Educational Technology in ELT

iPhone, iPod touch and iPad apps for ELT

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:31:00 +0000

I`ve read many articles about useful apps for Apple products so far and there are several apps I use in my iPhone that are rarely featured. So I decided to publish my own list.
I have focused mainly on free apps although there are a few paid ones that are worth it. I have left out dictionaries since there are many options and probably deserve a post of their own.
All the apps reviewed here are available for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Category: Reference

Spell Check

Spell Check is an inexpensive Spell Checker and a Dictionary, which requires no internet connection!
• $0.99
• Language: English

Irregular Verbs

Irregular Verb Dictionary for English learners contains over 370 irregular verbs used in modern English. A useful app for learners!
• Free
• Language: English

Sounds

This app lets you hear the English sounds in both American and British English and you can practise and play. There`s a premium version available.
• Free
• Language: English

My WordBook

This app is an interactive vocabulary notebook for language learners. You can browse preloaded flashcards of the most important words in the English language. Each flashcard contains pictures, sounds, example sentences, translations and notes to help you remember.

This version does not contain any translations but you can enter your own translations by editing the words. Regional language versions are available for: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Arabic.
• Free
• Language: English

Free British English Genco Audio Cards

This app has 20 flashcards with sound and you can practice and play games.
• Free
• Language: English

Category: Language Practice

Conversation English

Conversation English is an app for anyone learning English. There are 20 complete Conversation English Lessons that include 200 common English Idioms and Expressions and help you develop your Listening and Speaking Skills.  
• $4.99
• Language: English

Dynamic English Lessons - Phrasal Verbs

This app presents phrasal verbs in different categories. You need to solve the category puzzle first and as you do, the phrasal verbs are added to the dictionary section, where you can read the definition. Although it looks a bit difficult, a newer version is being developed to provide more help with solving the puzzles.
• £0.99
• Language: English

Category: Books
Stanza

This free app allows you to download and read books. It is available in many languages.
• Free
• Languages: English, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese

Free books

This paid app (Yes, I know….why is it called free books?) gives you access to 23,469 classic books instantly. There are books available in many languages.
• $1.99
• Languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish

Cinderella – a 3d fairy tale

This app is an interactive retelling of the classic fairy tale. It includes games and music and beautiful illustrations! There is a free version and a paid one.
• Free/ $4.99
• Language: English

Christmas Tale

This is a free interactive Christmas story worth trying.
• Free
• Language: English

Category: Word games

Word challenge

60 Second Word Challenge is a vocabulary game to help improve and widen your English learning developed by the British Council. Really good!
• Free
• Languages: English, German

Word Scramble

Scramble is a fast fun game of finding words in a jumbled grid. Great for vocabulary practice! And addictive!
• Free
• Language: English

Hangman

This classic hangman app let you choose difficulty and word categories, like animals, food, etc. Simple but fun to practise vocabulary.
• Free
• Language: English

Other

Mouth off

Hold your iPhone in front of your mouth and talk, shout, laugh, scream or sing to get the mouth of your choice to animate in time with the sounds you make. There`s a lite version with one free mouth.
• $0.99
• Language: English

Sonic Pics

This app is an easy way to turn your images into custom slideshow movies. The lite version has some restrictions in the number of pictures allowed and maximum recording time of 10 minutes.
•    Free/ $2.99
•    Language: English

Fotobabble

This app lets you quickly create and easily add your voice to photos and instantaneously share those Talking Photos with friends.
• Free
• Language: English

Dice Roller

This app is a simple dice roller simulator. Simple yet useful.
• Free
• Language: English

Hope you have found something useful! If you know of other apps you use, please add them in your comments!

Blog Action Day: Food!

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 04:01:00 +0000

It`s Blog Action Day 2011. You can read about the initiative here.

This my contribution to the topic of FOOD in education. I have put together some interesting interactive resources related to food and nutrition. Click on the images to go to the websites.

Nutrition

This is the USDA website with a few interactive resources to explore nutrition issues.

This is a collection of nutrition related games for children.

A collection of interactive tools related to nutrition by the USDA

Interactive Nutrition Label and Quiz by Health Canada

Sustainability

This is an interesting article about the sustainable table with an option to find out what's fresh and ripe where you live in the US. Great if you live in the US but useful too for other countries to discuss this issue.

A similar tool is this interactive US map that shows seasonal ingredients

These are just a few tools to get you started in the discussion of food related issues. Hope you have found something useful!

Guest post: SpeedUpTV – Helps To Hone Your Foreign Language Learning Skills

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:48:00 +0000

SpeedUpTV is a new iOS-based application, compatible with the iPhone. This application provides rich features that have made it a popular choice among various iPhone users. Some iPhone users, like foreign language students, find this application simply amazing. SpeedUpTV is an effective app for improving your listening comprehrension skills. For example, if you have trouble understanding some dialogue in your favorite drama or an important part during a movie you can always replay or slow it down and loop it so you can understand what was said more clearly.

Let me explain in more detail. You can decrease the speed to 0.5X meaning you can slow down the speech of a video. Moreover, you can choose playback speed of 0.5x, 1x, 1.5x, 2x or 2.5x without sacrificing on quality of the video. This can be helpful when watching educational videos or maybe a lecture in English or any other foreign language.

This app helps students clarify their errors and make the necessary changes to improve fluency. I found this app to be of great use for people trying to learn a new language. I was able to slowdown the speed of video to better understand what the speaker was saying. SpeedUpTV is a great tool for improving listening skills. By listening to the video slowly and then progressively faster, I was able to better understand each dialogue and the nuances of pronunciation.

For those of you having trouble understanding the dialogue in your favorite foreign dramas because of the speed of their speech this app might help you improve your listening comprehension skills while also enjoying learning a foreign language.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/speeduptv/id386986953?mt=8

AppsAsia is a South Korean-based company passionately dedicated to providing marketing, promotion and advertising services for Korean iPhone application developers.
__________________________________________________________________

If you are interested in this app, I have 4 redeem codes to give away, courtesy of AppsAsia. Just send me an email at saumell.vicky@gmail.com and the first four will get them.

Cheers,

Vicky

Social Bookmarking: an essential 21st century skill for educators

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:05:00 +0000

Since the very beginning of the internet, and even more so these days with the endless number of useful websites and applications that we come across every day as educators, the need to organize our findings has become an essential skill. Fortunately, there are many tools that can help us to achieve this much needed organization of resources, referred to as social bookmarking.

This video about social bookmarking is a great introduction to the topic

The video also introduces the concept of tagging, which is expanded in this one.

A main consideration about tagging is consistency. Tags have to work for you, but good tags also work for the rest. Decide whether you will use a singular or plural noun (animal or animals?), and infinitive or a gerund (tag or tagging?), etc to make it easier to find things.

If you want to read further about social bookmarking and tagging, here are 2 interesting articles

7 things you should know about social bookmarking (Educause)
Folksonomies article

Social Bookmarking applications

Now you are ready to start bookmarking content. There are many social bookmarking applications with slight differences. I have compiled a list for you to see and choose the one you like best.

