Nik's QuickShout

Developing materials and practices for the digital generation

2012-01-28T02:21:00.000-08:00

On the 24th January 2012 I delivered an online webinar presentation for the IATEFL Young Learner SIG. The theme of the presentation was 'Developing materials and practices for the digital generation.' I focused on how teachers could combine the use of online tools to encourage students' digital literacy and study skills whilst also developing their ability to develop their linguistic skills in a more autonomous way.

Below you can find a link to a recording of the presentation and you can also download the slides with all the links.

Adobe Connect recording:

Watch the presentation here

Presentation slides:

Technology with teens Developing materials and practices for the digital generationy

View more presentations from NikPeachey

I hope you find these useful. You can leave comments and see comments at: YLT Sig EVO Discussion

Related links:
3D Computer Games with Young Learners

Best

Nik Peachey

Could Doceri be the IWB killer?

2012-01-09T06:54:00.000-08:00

Just before Xmas I reviewed a potential IWB killer app called Idea Flight. This was the first of a batch of iPad apps that I have found which attempt to replace the need for an IWB. Idea Flight attempted this by enabling the networking of groups of iPads and one of the primary criticisms that readers pointed out with this system is that it was limited to contexts in which students all had iPads.

Doceri takes a very different approach though. Doceri requires that you have a data projector with either a laptop or desktop attached, but using a small app on the iPad and a small piece of software on the computer, it enables you to take control of the main computer with all it’s installed software, and Flash functionality, directly from your iPad.

The iPad app has all the normal software installed that would expect with your IWB, so you can use different modes such as a whiteboard mode that enables you to write on the board from your iPad using your finger or an additional stylus, or surf the internet and interact with the computer native software, or you can mix the two modes and annotate over web pages or software based applications. The app records your annotations too so that you can play them back as video animations.

Here are just a few of the features of the Doceri app shown as iPad screen grabs.

You see the computer desktop on your iPad and can access all the computer's software through the interface.

You can access files images and different whiteboard backgrounds through the app's folders.

You can manipulate the computer software, click your way through websites or presentations and point out different features by using two fingers on your iPad screen.

You can get left mouse clicks or right click menus by using two fingers on the iPad

You can call up an onscreen keyboard for text input.

You can annotate over software applications or web pages using a range of pen types and record the annotations to play back later.

The board can be used as a normal whiteboard and you can write and draw from it and hand the iPad around to students to let them control the space.

You can find more detail about the app features on the Doceri website at: How to use Doceri Features or watch this video to see the basic features.

Recently, I’ve started using Doceri at conferences to control my laptop during presentations, and although it took a little bit of getting used to at first I’m starting to find the ability to control presentations and switch between presentation, interacting with live web and software applications without having to keep going back and fiddling with my laptop pretty handy.

What I like about Doceri

It’s not free ($50) but it’s much cheaper than an IWB.
It’s great to be able to control the whiteboard from where ever you are in the room.
You can pass the iPad around and give students control of the board
It’s wireless so no fuss with leads.
Easy to switch between modes.
I love that you can record and play back annotations etc.
It’s great that it’s portable so you can use the app on any computer in any room as long as it has the software installed (The computer part is free) So it’s great for schools who are supplying teachers with iPads (and they should be).
You can store all your lesson documents on the iPad and access them from where ever you are.
It’s possible to make surprisingly accurate mouse gestures using your fingers on the iPad
You never need to have your back to the class and can maintain eye contact much more easily.

What I’m not so sure about

Writing reasonably sized letters with your finger is a bit tricky, so I think the Doceri Good Point Stylus is a must buy ($39).
The app software doesn’t come with as many fancy tools and library objects as an IWB, but that could be an advantage when it comes to training and teachers will want to build up their own library of images and docs etc to use.
It would be good to have a couple more tools that enable you to draw shapes and tables without having to do them freehand. I also miss some of my favorite IWB tools like the spotlight function and the curtain for slow reveal.
It takes a little bit of time to get used to manipulating the left and right click using the fingers of one hand, especially if you are used to walking around and are hanging onto your tablet with the other hand, especially if like me you tend to gesticulate a lot with your hands.
Teachers are generally more comfortable with a pen in their hand.

As I said before Doceri isn’t free, though there is a 1 month free trial If you want to try it out. At $50 and considering you need to get the software installed on any computers you want to use it with, this probably isn’t going to be a purchase for the average teacher, though it might be something you try to get your school to invest in instead of IWBs.

For someone like me though, who does a lot of work in different schools and a lot of presenting at conferences, Doceri is well worth the investment as I can turn up anywhere with my laptop and iPad and know that I’ll have IWB functionality and that’s certainly worth the $50.

So, what do you think? Could Doceri be the IWB killer?

