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.



Friday 16 March 2012

bookr


These lovely pics are from the Flickr website. Bookr lets us choose photos from Flickr to make some highly polished publications and presentations. Bookr is another idiot friendly website where the book pages are waiting when you open the website and you simply type in a topic area in the tag box. You select from an array, or keep scrolling if you can't see what you want. Keep turning the pages with your cursor, add more pics and write in the text box on each page if you want to. Once you're happy, type in an e-mail address and copy the embedding code if you want it. The book is tagged in their archive.


I made these two books using some published students' stories. The first shows how bookr can be used as a speaking prompt - if you are looking for presentation-type practice and you have a large screen in the classroom. It would be more interesting for students to find their own pics of course and spend some time rehearsing. The second version shows how simple it is for students to add text. Although the boxes look small, they can write a considerable amount and add more pages. This is particularly motivating for beginners - rarely does the end result of 4 sentences look so impressive! 


However - problems?   There's not a lot to say here.  You can't save your products except in their archive.  You might find the Flickr archive a bit annoying.  It has a definite cultural skew.  But definitely worth exploring!

MailVU


This is one of those multi-purpose tools not necessarily designed with learning in mind which seem to have "here I am, language teacher" written all over it.  As long as you have a webcam it allows you to record a video for up to 10 minutes, save it in a repository and e-mail it to someone else.  You can click and record as soon as you access the website, though there are three versions you can sign up for. I've tried the free one which gives you a repository to save your recordings to but doesn't allow you to embed.  It is ridiculously easy to use: one click and you are recording. 

My first thought was to use it to record stuff to take into the classroom.  Listening to teachers talking has now become acceptable practice again - teachers are great resources for authentic, but roughly tuned input and add a personalised and context-sensitive motivation for listening. HOWEVER, I find spontaneous, unscripted story-telling, for example, quite difficult to get right first time (and we often ask our students to do this!)   So I've made recordings at home, with an off-screen audience, and I was a lot happier with the result. Click this and see what you think?  http://ml.vu/yUBlvL It also meant I could think about some of the language I was using and decide which bits might be useful for students to notice.  Of course, the next step is to prepare students to make their own recordings and this needs to be done in the classroom.  The teacher's recordings can be used for more than one listening so students can be encouraged to notice the structure of the story, the tenses or typical narrative discourse markers.  Students need time to think about, prepare, elaborate, rehearse and correct: the classroom environment is ideal for this.  They have a critical but receptive audience for each stage in peers and their teacher who provide feedback about meaning, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.  All this and the prospect of recording should challenge students to 'raise their game' (as in the reporting stage of task-based learning) and develop greater accuracy and complexity. The actual recording, on the other hand, can ideally be done from the students' homes and e-mailed to their teacher and other students.  This enables the teacher to send back individual feedback, which is usually quite difficult to achieve for speaking activities.  You can imagine how much students might appreciate this as they approach their speaking exams.  Thinking of assessment in more formative terms, once students start saving their recordings, they are beginning to assemble a portfolio with evidence of their progress.  They should find this motivating and your quality assurance-minded managers would certainly be interested in this method of tracking. Once you have the students' recordings, there is more motivating learning potential in playing one or two strong ones and encouraging peers to analyse what makes them successful. 

It's difficult to find  any problems with this tool except where your classrooms or your students don't have webcams: this is certainly a problem in my own context.  It would also be ideal to be able to  save these elsewhere. 


http://mailvu.com/

Thursday 15 March 2012

Learning Chocolate

This is a friendly little vocabulary site that obligingly offers you the same items in many other languages as well as English.  It seems to get updated - new items have appeared on the site recently.  For each vocabulary field there are opportunities to click a picture and hear each item, match sound and spelling (3 different ways) practise spelling and then do a dictation.  Each activity has a timer and a feedback button.  This is the key to its usefulness: it enables students to come across the same item in many different ways, links pronunciation, meaning and spelling, and provides the consolidation students really need to acquire a new lexical item.  The site has three  full pages of different vocabulary fields: what I also like is that they include collocations.  It has a dual language option for Spanish, Japanese and Chinese speakers (it has its eye on the big markets).  You can show the most IT timid students how to navigate this site and hope they will find this experience so easy they will go away and use it at home.  Your tech savy students will have found it already. 

Unfortunately for my students, the accent and variety is U.S. English, which UK-based beginners in particular find a bit confusing (period? - fullstop!).  I'm just waiting for the Brit English version.  Also, as you might expect with a site which is picture-based, it only offers a basic level vocabulary list.  A further thought - once your students start matching up randomly and then going straight for the checking button, it's time to think of more creative ways of using this site - there's not much learning going on.   



http://www.learningchocolate.co