1) Delicious, which was also mentioned in the social bookmarking video. Delicious is very simple to use and has many users so you can benefit from what they are bookmarking too.

2) Diigo is a fantastic application for social bookmarking. It allows tagging, but also highlighting parts of the website and adding comments with sticky notes. Definitely my favourite!

Taking Diigo beyond the bookmark is an interesting article about the potential of Diigo.

3) Simply Box is a visual way of collecting bookmarks by adding them to a box, where you can see the screenshots of the bookmarked website.

4) LiveBinders works in a similar way by adding websites to a particular binder, with multiple tabs within.

Other tools to explore

Blinklist

Notefish

Bag the Web

Tizmos

Skloog and Symbaloo allow you to create shortcuts to your favourite websites and use as a startpage. I can see a great potential here for sharing useful resources with students visually in one page.

Symbaloo

Skloog

Hope you have found something useful! If you know of other tools or have any other ideas, please share in the comments.

How to Start Blogging with Students

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 13:31:00 +0000

Do you want to start blogging with your students but don`t quite know where to start?

When I first read about blogs and teachers blogging with students, I tried to set up a plan so that I could introduce blogs gradually both for students and teachers. So I have decided to share my ideas in this blog post as I know many teachers feel overwhelmed by the concept of blogging.

My usual recommendation is that, as a teacher, you cannot introduce any technology tool in class unless you are familiar with it. So with that in mind, it is important that you familiarize yourself with blogs first as a user before you introduce them in class.

Step 1: Commenting on a blog (teachers)

Find a few blogs you really like and make it a habit of commenting.

Step 2: Making your own blog

Set up a blog to experiment with. The main purpose of the blog could be sharing professional experiences among the teachers, but it can also be a space for more personal musings or a digital journal.

The blog you are now reading was conceived with this idea in mind.

Step 3: Building a repository of materials using a blog

Create a collection of resources for your students by posting them to a blog.

Examples:

a collection of videos to be used and reused with different classes
a set of pictures to be used as discussion prompts

Step 4: Making a blog-based lesson

Choose a lesson that would benefit from the use of technology and use a blog to present it to students. Have a look at two blog-based lessons I prepared a while ago on Friendship and ConspiracyTheories.

So far, students have only accessed the blogs to see the materials, they have not been asked to comment or blog themselves.

Step 5: Commenting on a blog (students)

Find and interesting blog from a colleague or class and ask students to read it and comment. Alternatively you can use a blog of your own, for example the ones in steps 2 and 3, and ask students to leave comments.

Now, they have moved from passive recipients of content to a bit more interactive users.

Step 6: Building a class blog

Build a blog for a particular class or project and have students writing and posting to this one blog. In this case, you need to give them editing permission but they do not have to make their own blog.

This step stretches students’ responsibility a bit more as they become authors in the class blog.

Have a look at this example of a blog I made for students to write film reviews.

Step 7: Building individual personal blogs

The last step is having students make their own blogs and manage them. You can guide the students’ postings or you can give them freedom to use the blog as an expressive platform for anything they want to write about. In this last step, you can benefit from using RSS to monitor your students’ blogs.

This is a quick guide to RSS, which I will be addressing in more detail soon…

Also, these are detailed step by step videos for using Blogger by Russell Stannard in his amazing Teacher Training Videos website.

Hope you have found some useful ideas to get you started!

If you have other ideas you are most welcome to share them in the comments.

Pronunciation related tools

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 19:09:00 +0000

Technology has been very useful in finding ways to help learners with pronunciations issues, which were in the past addressed by the teacher. I have collected some interesting pronunciation tools that can definitely help students when teachers are not around.

For pronunciation of individual sounds

Printable phonemic charts

English Club phonemic chart

English File Sounds Poster

Interactive phonemic charts

Teaching English/ British Council

Phonetics Focus/ Cambridge English Online

One Stop English/ Macmillan

Sounds App for iPhone, iPad and Android OS devices

The Sounds of American English/ University of Iowa

Interactive exercises and games

Phonetics Focus/ Cambridge English Online

Phonetics Focus Mobile App

English Online France

Free English Lessons Online Alphabet

One Stop English Pronunciation Skills

For listening to pronunciation of words and connected speech

Forvo/ All the Words in the World. Pronounced

Howjsay / A free online Talking Dictionary of English Pronunciation

For practising pronunciation of words and connected speech

English Central

I encourage you to browse through these tools and see how you an use them either in or out of the classroom!

Guest post: Correcting the Translator

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:15:00 +0000

Today`s guest writer is Lindsey Wright. She has written a post on an issue I have always paid attention to, but never got round to writing about: the use of online translators as allies to learning.

Lindsey Wright is fascinated with the potential of emerging educational technologies, particularly the online school, to transform the landscape of learning. She writes about web-based learning, electronic and mobile learning, and the possible future of education.

In today's modern world, online translation technology enables us to quickly and conveniently understand online content written in foreign languages. Services like Google translate will even offer to translate entire websites. As impressive as this is, native English speakers who have used these services will still find grammatical errors and dissonant wording. While it is certain that computers have not yet perfected the subtle art of language translation, human students of the English language could benefit from the valuable practice of correcting online translators' mistakes. With a little ingenuity, online translation services can become useful tools for students and teachers of the English language, no matter whether they are in a traditional classroom or in an online school. The following activities, grouped by difficulty level, are just a few examples of potential translator exercises.

Beginner Level

For English learners only just starting to familiarize themselves with grammar and syntax, translators can be excellent for reinforcing lessons in simple rules and constructions, such as subject-verb agreement, prepositions, verb-preposition combinations, or any other fundamentals of the English language.

Beginner Activity

1) Teach a lesson on a simple rule of English grammar and/or syntax.

2) Give several single-sentence examples as references for your students.

3) Have the students type, in their own language, single-sentence examples similar to the those given in the lesson. For example, in a group of students learning about prepositions, a Thai student may type "เด็กอยู่ข้างหน้า," producing the online translation, "Children in front" while a Spanish speaking student may type, "El pajaro esta volando por encima de la casa," which could be translated as “The bird is flying over the house."

4) Have the students check and correct the translation against the examples, and go over them in class.

Further examples:

Basic Lesson: Verb Preposition "Jump over"

Type into the translator: "El gato salto sobre el zapato."

View result: "The cat jumped on the shoe."

Correction: "The cat jumped over the shoe."

Basic Lesson: "Verb + Subject"

Type a single sentence into the translator: "ไก่ของคุณอยู่บนโต้ะ"

View the result: "Your chicken on the table."

Correction: "Your chicken is on the table."

Activity objectives for beginner learners:

1) To gain experience in using the words and/or constructions taught.

2) To make connections between English and their native language.

3) To note the differences in the use of words and constructions between English and their native language.

4) To ultimately reinforce lessons taught in class by checking for and correcting translation errors, as well as confirming correct sentence structures when there are no errors.