Related articles:

Best

Nik Peachey

Visualize sentences with video clips

2011-11-22T00:16:00.001-08:00

A while back (well actually about 3 years ago) I wrote an article about Phrasr, a service that helps to visualize sentences by linking them to Flickr images, well now Vizlingo has taken this a step further.

Vizlingo enables you to type sentences and see them recreated as a linked sequence of video clips. Here's an example: This is a very smart way to visualize words and sentences. You like it?

These are easy to create, you just type your sentence into the field below the video and click on 'Create'. You may have to wait a few moments while the video is assembled and then it will play with the words that are represented underneath each clip.

If you don't like one of the clips in your sentence you can select it in the 'Lingo Breakdown' and you will see a number of alternative clips you can insert to replace it.

If you want to save or share your clips you will need to register and log in. Once you have done this you get a number of sharing options, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as well as getting a direct link to the video clip.

This is a great tool for students who are visual learners as it helps to connect the concepts in the sentence to visual reminders.

Some suggestions for activities

When learning vocabulary get students to create example sentences using the word (or better still two words) they want to remember in the sentence.
Try to assemble short dialogues using a number of clips.
Explore the relationship between the images and the words (The link can be a bit abstract sometimes).
Show students the clips and see if they can guess the sentence (cover the words)
Give students a list of ten sentences and see if the can link them to the videos you have created (again cover the words)
Get students to create a clip from a line or the title of a song in English and try to guess each others' song.
Get students to create clips of idioms, for example

To some extent I think the value of getting students to create sentence visualizations like this and think about and select appropriate clips to represent different words has more value than the actual finished videos. It can really help the to explore the concepts of words.

Vizlingo is still in development at the moment and is likely to get better as more clips are added and more features (it looks like there will be a mobile version) so this is a simple tool that is well worth keeping an eye on.

I hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Translate text into phonetic script

2011-11-15T02:58:00.001-08:00

I always believe that the best sites and web tools are the simplest, and this is certainly the case with Phonetizer. It's a really easy to use tool that takes and text and adds the phonetic spelling below it.

It's really easy to use. You just cut and paste or type in the text you want to use in the left hand side, click on 'Transcribe' and the text appears on the right with the phonetic writing underneath each line. You can then cut and paste to a document if you want to save it.

Ways of using Phonetizer with EFL ESL students

This is a great tool to add pronunciation support to any reading text and help students to develop their pronunciation while reading.
You could also get students to use it to record their own version of the text using something like Audioboo.fm.
You could use it to produce vocabulary records with pron symbols added
You could get students to transcribe a short text then use Phonetizer to check their own work.
It can be especially useful with things like scripts or poems which are intended for reading out loud.
It's a great way to add a pronunciation record to any dialogues students work with.

I hope you find Phonetizer useful and create some useful materials.

Related links:

Best
Nik Peachey

A collocation thesaurus concordancer that produces word clouds!

2011-11-14T23:44:00.001-08:00

On the surface of it Just-the-Word looks just like any other online dictionary or thesaurus, but start using it and you will soon find that it's much more.

If you type in a word, you can ask not only for alternatives just like any other thesaurus, but also word combinations for use with your key word.

The word combinations option produces a great list of collocations for the word, and what's better, if you click on the collocates, you get the kind of list that a concordancer will produce, with the expressions highlighted in context.

That's great, but there is still more, because if you click on a small button that says 'View in Wordle' the site will link through automatically to Wordle and create a word cloud of the most frequent collocations.

All of this is great, but there could be even more to come. There is also a button to select for 'Learner errors'. I haven't been able to get this to work yet, but to be able to search common learner errors really would be a very useful addition to such a site.

There are lots of ways we can use this site with EFL and ESL students.

We can create gapped sentences using the contextualised results from the concordancer, then create a Wordle that students can try to select the answers from.
We can create collocation Wordles and get students to try to make sentences with the combinations.
We can get students to use it as a tool to research words and collocations.
We can get students to check the collocations in their own writing to see if they are correct.
We can get students to research the context in which different collocations would be used.

I hope you find Just-The -Words useful and think of lots more uses for it. And if you work out how to use the 'Learner errors' button, please leave a comment below.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Explore Lexical Relationships

2011-10-27T01:00:00.000-07:00

Graph Words is one of those websites like Wordle that seems, because of its simplicity, like a gift from the heavens for English language teachers.

Graph Words is a visual thesaurus that it is really simple to use. You just type in the word you want to explore and click on 'Draw'.

You will then see a colour coordinated web of word relationships. You can then click on any word within the web to explore the relationships to that word and so on. If you hover your mouse over the 'nodes' that connect the words you can also get a definition for the word relationship.

One of the great things about the site is that you can save each web as an image with a single click, so you can use the images in your teaching materials. The site also works well on mobile devices such as iPads /iPhones etc. and you can also drag and arrange the related words to regroup them.

