Welcome to my ELT blog









I am an ESOL teacher and teacher trainer in the UK: all the tools I'm looking at here are easy to handle and have lots of learning potential inside and outside the classroom. I hope you find this too.



Sunday 12 February 2012

Phrasr

 This tool can be found on the Pimpampum website, home of bubblr and bookr and, like them, draws on the repository of flikr photos.  It is ridiculously easy to use: it offers to find photos to illustrate any phrase you care to type in.  It tries to find a match for each item in the phrase and if you don't think much of any of the matches, you are offered others or the option of a blank.  Once you are happy with the collection of pictures, you write a title for your row of pictures and e-mail it to someone.
 
At first glance this is a dodgy idea, but as long as you remember this is not attempting to be an elementary photo dictionary then your learners can use it to explore their understanding of the meanings of new words and phrases.  If they type in a vocabulary list of concrete nouns, they will be presented with a straightforward collection of pictures to choose from.  With more idiomatic phrases the pictures start to become  more idiosyncratic.  Used in this way it becomes more challenging to find the best (sometimes quite personal) fit between word and picture.  Students could work in pairs with their vocabulary lists compiling then comparing their illustrations.  Successful acquisition of vocabulary requires a lot of recycling like this, and the process of making a personal selection of pictures can only help to make it more memorable.        

I typed in a number of phrases to see what it would come up with.




  

However...

Some phrases and words will never trigger an acceptable match - the pictures draw from one repository.
YOu can't save the illustrated phrases: you can find them again in the website's public gallery or by e-mailing them.  


  http://www.pimpampum.net/en/content/phrasr

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