Intermediate Level

Intermediate students who have already begun to understand grammar and syntax can comprehend larger sections of text, but might still struggle with application. As such, simple short stories are helpful tools when teaching and reviewing vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. The Internet offers a large selection from sources such as Grimmstories, which has bilingual versions. An alternative is to use well-known stories from another language.

Intermediate Activity.

1) Select a story and prepare the students by reviewing new vocabulary they will encounter.

E.g., select the story "The Magic Tree."

2) Select the link to the version of the story that is written in the native tongue of your students. E.g., if your class' native language is Spanish, select the link for the Spanish version of the story.

3) Translate the story or webpage with an online translator. E.g., translate the Spanish version of "The Magic Tree" into English with an online translator and present it to the students to correct.

4) Allow the students a brief period to correct any errors they detect on their own.

5) As a class, go over the translated story, sentence by sentence, asking the students what corrections should be made. E.g., Incorrect: "...through a meadow in the center found a tree,"

Corrected: "In the middle of the park there was tree..."

Incorrect: "The child may carry all his friends to the tree."

Corrected: "The little boy brought all his friends to the magic tree."

6) Read a correct version of the story to the students in English.

7) Finally, give the students the correct version to compare with the corrections they have made.

Activity objectives for intermediate learners:

1) To learn and review vocabulary in story form.

2) To review and apply rules of grammar and syntax.

4) To give students experience in selecting words with similar definitions for a specific context.

3) To practice listening comprehension.

Advanced Level

Advanced English learners already have a solid understanding of syntax and grammar rules. However, to ensure they possess the ability to apply this knowledge, it is good to have students edit works that have already been translated. This allows them to learn the subtleties of English and tests how much of the language they actually comprehend.

1) Translate a document written in a foreign language. Good sources are news articles, longer stories, letters, or even documents the students themselves have written in another language.

2) Have the students edit the translation mistakes themselves.

3) If possible, have students proofread each other's editing.

4) Have students type up or present the final corrected versions of the document.

Example: Translating the News.

Translate a news story, such as "EU Incorporó a Venezuela en Lista Negra por Tráfico de Personas." selected from the Spanish news site, Univision Noticias.

Translate: "Venezuela joined in EU blacklist for trafficking."

Edit: "Venezuela was added to the EU blacklist for human trafficking."

Activity objectives for advanced learners:

1) As there is no single correct English version, students' language ability will be challenged.

2) Students will develop reading comprehension.

3) Students and instructors can explore subtleties and nuanced rules of the English language together.

These are only a few ideas on how online translators can be used as practice for English learners. If used with foresight and creativity, translators can become very valuable tools in creating lesson plans for any English level. Likewise, an added bonus of the use of translators in the classroom via these activities is that students will definitely realize that online translation is neither a substitute for doing homework nor composing English documents from scratch. So instead of trying to cut and paste into a translator for class, students can instead learn their stuff from correcting those same translators, gaining confidence and experience at the same time.

Note: The examples mentioned in this article are in Spanish and Thai, but the activities can be applied to all languages. Also, the activities assume a group setting, although students who are studying alone could still utilize them to improve their English.

Plagiarism-related tools

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 14:12:00 +0000

As a teacher, you hope you will never need to use these tools, but once in a while a student turns in a writing assignment, which you suspect is not his own.

This happened to me last week when I asked my students to write film reviews to be published in our dedicated blog. We had previously worked on film-related vocabulary and read a few examples of film reviews so that they understood the format, style and register. We worked out which information was to be included and then we started working on the review: a first draft written in class, draft back the next class with errors highlighted according to an error correction code and a second class to edit their drafts into a final version.

The overall result was amazing (You can check their reviews here). However, one student turned in a suspicious review of the film “The Little Fockers”. When I read “As Greg and his wife Pam prepare for their young twins' upcoming birthday, Jack is nursing a heart condition that's got him mulling who should become the family's patriarch should he die. For reasons that I won't bother to spoil, Jack selects Greg who, of course, must endure a new set of tests and expectations. Greg, though, stands to ruin it all when he begins working with an exuberant and unbelievably hot drug company sales rep….”, I knew he hadn`t written it so I tried to find out where he had copied it from and, unfortunately, I was right….

So, after having done a bit of research on plagiarism checking tools, here is a list of the options I found and checked with the following text:

As Greg and his wife Pam prepare for their young twins' upcoming birthday, Jack is nursing a heart condition that's got him mulling who should become the family's patriarch should he die.

The following tools returned results showing that the text had been plagiarized.

Google

http://www.google.com/

The Plagiarism checker

http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/

Dupli Checker
http://www.duplichecker.com/

The following tools returned results saying that the work was original, no plagiarism.

Article checker
http://www.articlechecker.com/

Advanced plagiarism checker
http://searchenginereports.net/articlecheck.aspx

Plagiarisma

http://plagiarisma.net/

Plagiarism checker
http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/

Other tools

For this one, you need to sign up

Academic Plagiarism

http://www.academicplagiarism.com/

Free PC downloads

Viper

http://www.scanmyessay.com/plagiarism-detector.php

Sherlock

http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~scilect/sherlock/

Tools to search for copies of your page on the web.

Copyscape

http://www.copyscape.com/

Check website plagiarism
http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/url/

I hope this brief report can help you choose the best tool for your context.

The Horizon Report 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:20:00 +0000

The 2011 edition of the Horizon Report, a joint publication by Educause and The New Media Consortium, has just become available.

It examines emerging technologies in relation to their potetial impact on teching and learning and categorizesthem according to the predicted time of adoption.

The following summary taken directly from the report is a good overview of you can expect to find.
"The internationally recognized series of Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the 2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment."

The 2011 Horizon report includes such technologies as Electronic Books, Mobiles, Game-Based Learning and others.

Click on the image to get the PDF version of the report

Teaching English through songs in the digital age (part 4 of 4): Music-related web 2.0 tools

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:29:00 +0000

Finally, this is the last part of the series which summarizes the #ELTchat from Jan 12th about Teaching English through songs: activities, resources and benefits of using songs for teaching. In this post I have collected music-related web 2.0 tools which were mentioned during the #ELTchat and examples of how to use them.

You Tube

Music and lyrics copied and pasted on IWB.
Put up a playlist on YouTube for students. So, if they like a song, then they can listen to more beyond class.
There are lots of karaoke videos on Youtube; with just a computer and a mic, you can have a great singing lesson!

Spotify (Spotify is available in the following countries:Finland, France, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and Grooveshark

Get students to make a playlist, then ask them to walk around class & find out who else’s they would listen to.

ESL video

Make a quiz on lyrics. Ss answer as they watch the video clip.

Lyrics training

Great for autonomous work on the songs they like.
Choose song, choose level, fill gaps. Music will stop.

Overstream

Ask students to subtitle song. Then compare each other’s versions

Wordle and Worditout

Do a word cloud to predict the song theme.
Students make up their own song based on word cloud , then compare with real song to see who is accurate.
A great warmer for a song is to stick the lyrics in Wordle or Worditout and ask learners to guess song from word cloud.