What I like about it

Clear, colourful, free and simple
Great to be able to save the images so easily
Dragging and rearranging words should work well on an IWB
Nice way to explore word relationships
Great that it is built on html5 not Flash, so it works on Apple mobile devices.

Some ideas for using Graph Words for English teaching

Give students a text and get them to see how many words they can change and substitute in new words
Give students two words and get the students to try to find the words that connected the first word to the second (like 6 degrees of seperation)
Get students to include a word graph with vocab records of new words they are learning or words the are revising.
Create word graphs and hide the central word. See if students can guess the hidden word.
Get students to try to predict related words then create a word graph to see how many they got right.

I hope you and your students enjoy using Word Graph and if you think of other ways to use it, please leave your suggestions in the comments below.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Instant back channel chat room

2011-10-26T01:23:00.000-07:00

I've been using back channels in my training and conference work for quite a while now and I'm getting to the stage where I wonder how I ever got by without them.

A back channel a means of enabling text based collaboration among the people in your class / talk and this is usually done by using some form of chat room that people attending the class can log into during the session.

There are a lot of advantages to this:

It facilitates greater participation and knowledge sharing. Participants are able to share what they know with each other on the topic you are talking about.
You can use it as an audience response tool get students to write in and share their responses.
You can pass links to websites that students can then just click and open, so you don't have students trying to type or copy long URLs.
You can also pass links to worksheets that students can download.
The back channel is a great tool for students to base their notes from the session on. they just need to copy the interaction and all the links into a file.

My main tool has been TodaysMeet, but I have recently discovered a new one that could be worth trying.

It's called SimpleMeet.Me and it was designed for meeting collaboration. It has an advantage over TodaysMeet in that you can upload and share a document through it. So this could be useful for sharing your presentation or the aims of the class etc.

It's very simple to use, just go to http://www.simplemeet.me and the site instantly produces the chat room for you and gives you a code to share. You then simply tell your students what the code is and they can go to the site and join the meeting.

Once you are in the meeting you put in your name at the top and can then start to chat at the bottom. Your shared file appears bottom right (I've uploaded my CV as an example). You can have a look in the chat room I've created here

Another nice feature of SimpleMeet.Me is that you can just enter your email address at the end of the chat and get a transcription of the complete discourse sent to you.

If you work in a computer lab or wireless environment and you want to encourage your students to bring along laptops and mobile devices and participate in your lessons, then SimpleMeet.Me is a really useful tool. Personally, I have found that using a back channel in this way has transformed the way I teach and enabled me to completely do away with using any kind of paper handouts in class - so no more photocopying. It's also reduced the amount of wasted time struggling with students misspelling URLs and increased engagement during the classes. Of course the catch is that you have to work in an environment where your students have access to the Internet in class.

I hope you give this a try and your students enjoy it.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Create Online Social Interaction Around Videos

2011-10-21T00:42:00.000-07:00

YouTube continues to be the biggest and one of the most useful video resources on the Internet, but creating online tasks and interaction with YouTube videos can be complex and time consuming, that's why it's always great to come across really useful sites like Grockit.

Grockit provides a really simple and fast way to build social tasks and interaction around any video from YouTube and it does it in a way that is much more suitable for delivery to students, as the interface removes many of the distractions that a direct link to YouTube would include.

Here's a quick example to show you what I mean: Married Life

Creating a Grockit
Creating an activity is very quick and easy though you will need to register and sign in (and so will your students).

Grockit starts with a simple field that you can use to either search for a video using key words or if you already have a video in mind you can just enter the URL.

Once you see your video in the search results you can click to make either a public or private Q&A.

Your video will then appear framed on the page and you just need to add a few questions to get things started. You type these into the field on the top left of your screen. If you play through the video and pause at specific moments, the question will appear at that point in the video.

The last thing you need to do is to share the video by clicking on the 'Share this page' button. This will give you a URL that you can share with your students.

Then when students play the video the questions will appear below it as they watch. They will be able to answer the questions and add their own.

Lastly, as a bonus if you click on 'Moderate Q&A on this video' at the bottom of the page, you can create play lists, moderate submissions to the Q&A and even get an embed code to add the tasks to other materials.

All really simple and done in just a few minutes. Of course the difficult part is getting the right video and choosing good questions.

What I like about it

This is a great way to create interaction around a video clip
It's really quick and easy to create a task
Students can access it from home or anywhere else
Students can add their own questions
Great to time questions to specific points in the video
It's a nice clean interface with few distractions
You can set up your own playlists and moderate them
It even has an embed code to add the tasks to other materials

Grockit is a great free tool for creating online interaction that's social and communicative. I hope you enjoy using it and create lots of useful activities for your students.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Creating Texting Dialogues for Students

2011-10-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

As mobile phone use becomes ubiquitous around the world and texting becomes a new genre of communication, it seems increasingly important that we as language teachers engage with these devices and help students to deal with the impact they are having on the English language.

