for students working on their own.  I've tried a few word cloud tools and there are pros and cons with each: some (like Wordle) don't save easily except by screen capture though they can be captured onto a smartboard or printed off; others come with a thesaurus, though this is not very ESL friendly.

A gorilla joke

 

A gorilla went into a pub, walked up to the bar, and ordered a whisky. The barman was rather surprised, but he gave him the whisky, and then he thought, gorillas probably don’t understand much about money, so he asked him for £15. The gorilla gave him the money and started drinking. There was a silence for a few minutes, and then the barman said, “Excuse me, but you don’t often see a gorilla in a pub.” “It’s not surprising,” said the gorilla, " with whisky at £15 a glass.”