Other tools and websites

Tune into English is a fabulous free resource to use with students!!

English Central always includes a song for pronunciation work.

Karaoke Party is a great interactive online karaoke venue – very useful interface with ratings et al.

Tubeoke is also great. It shows the video and the lyrics alongside.

I hope these tools can really make the use of songs more fun. I have really enjoyed writing this series!

Teaching English through songs in the digital age (part 3 of 4): Specific songs and their uses

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 12:28:00 +0000

It´s now time for part 3 of the series which summarizes the #ELTchat from Jan 12th about Teaching English through songs: activities, resources and benefits of using songs for teaching.

Specific songs and their uses

Shakira´s “Fool” to look at words that share the same sounds.
“Anything you can do I can do better” for the comparative.
Katy Perry’s “Firework” to tackle a taboo subject.
A modals (for prediction) song is “The ballad of Billy Jo” – there’s a version by Sinead O’Connor.
“Eternal Flame” by the Bangles with Elementary level -great present continuous, miming actions and body vocabulary practice.
For beginners get them to write new verse for “Don’t know much” song – good fun.
“Hello Goodbye” by The Beatles with beginners. I often ask them to write an extra verse.
A lesson where I used a song video to help teach vocabulary & grammar (likes and dislikes).
A blog post on using “Pencil full of lead” (the vid is superb for an EFL class).
Activities to work on pronunciation, as this one with “Bizarre Love Triangle”.
To practise present perfect continuous this song by Foreigner is great. Do A/B close gap activity.
Karaoke Lady Gaga’s "Bad romance" .
"Mad World" with multiple visuals: video 1, video 2 and video 3 .
Bob Dylan and Billy Bragg are great for stimulating discussions about issues.
“Taxman” by The Beatles to teach the comparative.
Great lesson on articles with “Penny Lane”.
“She’s leaving Home” for hard to find narratives.
Great new lesson plan on Lessonstream.org based on a “How deep is the ocean”.
"In the ghetto" would be an Elvis number I would pick.
Funny songs like “If I had a million dollars” by Barenaked Ladies are great for conditionals type 2.
A great 2nd conditional song is “When I win the lottery” by Camper Van Beethoven.
Black Eyes Peas´ “Where is the Love” is a song teens love…but tough to sing. I challenge them to sing it from beginning to end for credits.
“Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds” is good for teaching prepositions.
Pub song “Show me the way to go home” to introduce Language Varieties.
Chumbawumba’s “Add me” is great for teens. You can have a seriously good discussion about internet safety afterwards.
Ask students to compare this video of “American Pie” (broken link) with either the movie or this other video.
“Take a bow” by Rihanna is good for showbiz vocabulary.
“Cosmic” by Jamiroquai is good for space vocabulary.
"Spanish Train" or "Patricia the Stripper" by Chris de Burgh are good story songs.
This video of “Someday” by Nickelback is also great for starting a discussion as the end of it is quite surprising.
Album ‘The Boy Bands Have Won’ some great story songs. Also Folk songs.
Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly has lots of great story-songs, but may be ‘too Australian’ for anywhere else.
For "Young Hearts" give lyrics, ask them to devise video clip THEN play it – music big contrast to words.
Paul Kelly – very Oz.
Daniel Powter for story songs, his videos anyway "Free Loop" and "Bad Day".
Re: story songs Sterephonics – ‘I stopped to fill my car up’ .
Re: story songs: “The Cruel War” by Peter Paul & Mary, “Spanish is the Loving Tongue” by Michael Martin Murphey.
There might be a (long) lesson in Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”.
Alanis Morisette´s “Hand in my pocket” and “You Learn” are great for opposites and actions, respectively.
To punctuate “In The Ghetto” and “Bang Bang My Baby Shot Me Down”.
“Conjunction Junction” not designed for foreign learners but still works.
Michael Bublé video “Just haven’t met you yet” as a writing prompt for retelling.
Alanis Morisette´s “Ironic” – a great video to accompany this song for advanced learners is – Ed Byrne (comedian).
I use this version of “In the ghetto” to demo importance of working on your pronunciation.
David Deubelbeiss´ #1 activity .
“Lemon tree” animation video. Check these amazing ideas by @evab2001!
“Jealous Guy” – John Lennon for Past Continuous and relationships.
“United Breaks Guitars” is another great storytelling song as well.
‘Ode to Billy Jo’ video – comments full of great discussion material.

Again it´s amazing to see how much information was shared in one hour over the #ELTchat! The last part of the series is coming soon...

Note: There´s a broken link in #26. Will try to fix it ASAP

Teaching English through songs in the digital age (part 2 of 4): Ideas for using songs

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 15:17:00 +0000

Following #ELTchat from Jan 12th about Teaching English through songs: activities, resources and benefits of using songs for teaching, this is part 2 on reasons and ideas for using songs.

Why use songs?

Songs can be very effective to work on supra-segmental features of the language.
Songs as poetry.
Songs (and poems) a great way to look at words that share the same sounds.
Songs provide multiple routes to language retention: rhythm, melody, metre.
Songs are great for pronunciation practice especially sound linking and reduction.
Slow songs can help students learn intonation, elision etc.
Chants are good for pronunciation exercises.
Songs enable bottom-up/top-down processing simultaneously.
Songs are for great vocabulary extension / vocabulary themes.
Songs can prompt discussion *about* the song.
Songs are a great way to access slang.
New options to “fill-in-blank”.