Some time ago I wrote about a texting language translater called Transl8it which enabled users to trans late short texts from standard English to something approaching sms texting language. Since then I've used the site quite a lot to:

Translate text for using in chat rooms such as TodaysMeet
Translate poems and short dialogues into texting language for students to read
Translate news headlines.
I've also tried getting students to record example sentences of vocabulary into texting language, just to add an extra element to creating vocabulary records.

Recently, I have also found a handy tool called ifaketext and this enables you to create a picture of a smartphone screen with your dialogue on. Here's an example:

This is a great way to create materials to use with students, especially if we combine it with the Transl8it. Then I can make dialogues that look like this:

All we need to do to create the dialogues is go to: ifaketext.com and type in a dialogue. Be sure to put a name at the top and format the dialogue with the name of each speaker followed by a colon (:) then the dialogue. Then just click on 'Create Your Screenshot'.

Once the screen shot is created you get a number of options for adding it to materials. You can either get a code to embed it or a direct link to the image and you can save it from there and add it to you documents.

Here are a few ways you could use this with students:

Convert dialogues from their coursebook into texting language.
Create mysterious interactions and get them to predict the context.
Create dialogues and get students to guess the relationship between the people.
Create the beginnings of dialogues and get the students to continue them.
Create dialogues with missing lines / words and get the students to complete them.
Create dialogues with the responses in the wrong order and get students to arrange them correctly.

This is one small way that we can start to adapt materials and incorporate this kind of language into a our classroom. I hope you and your students enjoy using ifaketext and transl8it and you create some interesting and motivating materials for them.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Can you replace your IWB with a $10 dollar app?

2011-10-07T04:04:00.000-07:00

Idea Flight Enterprise is a new idea that makes a first attempt at using iPads to replace both the expensive IWB and the data projectors in your classroom.

In many ways it's a great idea that centres around using a $10 (£7) iPad (Pilot) app to share materials and interact with a classroom full of students.

Students will also need iPads and to download a free (passenger) app so that they can view the lesson materials and make notes on them.

The 'pilot' or teacher can open their PDF course materials and take students through them page by page in step allowing students to make notes on the materials as they go. They can also 'unlock' the materials which will allow students to move backwards or forwards through the materials independently at their own pace.

The Idea Flight Enterprise app ensures that the teacher and students are all seeing the same materials and so this negates the necessity for both IWB and data projector (Though it is possible to plug the iPad into a data projector too if you require that)

The app runs through either the wireless connection (with up to 14 students) or through connecting the iPads by Bluetooth (with up to 3 students).

This looks like it could be a really good product for schools with small classes / classrooms, especially those teaching business English or very modern schools who want to experiment with class sets of iPads.

What I like about Idea Flight

Assuming that students already have iPads, buying a $10 app could save you the price of both a data projector and an IWB.
It would be ideal for teaching small classes or one to one classes off-site, especially when there is no internet connection as you can connect through bluetooth.
It synchronizes with your DropBox public folder so it's easy to upload your materials if you have a free account.
It allows schools to create their own course materials using PPT, Keynote or Word and publish them as eBooks in PDF format for their students.
Students can make notes on the materials and then store their own copy.
Running materials through iPads rather than desktop or laptops enables your students to still be pretty mobile within the classroom, so you can still easily move them around and regroup them for discussion and human interaction within the classroom.
The app has 'Linkedin' integration so new students can see each others profiles etc and find out about one another more easily, so this also makes it a great networking tool.

What I wasn't so sure about

In the PDF materials I used in the app, all the hyperlinks were dead, so it would be nice if linking out to other materials were possible through the app.
The app only runs on iPad which makes it a bit restrictive. It would be nice to see integration with the web, so that students with laptops or other tablets could also be included in the same class.
I didn't try the app with video embedded into PDF so it would be nice to know if that worked, but I'm assuming it's unlikely.
Classes of 15 students on wireless or 3 on bluetooth, make the use of this app pretty much restricted to private or very privileged classrooms, so it would be nice to see greater numbers of students made possible.
It would be really good if a broader range of formats could be imported into the app. At present, any animations or effects that can be created with presentation software are lost when the materials are exported to PDF.

Despite some of the weaknesses of this Idea Flight Enterprise, I still think it's a massive step in the right direction towards enabling greater use of these kinds of devices in the classroom and, at $10, making that step an economical choice and one that is a better fit for an interactive communicative classroom than something like and IWB and data projector.

If you are thinking of introducing iPads within your school environment, and especially if you are developing your courses and course materials in-house, then I definitely think Idea Flight Enterprise is worth investigating.

Here's their short promotional video showing how it works.

This is an independent review that was written at the request of one of my sponsors - Idea Flight Enterprise - What I have written was in no way influenced or edited by them.

I hope you find it useful.

Related Links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Things to do with a Burning House

2011-05-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

The simple basis behind The Burning House Website is this:

"If your house was burning, what would you take with you?"

It's a really simple website which asks a simple question. The rest of the website has images with accompanying lists sent in by visitors to the site. Each person's list and image has about 10 items.

I really like websites like this because the strong idea and images provide great authentic materials to get students thinking and speaking. Here are a few of the images.

How to use this with students

Get the students to look at the images and identify what they see.
Save some of the lists and images and get them to match them up for simple vocabulary practice.
Ask the students what they think all the images have in common.
Show students the images and ask them to try to guess what the person who owns the objects is like (great for modals of deduction).
Get students in your class to bring in their on image (you could mix them up and see if they can guess which one belongs to each person.
Get them to upload their image and list to the site or create a wall design in your classroom.
Get students to tell the story behind each of their ten possessions on their list.
Give each students one of the images from the website and ask them to imagine they own the objects and get them to invent the story of why each object is on the list.
Get the students to browse the site and find the person with the list which is most similar to their own.
I hope you enjoy The Burning House and the stories behind the images.

Related links:
Image Based Speaking Activity for IWB
Crazy Comparatives & Superlatives
Creating multimedia stories
A Picture's worth
Picture phrases
Personalised flashcards
Exploiting Image Sequences
Best

Nik Peachey

Questioning the Role of Technology in Education

2011-05-16T03:23:00.000-07:00

Over the last six months I have been involved in a project with Delta Publishing on their development blog as a guest author to produce a series of postings which question the role of technology and how it is applied in ELT and education in general. This has been a bit of a new departure for me because I usually focus on very practical articles and tend to avoid getting into the sometimes lengthy debates that surround technology with ELT.

I'm now coming to the end of this series for a while and so I thought I would collect together these postings and some thoughts on what I've learned from the interaction with the various teachers who have responded to these posts.

Here you can see a short video I created to introduce the series.

Here you can find a brief summary and link to each article.

ELT and the Crisis in Education
In this first article I tried to put ELT into the greater context of general education and what is being described by some as the 'Crisis in education'. I often think that ELT is viewed and views itself in isolation from what is happening elsewhere in education. I used a social questionnaire to encourage readers to reflect on their beliefs and compare them with those of other readers.

ELT and the Crisis in Education – Part 2
In this article I tried to highlight and share some of the reading and viewing that had influenced my own thinking about the problems that education faces today and the kinds of changes we need to make.

ELT and the Crisis in Education: Technology in the Classroom
In this article I tried to examine what I believe are some of the mistakes that have been made in our attempts to overlay technology onto our existing classroom design.

ELT and the Crisis in Education: Digital Literacy
In this article I tried to examine the role of digital literacy within ELT and highlight the importance of improving our understanding of what digital literacy is and how and why we should integrate it into our course design.

ELT and the Crisis in Education: Digital Reading Skill
In this article I tried to examine the way receptive skills and the demands on 'readers' of web based content differed from the traditional reading skills we develop with our students.

It’s time to change the way we test our students
In this article I tried to examine the role of testing and its negative impact on the potential of ELT to move forward and become more innovative.

Breaking down the walls of the classroom
In this article I tried to examine the way that technology could be applied to course work to extend learning beyond the walls of the classroom and support a more blended and autonomous approach to the use of technology in ELT.

Some Pros and Cons of iPads for ELT
In this article I tried to examine the potential of iPads and tablet style devices within the classroom context and look at the way course books and published materials could be enhanced to make digital course books much more interactive and communicative.

The worst thing about educational technology is educational technology
In this article I tried to look at some of the worst aspects of our fixation with 'hardware' and the problems caused by misguided spending on complex gadgets without funding the support to make these work.

Is the 140 character ‘micro interaction’ enough?
In this article I tried to look at our tendency to be obsessed with 'the latest thing' and how this often limits view of what is potentially available to us. I tried to particularly focus on a contrast between microblogging and 3D game playing in virtual worlds.

Augmented Reality and Web 3.0
In one of my last posts I speculated about what could be the next step in terms of the way the Internet is developing and I had a brief look at how this could potentially impact on ELT.

Survey: Mobile Learning in ELT 2011
My final post will be a write up of some research I have been doing into mobile learning. This will be a follow up to some research that I published a year ago into the use of mobile learning devices in ELT.

I'd like to thank all the people who have left comments and questions on the articles and especially I would like to thanks everyone at Delta Publishing for sponsoring this series and leaving me absolutely free to say whatever I want.

I hope you enjoy reading them.