Possible tasks

Organize student presentations: 4-5 lines of lyrics, with translation, then short YouTube clip, then 100+ words on why they like the song.
Have background music to put students at ease when doing song tasks.
Have students write a song.
Use songs to encourage discussions in my literature classes. For ex Animal Farm with Revolution by The Beatles.
Use songs to prompt discussion *about* the song. Play a clip, students talk (Have you ever heard this, Do you like this, etc).
Use two versions of songs and get student s to compare them like 2 versions of Candle in the wind .
Take your PlayStation to class and use SingStar (karaoke) – great fun with teenagers.
Get student s to write additional verses.
Play song once, ask students to write down as many words as they can, pair them up, and ask them to create a new song with the words.
Use screen capture to take pics from a song video, they can then be used for ordering/ prediction(inspired by @cheimi10).
Have a Skype call with another class. (We sang for them and they sang for us! It was amazing!).
The usual pre, while and post listening/viewing phases: covers mood, vocabulary and application.
If there are different visuals to a music video, or advert using a song, it can be interesting to consider the differences.
Play the song and ask them to design a concept for the video.
Get Young Learners to mime song, teens to act out a scene of what they think happened. Improvising!
Get Weird Al’s versions and compare with originals. The videos are also a good idea.
Play a song as student s come into room at beginning of a class and do nothing with it; can have a great impact on general mood.
Ask students to participate in song selection too for ownership and deeper engagement! Give them 5 and have them vote on top 3!
Do a kind of Jukebox Jury with a handful of songs. Students have to vote for their favourite.
Use instrumental music as a way to frame a guided visualisation.
Ask students to draw while listening, then talk about what they drew.
Use a mix of music from the countries of my students. They have to explain similarities and differences in the sentiments of the songs
Let students choose a song about any global issue… sing along and discuss. When student s choose they feel empowered. They can even gap the songs themselves.
Get student s to research the singers/ bands and do projects or presentations on them.
Maybe ask your students to try to recreate this video.
Write key words on bits of coloured paper – hand out to student s – they have to stand up when they hear their word – usually great fun!
Look at songs as poetry: form, metaphor, emotion. Working extensively with lyrics post-listening can be very powerful.
With appropriate groups discussing “inappropriate” lyrics might be very productive.
When teaching poetry and figures of speech, start with a song…more accessible for teens.
Lyrics race: teams memorize one line of written song and race across classroom/hall to recorder who writes down. At end all listen.
Can be interesting to think about using and comparing cover versions with originals.
Look at different versions of same song and get students to listen out for differences in voice or Instruments as with Hallelujah.
Use literal songs – they’re so funny! (many on YouTube).
Get student s to make up new endings or make up their own versions of songs.
A nice idea with a story song : stop half way through the song and get student s to predict ending.
Give students half the rhyme and get them to make up the other half- Can be hilarious (careful with teens).
Scrambled lyrics: give students lyrics but put lines out of order. Students reorder, then listen.
Have children do their own songs to famous tunes, works really well with rap.
Play bits of songs / soundtracks and ask students to write adjectives they think of on the board – no repetition allowed.
Play a soundtrack and ask students to guess the kind of film – good for slightly out-of-date so not too easy.
Do grammar revision through song titles.
Use songs/videos as writing prompts. Students listen/watch, then retell or answer questions.
Eliciting a class story from a song or piece of music (eg Duo de las flores by Delibes).
Get student s making karaoke files (they learn while doing/sharing).
Use karaoke versions of songs on YouTube and have an occasional sing off with students.

Hope you enjoyed part 2...more on the way!

Teaching English through songs in the digital age (part 1 of 4): Background readings and resources

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:42:00 +0000

In case you didn´t know, I´m an avid tweeter, especially for Professional Development and networking with colleagues all over the world. And one of the best examples of collaboration towards PD in ELT is #ELTchat, a weekly one-hour conversation on Twitter on a topic voted by those who are interested in participating. #ELTchat is usually moderated by the amazing @Marisa_C (Marisa Constantinides), @rliberni (Berni Wall) and @esolcourses (Sue Lyon Jones) and each weekly chat is archived at http://eltchat.com/.

Yesterday, #ELTchat was about Teaching English through songs: activities, resources and benefits of using songs for teaching. So that you get an idea of the intensity of the conversation, these are the stats:

13 readings and resources,
68 ideas for using songs,
50 example songs with links,
11 music-related web 2.0 tools

All this information, which I have tried to digest for easier consumption, is too long to be posted in one blog post so I have divided it into 4 parts:

Part 1: Background readings and resources related to teaching English through songs
Part 2: Ideas of tasks for using songs
Part 3: Specific songs and their uses
Part 4: Music-related web 2.0 tools

You can, of course, access the original #ELTchat at http://eltchat.com/2011/01/13/teaching-english-through-songs-activities-resources-and-benefits-of-using-songs-for-teaching/

So here it goes!

Background reading and general resources

Using English Songs: an Enjoyable and Effective Approach to ELT

Using music in world language performance assessment , interesting article, based on ACTFL modes of communication, 4 performance assessments [word doc]

12 Keys to Using Songs for Teaching Children English as a Foreign Language

Music and Song by Tim Murphey. (OUP) Useful teacher resource book

Musical English Lessons and categorized by language focus

A Beatles YouTube Album, The Beatles Learning Styles & Creativity in 6 posts.

The Archive of Misheard Lyrics

Flocabulary – Hip Hop in The Classroom

Why use songs and some ready activities for various levels

BC Learn English Kids has lots of great sing-along-songs for kids

You´ve got to learn Brilliant post by @evab2001 on how to use same song but in a different language

Esol UK has great bank of songs, videos and activities

Learn English with Songs by @esolcourses – Fabulous song resources and lessons for multi levels

Some readers´suggestions that are worth sharing

Music and Song in ELT by Greg Quinlivan

My ESL friends Song page by George Machlan

Music and Songs in the Classroom: Techniques to Aid the Language Learning Process by Elda Macias

Teacher training presentation on using song by David Deubelbeiss.

Facebook group Songs for Teaching (sent by Susana Canelo)

Songs in EFL classroom, another great blog post by @evab2001

I hope you enjoyed these resources which were contributed by all those partcipating in #ELTchat. Part 2 coming soon...

Resources and Ideas for a lesson about Water

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 02:58:00 +0000

It´s Blog Action Day again and this year it´s about water.

I have found many interesting infographics and stats that can be used as starting points in the debate about water in the world. Infographics are great for visual literacy and to get students thinking and producing language from facts. I thought I would share these with you.

http://peoplepoweredmachines.wordpress.com/tag/rain-barrel/

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_SDd59HFkDQI/ScInIFb1vgI/AAAAAAAAAfk/QHIG5i5D8sw/s800/water-footprint-of-individual.jpg


http://solaquagen.com/page001.html

http://www.americainfra.com/news/us-hit-peak-water-in-1970/

http://virtualwater.eu/


http://theredmullet.blogspot.com/2009/08/water-footprints.html

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/05/20/1179601242802.html

http://wineindustryinsight.com/?p=1415

http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Original_Graphic/2008/06/14/1213462663_8520-1.gif

Other websites with plenty of resources on water education are

It would then be interesting to make students calculate their water footprint

To do this you can use National Geographic´s Water Footprint calculator or Water Footprint´s quick or extended calculator

After you do this, you can ask your students to brainstorm and debate ways of saving water, which they can later post to a Wallwisher

Alternatively they can also do an image search for water education campaigns and discuss the images used.

If you have any oher ideas, please leave a comment.

If you feel like doing a bit more

Change.org|Start Petition

8 voice recording tools for language learning

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:22:00 +0000

One of the greatest benefits of web 2.0 tools for English language learners and teachers is the possibility of recording audio and voice to share online. These tools lend themselves for a myriad of tasks you can set up for different levels and purposes.

This is my personal choice of the audio recording tools available. It is only a showcase of the available tools. Links to ideas on how to use the tools are provided in some cases.

Audacity

Audacity is a downloadable program for your PC. It is a simple yet powerful audio recording and editing studio. You can read about ideas for using Audacity in this blog post by Keri Lee Beasley here

Voki

Voki is a creative voice recording tool to create speaking avatars. It offers multiple customization options. Registration is needed and you get an embeddable widget in various sizes and colours. With Voki you also have a text to speech option. You can see a Voki in action at the top left column of this blog.

You can read about how Shelly Terrell and Ozge Karaoglu used Voki with their students here and here

Voicethread

Voicethread is a tool to build conversations around images, videos or documents.

Registration is needed and you get an embeddable widget which you can add to any blog, wiki or website. For ideas on how to use it, check this Voicethread

Voxopop

Voxopop is a neat tool to create asynchronous conversation threads. Registration is needed.

For more detailed information you can check Nik Peachey´s tutorial and ideas on pages 8 to 11 of his “Web 2.0 tools for Teachers Guide”

Vocaroo

Vocaroo is a very simple voice recording tool. There is no registration needed and you get a small embeddable widget to put on your blog, wiki or website.

Audiopal

Audiopal is another very simple voice recording tool. Again no registration needed, You just need to provide an email to pick up your small embeddable widget to put on your blog, wiki or website.

Chirbit

Chirbit works in the same way as Vocaroo and AudioPal, but you need to register first and the embeddable widget is slightly bigger.

Cinch

Cinch allow you to record a message to which people can reply. Registration is needed and the recording is available on their website but also embeddable or linkable.

Odiogo

Odiogo is a bit different from the previous tools in that it is not really a voice recording tool but a text to speech one. But it works really well so it was worth mentioning.

I hope this list is useful and if you know of other tools, please leave a comment!

Readers suggestions

Wimba Voice (Suggested by Teresa)
Wimba Voice is a web-based service on subscription that allows you to create voice forums for e-learning courses.

Fotobabble (suggested by Shaun Wilden)
Fotobabble allows you to upload a photo, record voice to it and share it with friends.

AudioBoo (suggested by Alex Wilson)
AudioBoo is a free web-based audio recorder. Registration is needed. It also has a free Iphone app worth checking.

Voice Activity (suggested by Paul)
This is an online (desktop version for Windows, Mac OS, Linux) short voice messages service. You can use it as a training/learning tool as well.

SoundCloud (suggested by Vernon)
It has a web app and an Iphone app. The great thing about it is that you can add comments at specific times of the message/audio track. Worth checking!

Online Vocabulary Games

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:59:00 +0000

I have been looking for some specific vocabulary games to use with my classes and I found some really interesting options. So I decided to share them with you!
I have chosen to categorize the results into:

Pre-school games
Games for specific vocabulary topics
Games for mixed vocabulary topics
Tools to create games

Pre-school games
Pre-school games
A variety of simple games for colours, shapes, animals, numbers and the alphabet.
Do2learn
Another collection of games: colours, feelings, numbers…and more.
ABCya!
Yet another collection of simple games.
What colour is it?
A simple game about colours.

Games for specific vocabulary topics
Actions and commands (based on suggestions by Larry Ferlazzo from his blog post)
Subservient Chicken
Give orders t the chicken and watch him perform your commands… only if they are appropriate!
Simon Sez Santa
Tell Santa what to do. Many languages to choose from!
I Do Dog Tricks
Give order to the cute dog and watch him perform the actions.

Spelling
Spelling City
Create your own game with your word list.
Kidspell.com
Another collection of spelling games that you can customize.
Spelling Connections
This game is about spelling and sounds…interesting to try.

Body parts
Matching words and pictures of body parts
Listen to the a sentence and find the picture for the right body part
Listen to the word and find the picture. There´s a study mode and a quiz mode.

Collections of games
Vocabulary Building Games
Free English Lessons Online
More than 40 English vocabulary picture matching quizzes on a variety of topics such as Weather, Sports, Transport, etc created by Sue Lyon Jones.
Word Games
A great collection of word games categorized by difficulty.
Digital Dialects
A nice collection of simple games about numbers, colours, food, clothing and animals. The main page offers 60 languages to choose from!
Learning chocolate
Great variety of topics and several types of games for each topic, including word recognition from audio recordings, matching, etc.
ESL Fun Vocabulary Games
Picture labeling games on a variety of topics like parts of the house, school, pets, fruit, etc. You can also check the assorted vocabulary games menu for more options.
Language Guide English
Lots of quizzes for more than 40 topics available in study and quiz modes.
Learning Games for Kids
A great site with thousands of games. Check the vocabulary games section.

Games for mixed vocabulary topics
Rain words
Complete the crossword by dragging the images to the appropriate place in the crossword. You can choose the level of difficulty.
Fastr
A Flickr-fed game where you have to guess the tag for the given image.
Photo Munchrs
You are given a tag and must click on the pictures that match it. I hear about this one from Nik Peachey in his Daily English Activities blog post.
Vocab Sushi
Multiple Choice game to develop your vocabulary. Good for upper intermediate learners.
Free Rice
Another multiple choice game. Your scores are translated into help for the World Food Programme.

Tools to create games
Eclipse crossword
An easy to use crossword puzzle creator.
Word Magnets
Type or paste a text and get the word magnets for it to play around. I heard about this one from Russell Stannard, who has a detailed video about using it.

You will certainly need to explore them to see if they are appropriate for your context... I hope the list is a useful starting point!

Update (22/9/2011)

These articles from Free Technology for Teachers are worth sharing

My transformation as a teacher: from part-time instructor to full-time educator

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:13:00 +0000

First of all, I want to be straightforward about the content of this post: it is not about technology. So I want to apologize in advance to my techie audience but I have wanted to write about this for a while and this is the best space for it, anyway.

After the article I wrote for Ken Wilson’s blog, “Daring to move away from coursebooks”, some people asked me if I had always been daring in my profession or how I was able to make such a decision. And it was a really good question that got me thinking about my present as a teacher and how I got here.

So this is the story...when I finished the secondary school, I was offered a part time job teaching English to children at the private institute where I had myself studied. At that time, my professional interests lay elsewhere (I am a PE teacher) but I took the job as a way to help my family and start earning my own living, partly. After all, I really liked English. And I have never stopped teaching it ever since!

As I said, it was only a part-time job and I did it for many years at different private institutes with the only concern of instructing my students according to the specific guidelines from my superiors, who had the decision-making power. This went on for about 12 years. Then something happened... I was already working at the school where I still work and was asked to develop a specific project for the school. Immediately after that I was asked to take on the brand new position of English department coordinator, which I did.

This new position brought on to me several new responsibilities. I was now in charge of all the students and all the English teachers in my school, not just my own classes. So I had to start reflecting critically on the decisions to make. I have always taken this responsibility quite seriously although at the beginning I chose to go safe by staying within traditional paths. Later on, I joined Webheads in Action community of practice and I have to say this single and apparently insignificant event changed my professional life forever.

I learnt from them, experimented with their suggestions, shared and discussed experiences with teachers from all over the world. In time, I dared to try my own ideas and share them. I learnt that there are many different ways to do things and that educational contexts are so different from one another that you need to take risks and innovate. I also learnt to be critical of whatever I read in order to discover its true value as related to my context. Without realizing it, I became so absorbed in teaching, concerned with so much more than language learning! I discovered that I no longer wanted to go with the flow but change things if necessary. I realized that I am living in exciting times for education, as I discussed not long ago with Jeremy Harmer. Times of innovation and profound change, times for making these changes happen and being a part of it! And this realization came with the feeling that this professional self was much more satisfying and challenging!