Best

Nik Peachey

36 Tools to Digitise Coursebook Activities

2011-04-21T02:12:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years, I have often heard teachers commenting that they would like to use more technology with their students, but they have to cover the materials in the coursebook. So, I started thinking about ways we could use technology to quickly and simply convert coursebook activities to something more interactive on the web.

I've created this document which shows 36 different ways we can use web based tools to enhance the things we do in the classroom and make students homework options more interesting and communicative. This document was used to support my presentation at IATEFL Brighton and you can see the presentation slides at: 36Tools for Digitising Your Coursebook

36 Tools for Digitising your ELT Course Book

I hope you find these useful and I hope to find the time soon to develop this document and add more detail and more examples. Until then please feel free to add comments and suggestions below and share ideas that you have for digitising coursebook materials.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Comparing and conditionals - The facts about countries.

2011-03-30T01:45:00.000-07:00

Last week I saw IfItWereMyHome and instantly thought that it would be a useful resource to get students making meaningful 2nd Conditional sentences based on real information, but a closer look shows that the site has much more potential than just that.
By clicking on 'Country Comparison' the site detects your home country. You can then click on any of the country names below to get statistical comparisons between your own country and the one you have selected.
The comparisons are actually colour rated according to whether they are viewed as negative, positive or neutral aspects.
If you click at the end of each comparison you can also get more information about the facts being presented.

At the bottom of the page there is voting button where you can choose which of the two countries you would prefer to live in.

Once you click to choose the country you would prefer you can leave a comment to say why and also read other comments.

Here are some ways I think you could use this site with students.

Get them to find a country they would prefer to live in and ask them to find 5 reasons to justify.
Get students to find a country they would NOT prefer to live in and ask them to justify.
Select two countries and ask students to choose one to live in and justify their choice.
Ask students to look at the colour rating of the facts and see if the agree with the positive / negative rating of the facts.
Ask them to compare a number of different countries and find out which is the most environmentally sound / destructive.
Ask students to compare a number of countries and find out which has the best quality of life (They will need to decide what the criteria are for this).
Ask students to decide which of the facts displayed would influence their choice of country most.
Ask students to look at the facts that are compared and decide which important facts they feel are missing.
Ask students to look at some of the comments about the countries and decide - which they agree with / disagree with, which they think are ridiculous.
Ask students to compare their country to a number of others then post a comment or ask a questions about each country.
Get students to find the comments about their own country and respond to one of them ( in a polite way)
Ask students to look at the site and try to decide who constructed it and why.
Ask students to look at the facts about their country and decide if they think they are accurate.

I hope you find IfItWereMyHome and these activities useful. If you think of any other activities you could use the site for ,please post them in the comments.

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Nik Peachey

Create a Web Based Song Activity in Minutes

2011-02-28T01:47:00.000-08:00

Back in December 2010 I wrote an article about how you could use Batlyrics, a site which combined Song videos and lyrics, as a corpus to find examples of grammar or vocabulary you wanted your students to focus on: 'Lyrics and Video and Grammar - Song as Corpus'

Since writing this article I've spotted another useful feature of the site, and that is the addition of an embed code button.

This is really helpful, because now it means that you can select the song you want to use, copy the embed code and then embed it into your own web page or blog and write your activity around it.
This is particularly easy if you use the Posterous blogging platform, as all you need to do is copy and paste the embed code into and email, add a title and instructions and post it off to post@posterous.com.

A few seconds later you should get a message back with a link to your published activity. Then you just share the link with your students.

Here's a quick example that I created: In my life

So now you can create quick online song based activities within just a few minutes. I hope you find Batlyrics useful.

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Nik Peachey

Google Spaces for Language Learning

2011-02-18T08:41:00.000-08:00

I was never a great fan of Google Wave. It arrived with a real wave of hype and disappeared just as quickly, but it seems that many of the 'gadgets' designed to work with Wave have survived and can now be used independently within a service called Google Shared Spaces.

There are lots of these small gadgets so I decide to have a look at some and see if they had any potential for use in language learning.

Here are examples of some of the more useful ones.

Wave Tube
Here you can add a Video from YouTube to a page and students can watch it and leave comments or ask questions using the chat box on the left.
Try this one: http://goo.gl/AXEFY

Yes/ No / Maybe
This is a simple gadget for creating single question polls that your students can then answer and add comments to.
Try this one: http://goo.gl/UQvGz

yourBrainstormer
This is a nice brainstorming gadget that enables you to create mind maps around a topic. Students can actually vote for or against the elements they like too.
Try this one: http://goo.gl/StD9e

Listy
This is a nice tool for creating 'to do' lists. Anyone can add to the list of things to do and then tick them off as they are done.
Try this one: http://goo.gl/UVbjU

Magnetic Fridge Poetry
This is a nice tool for creating jumbled text activities. You just add your text when you create your board and then students can drag the words around wherever they want them.
Try this one: http://goo.gl/nCigp

These are just a few of the interactions you can create with the Shared Spaces. There are lots more, so why not try a few out, feel free to play with the ones I've created and let me know which ones work for you.