It is now that I understand that all these years’ experiences both in my school and out, sharing and meeting with people from distant places and seemingly different contexts to discuss education have made me the teacher that I am today: a full-time educator, ready for the challenges of a 21st century education!

What I learnt at IATEFL Harrogate 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:24:00 +0000

I must say that before March 15^th,Harrogate 2010 seemed inaccessible. The reason is very simple: I live in Argentina and work full time on a teacher’s salary. Harrogate is not only 11,259.38 km away (6,996.45 miles) and more than 16 hours away by plane, but has with it a consequent travel cost. However, good things happen to those who try! On March 15th I was notified I had won the Latin American scholarship to attend the conference only a few days ahead. So I plunged into organizing the trip!

During the days before the conference I felt really excited about attending the biggest ELT event of the year and kept thinking about what I was going to learn and how I would make the best use of it afterwards. But I also thought about what I was going to do after the day’s sessions were over, so I pictured myself going back to the hotel, dining on my own… as I didn’t know anybody, except for Nik Peachey and Gavin Dudeney, whom I had met in Argentina the previous year.

So I got to Harrogate on April 6^th, the day before the Pre Conference Events and time flew by! Before I realized I was on the plane back to Argentina. So here is what I learnt at Harrogate:

- Although I believed my country’s education system and context was far from ideal, I got to know about other countries´ contexts more closely and I can now understand where we, ourselves, stand and I can focus more readily on what needs to be changed.

- I am mostly interested in technology integration in language education so I chose sessions related to technology. I attended amazing sessions on the use of web 2.0 tools, Twitter, digital game-based learning and virtual worlds by young innovative ELT professionals such as Graham Stanley, Burcu Akyol, Shelly Terrell, Ozge Karaoglu, Russell Stannard, Kyle Mawer, Nicky Hockly, Gavin Dudeney and Petra Pointner among others. In fact, all the technology-related sessions were packed! That shows quite an interesting trend in language education. I am happy to be a part of it in trying to contribute to its development and spread, by promoting change at school level and training teachers in technology integration for language teaching and learning.

- Although I am quite an active “twitterer” myself, I surprisingly found a widespread use of Twitter by teachers, teacher trainers, writers and publishers:

· to get to know people from different parts of the world

· to increase continued professional development options among the members of your customized PLN (Personal Learning Network)

· to set up e-twinning projects with classes all over the world

· to learn about and share valuable resources

· to tweet during sessions both as a note taking alternative and to share what was happening with other “twitterers” either not at the conference or attending other sessions.

- Social life was far from inexistent! That’s definitely also thanks to Twitter. Two hours after arriving in Harrogate I was surrounded by about 20 ELT professionals from around the world… who called me by my name when they saw me! What a nice surprise! I am grateful for the opportunity of making so many new friends who share my passion.

- I also attended sessions by well-established personalities and found out why they are so respected. ELT stars are accessible! I shrank at the sight of ELT celebrities, such as Jeremy Harmer, Ken Wilson and Herbert Puchta to name a few, only to discover they were warm and willing to engage in deep conversation about education and life. I was amazed at their honest commitment to the profession and willingness to keep on learning!

All in all, there is no doubt that this has been the greatest professional experience in my life so far. And the only way to top that is coming back next year as a presenter. So that’s where I’m directing my energy now!

Digital Game Based Learning: an introduction through videos

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:31:00 +0000

Darren Elliott from The lives of Teachers and Karenne Sylvester from Kalinago English have come up with the nice idea of a sharing a blog post that has been overlooked for some reason.

So I have decided to share a blog post from Digital Play, a great blog on Digital Game Based Learning by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer. I somehow missed it when it came out and, given my interest in using games to promote language learning, I decided to bring it back to light as I think it is a great collection of videos to introduce teachers to DGBL.

So here it goes... read on

10 Online videos to watch

10 Blogs Worth Keeping an Eye On

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:42:00 +0000

I have been following the 10 Blogs Worth Keeping an Eye On initiative with great interest as a way to discover new gems in cyberspace. And it is now my turn thanks to Ozge Karaoglu, who included my blog in her list!

I could of course mention the obvious blogs that everybody talks about: those of Jeremy Harmer, Ken Wilson, Larry Ferlazzo, Shelly Terrell, Burcu Akyol and Karenne Sylvester, among others.

But since I run an educational technology blog I will focus on blogs specifically related to technology integration for language learning. So here´s my list of 10 blogs in no particular order:

Breaking News English, Sean Banville´s ready-made lessons based on news
Digital Play, Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer´s blog on digital game-based learning
Free English Lessons Online, Sue Lyon-Jones lessons based on web materials
Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals, Claudio Azevedo´s blog on using film clips for grammar practice
Nik´s Daily English Activities, Nik Peachey´s blog on ideas for teaching with web 2.0 tools
Nik´s Quick Shout, Nik Peachey´s blog on web 2.0 tools
Teacher Training Videos, Russell Stannard´s award winning site with web 2.0 tools tutorials
TEFL Clips, Jamie Keddie's You Tube-based lessons
That´SLife. Gavin Dudeney´s blog on Second Life and ELT musings
Web 2.0 Classroom, Steven W. Anderson´s blog on web 2.0 tools to connect classrooms

Now, it’s your turn to nominate if you are on the list!!

Add a picture and a link to the blog that has nominated you
Choose 10 blogs to nominate
Tell them that you have nominated them on your list
Spread the word & spread the love!!

Enjoy!!!

Visual literacy: Flickr-fed web 2.0 tools

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:38:00 +0000

I am positively convinced of the potential of using images to develop language so I have put together a collection of very interesting web 2.0 tools that feed from Flickr, an online photo sharing platform.

Flickr CC search allows you to find images within Flickr that are under a Creative Commons (CC) license. This is indeed useful when we teach our students about copyright issues.

Tag Galaxy is another creative way of searching images from Flickr. You enter a tag and then narrow your search adding other tags. The search parameters are shown as planets.

When you are satisfied you click on the chosen tag bundle and you get a sphere covered in the images corresponding to those tags. This is how "Audrey + Hepburn + portrait" looks

FlickrPoet generates a visual representation of a poem of phrase. In the example you can see a haiku come to life through related images. Although it is very attractive, there is no possibility of choosing the images.

Phrasr is a tool that allows you to illustrate a sentence of your choice with images taken from Flickr. It is useful for working on word and image associations because you are given options and you have to select an image for each word in the sentence.

This an example of a sentence created by my daughter Jazmin (so bear with the spelling mistakes). It is about her cat Morgan, who, by the way, looks just like the white cat in a hat!!!

A very similar tool is Flillustrator

Bookr allows you to create a book from Creative Commons images taken from Flickr. You choose the images and you can write captions under them. They are great for simple vocabulary books or for more sophisticated digital storytelling. The books can then be embedded somewhere else!