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Nik Peachey

How to Make Your Own Pronunciation Flashcards

2011-01-24T13:35:00.000-08:00

The Flashcard Maker from CEO has been around a while, but it is one of those really good free tools that keeps getting better. It enable you to create and print your own flashcards which include text, phonemic script and images that you can type in and add. You can then use these for a range of activities in the classroom.

To create flashcards, the first thing you do is go to: http://www.cambridgeenglishonline.com/Flashcard_maker/ and choose the size of the flashcards you want to create. you can choose from either one A4 size card to 8 cards per A4 sheet.
Next, you can either draw your own image or select one from the image library.
To add an image you just click on the name of the image you want from the image library and click 'Apply' and it appears on the flashcard.

Next you can add your text and lastly, use the small phonemic typewriter to add the symbols.

Then all you have to do is click on print and you have your flashcard with phonemic script.

This is a great tool to use with EFL and ESL students.

You can create simple flashcards with images and phonemic script of the nouns.
You can get the students to create the flash cards themselves, as the phonemic typewriter also has sound so they can hear the phonemes as they type them.
You can create some cards with just images, some with just word and some with just script and create a great matching activity.
You can create flashcards with pronunciation mistakes and see if the students can spot them. You can create flashcards with one image and two different phonemic spellings and see if students can say the correct one.

If you really like this and think it's useful, there is even a version for iPad / iPhone which has lots of activities built in along with the ability for students to record and compare their own audio of their pronunciation. The app version isn't free though I'm afraid, but it is quite cheap at £1.79 in the UK. You can some screen shots here.

Hope you enjoy this and make some useful flashcards.

Here you can find more online pronunciation activities for EFL students

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Nik Peachey

A Tool for Helping Students Develop More Complex Sentences

2011-01-11T02:03:00.001-08:00

A couple of years ago I wrote an activity for students called Extending a Sentence which used a Flash animated website to show how a simple sentence could be elaborated to become rich in detail. The site called Telescopictext had a marvelous sentence which started with 'I made tea' and developed into a full paragraph, just click on the grey words.
I'm glad to say that this site has now been developed so that everyone can create and save their own sentences. Here's my first one and it starts,"Telescopic text is great."

Creating your own text is really easy and if you register you can save the text and get a hyperlink to it. The first thing to do is to go to http://www.telescopictext.org/ and register. Then once you have logged in, click on 'Write'.

You can then start by adding a very short sentence. Then click the 'Start' button.
You can then add more words by slicking on a word, adding more detail and then clicking 'Insert'.
You can keep clicking on words and adding more parts to the sentence. If you click on the small magnifying icon at the bottom right of the screen you will also be able to see the structure of the sentence as it has been developed.

If you click on 'Fold' you'll be able to close the phrase up and then try it out by clicking on the word to expand it again.
When you think the sentence is finished, you just need to click on 'Publish' and after a few quick checks you'll be able to get a URL to share with your students.
Here's the one I just made: I went to class.

I think this is a great tool to use with students.

You can put students in pairs with a starter sentence and get them to keep taking it in turns to add parts.
You can see which students can create the longest single sentence without any grammar mistakes.
You can put in short texts your students have created then get them to edit and make them more interesting.
You can create a text with mistakes in and the corrections hidden, then just click to show what the mistakes are. Students can try to predict what the correction will be before you show it.
You could create also a create a version with some errors hidden and some visible and students have to decide which one are genuine errors and which are actually correct.
You can give students a starter sentence and get them to create short story around it by gradually building up the sentences.
You can use 'View Structure' feature to highlight the way the sentence is formed and the different parts of speech etc.

I think Telescopictext is a wonderful tool to use with students either on a data projector / IWB in class or to get them creating sentences at home. I hope you find it useful.

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Nik Peachey

Creating Video Sentences

2010-12-18T01:48:00.000-08:00

Twist Our Words is a great site I spotted while watching TV in the UK. It enables you to create video sentences that are 'mashed up' from a collection of clips of UK TV celebrities saying each word. If you don't understand that then look at this example I created. Click the white arrow to play it.

Making a video like this is very simple, just go to: http://twist.channel4.com/words and you'll see a page full of words. Click on the words you want to put in your sentence.

Then click on the words will appear along the bottom. When your sentence is complete, click on the white arrow at the and to watch it.

If you like the video, then just click on submit and you'll be able to get a URL link for the video or and embed code to add it to your site or blog.