Bubblr is similar to Bookr but instead of creating a book you create a sliding stream of pictures to which you can add captions in the form of speech bubbles.

The final product is also embeddable and looks like this.

You can check Russell Stannard's detailed Bubblr tutorial on his great site Teacher Training Videos.

Earth Album is an interesting mashup between Flickr and Google maps. You can search images according to geographical location by clicking on any place in the map.

Once you have the image strip at the top, when you click on any image you can see a larger size and its information or caption.

Gickr allows you to create animated gifs based from selected images from Flickr. This is the Puente de la Mujer in Puerto Madero, Argentina.

Make your own animation

Flickr-based games are abundant and have already been blogged about so I'd rather send you to the original blog post by GeekTonic.com.

I hope you have discovered some new tools and ways to use Flickr images. If you have any ideas about other tools or how to use these ones, please leave a comment.

My first take on IATEFL Harrogate 2010 - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:37:00 +0000

So here's Part 2 of the highlights for IATEFL Harrogate 2010

Plenary 2: Students´minds and imaginations by Kieran Egan

Kieran shared a novel viewpoint of the process of students´ cognitive development by linking it to imagination and how it can empower language learning to make it more effective. A brilliant session!

Engaging lower primary students through web 2.0 tools by Ozge Karaoglu and Shelly Terrell

Shelly and Ozge conducted such a lively session! Both because they are very dynamic and because they showed actual videos of their 5 year-old students in Turkey and Germany. Those who were there were going “Aaahh!” and “Uuuhhh” when they saw these little angels producing amazing language through technology! The best way to convince anybody!

Web 2.0 tools that make a difference by Russell Stannard

Russell introduced screen capturing tools with a huge success. The reason was his innovative ideas on their use. You could actually hear people’s amazement! Russell has just won the ELTONS for innovation 2010. Check his website for lots of ideas.

The IATEFL 3rd Annual Pecha Kucha Evening

Although I could not attend it, there is no way I can leave it out! Just watch for yourself.

Plenary 3: Socialising students´motivation and autonomy in the English language classroom by Ema Ushioda

Ema reflected successfully on the importance of internal motivation as an essential aspect of successful language learning. She drew from the field of psychology and from current theories of autonomy in language learning to make a clear link between motivation and autonomy.

Breaking down the classroom walls: Web-based tasks with real outcomes by Ann Foreman

Ann focused on using web-based tasks to create a wider audience for students´ work. She shared some web 2.0 tools through examples of students´ productions. Good point!

Making digital sense in the classroom by Shaun Wilden

Shaun’s dynamic presentation addressed the issues of teachers’ attitudes towards technology and digital solutions at hand, including IWB tools, mobile learning and others.

Embedding creative thinking skills training into our EFL practice by Marisa Constantinides

Marisa’s session was serious and fun at the same time. She managed to walk us through the theoretical background and then surprise us with very creative examples. I loved it!!!

Task-based learning in virtual worlds by Shiv Rajendran

I am so sorry I missed this one! But I had to include as I am really interested in what Shiv does. He presented on task-based learning in Second Life by showing examples of a unit on innovations from the book Market Leader being turned into a series of tasks in SL. Worth checking out!

Final plenary: What is a storyteller? by Jan Blake

Again I missed this one because I was taking the train back to Heathrow… Thankfully it was recorded, which is both good for me and for you! Jan is amazing!

So this is the academic summary of the conference. I will soon post something more informal on what I learnt at Harrogate.

My first take on IATEFL Harrogate 2010 - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:00:00 +0000

I have been lucky enough to be at IATEFL Harrogate 2010 to enjoy some of the best ELT speakers ever! The best thing about it is that most sessions have been recorded and can be accessed through Harrogate Online.

So what I would like to share is the highlights of the sessions I attended so that you can also check them out. The original post is too long so I decided to split into two parts to make it more readable.

Learning Technologies Pre Conference Event on the current state of technology for language learning. Discussion led by Stephen Bax, Scott Thornbury and Mark Pengrum was conducted face to face and in Second Life simultaneously. The technology aspects were brilliantly managed by Graham Stanley and LT sig team.

Plenary 1: The Professional Life Cycles of Teachers by Tessa Woodward

Tessa gave an enthralling talk about the different stages of a teacher’s professional life in which we could all feel identified.

Teaching the Mobile Generation by Nicky Hockly

Nicky engaged the audience with her fresh look at the potential of mobile learning by showing easily accessible resources and practical projects.

They just can’t hack it! by Gavin Dudeney

Gavin managed to address attitudes to technology through a witty presentation based around myths, which he attempted to demystify. And he certainly did!

Web 2.0: What’s in it for teachers? by Burcu Akyol

Burcu showed a variety of web 2.0 tools but focused mainly on the practicalities of blogs and wikis. As Jeremy Harmer pointed out later she “even made embedding widgets interesting!”

Before and after Twitter: Personal learning environments by Graham Stanley

Graham conducted the most crowded session I saw! His take on social networking tools to build your PLN was great!

What teachers do next by Jeremy Harmer and Carol Higho

Jeremy started the session with a personal anecdote which he then related to teachers’ need to feel alive. He then referred to professional development as a key element of keeping current. Carol finished the session showing some specific PD options. Unfortunately, there is no recording available for this session.

What students get out of Twitter by Petra Pointner

Petra’s session was incredibly effective in showing what you can actually do with your students using Twitter.

Computer gaming to learn by Kyle Mawer

Definitely one of my favourites because of my personal interest in Digital Game Based Learning. Kyle showed an amazing number of games that can be easily used for language learning.

Free Professional Development Opportunity

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:05:00 +0000

The Virtual Round Table conference is a semi-annual live online conference on language learning with technology. The first 2010 conference is scheduled for April 22nd and 23rd and is being organized by Heike Philip and Shelly Terrell, who have an amazing experience in web 2.0 tools and language learning.

The conference is free and is held online both through web conferencing and Second Life. In fact, all sessions in Second Life will be screenshared in Adobe Connect Pro and all sessions in Adobe ConnectPro will be streamed live in Second Life, Viewer 2 is a pre-requisite.

Check out the programme, which includes several outstanding speakers, such as Nik Peachey, Shelly Terrell, Ozge Karaoglu, Marisa Constantinides, Valentina Dodoge and Russell Stannard among others.

I am honoured to be contributing with a worshop on Free Web Applications for Language Learning.

If you have some time to spare, try to attend a few of the presentations and workshops...you will not be disappointed!!!

IATEFL Harrogate 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Vicky Saumell) — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:11:00 +0000

At this time of the year, we start anticipating one of the largest EFL events in the world. IATEFL Harrogate 2010 is drawing close. The event takes place from 7th to 11th April in Harrogate, UK.
And since not everybody can make it to Harrogate, you can follow the conference online, participate in the forums and watch presentations.

This year the joy is complete as I have been awarded the Latin American Scholarship to attend the conference so I'll be there to enjoy it face to face! And I'll be Twitting about it non-stop!