If you don't want to create your own sentence you can just click on 'Lucky Dip' and you'll get an automatically generated sentence.

I think Twist Our Words is a great tool to use with students to get them creating and listening to language.

They could try to make poems or haiku
They can produce a lucky dip sentence and then see how many word they can add to it without it loosing sense.
You could produce sentences that have errors in and get the students to try to spot the errors and correct them.
You can produce a collection of sentences and get students to decide which are correct and which are not.
You could have a competition to see which students can produce the longest grammatically correct sentence.
They could collect together all the words they can find that include a particular phoneme or all the word which rhyme.
They could try to make a video with all the words that contain 3 syllables and the same stress pattern.

I hope you can try a few of these ideas and they work for you and your students.

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Nik Peachey

A Collaborative English Grammar

2010-12-15T14:14:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that I'm not a great fan of grammar, but this is a site that I do really like. It's called English Language and Usage and it is like a Q & A of English grammar. The site has a huge collection of questions that people have sent in about various aspects of English grammar idioms and general usage and anyone who is registered can the try to answer the questions.

I think this would be a great tool to use with trainee teachers. They could find questions and check to see if the agree with the answers. They could also post their own questions and answers. It's also a great way to test your ability to answer thorny questions that might come up.

If you are looking for questions related to a particular aspect you can search through the tags to the side and click on any that interest you.

For me this is a great way to approach the development of grammatical knowledge ( I find attempting to read grammar books impossible). Though I'm not sure that the site would be suitable for any but the more advanced students of English.

English Language and Usage is a really good way to make grammar interesting and collaborative. I hope you find it useful.

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Nik Peachey

Lyrics and Video and Grammar - Song as Corpus

2010-12-03T12:24:00.001-08:00

A while ago I wrote a posting (Teaching Grammar Through Songs) on how you could search song lyrics for particular words or phrases, then find the lyrics and video to go with the song. In the posting, this involved using two different sites, but now I have found one site that does the whole thing.

The site is called Batlyrics. It's very simple to use. You just go to the search part of the site and click the 'Lyrics Words' search.

Then type in the phrase, structure or words you want to find in the text and you'll see the possible phrases from the lyrics start to appear.
Once you select one, you will be linked through to a page of possible versions of the song. Select the one you want and the video of the song should appear with the lyrics underneath.
This is a really fast way to find motivating listening materials for your students that deal with specific structures or vocabulary.

Using this with EFL students

You can get students to search for their own examples and learn the words.
You can use it as a way to find listening materials and copy the lyrics to make into classroom activities such as gap fill or reorganising the text.
You could cut and past the lyrics into this cloze test creator and you then have an interactive listening activity. Better still students could find there own songs and copy the lyrics into the cloze test creator so that they create their own personalised activities.

Batlyrics is free to use, but it does carry quite a lot of advertising though so be careful where you click.

I hope you find Batlyrics useful. Here you can find more EFL / ESL activities that use songs.

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Nik Peachey

Make Quick Pronunciation Activities

2010-12-02T01:39:00.000-08:00

Text2Phonetics is a very handy site if you like to use phonemic script with your students. It can take a lot of the hard work out of transcribing text to phonetic symbols. You just paste in a short piece of text, click a button, and it does it for you.

You can then copy and paste the text into websites or documents, like the text below which I copied from Wikipedia. Here you can see how well it transcribes.
This was done using the 'RP' setting.

| fəʊˈnɒlədʒi z ðə ˌsɪstəˈmætɪk juːz əv saʊnd tə ɪnˈkəʊd ˈmiːnɪŋ ɪn ˈeni ˈspəʊkən ˈhjuːmən ˈlæŋɡwɪdʒ | ɔː ðə fiːld əv lɪŋˈɡwɪstɪks ˈstʌdɪɪŋ ðɪs juːz |
Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use.

This looks like a really great tool to help prepare materials for students or to get students using for themselves.

Here's a few ways you might use it.

Get students to type example sentences using new vocabulary words and convert them to script.
Produce some sample sentences in script for your students to decode and read.
Produce some examples of script and the original text and add some pronunciation errors to the script and see if they can spot the errors.
Get students to translate short texts or sentences to script and then use the site to compare and check their own transcriptions.
Create transcribed versions of conversations or dialogue and get students to draw on the intonation patterns to show where the intonation rises or falls. You could actually use short exerts from film or TV scripts to do this and then find the clip on YouTube so they can listen to hear the intonation. Drew's Script-O-Rama is a good place to find TV scripts.

If you want to transcribe longer texts then you can also download a desktop edition, but this only runs on PC, so I haven't tried it yet. The tool even offers a degree of customization so you can remove or include different features.
I hope you find Text2Phonetics useful and soon have your students producing perfect 'RP' accents.

Here you an find more web based activities for pronunciation.

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Nik Peachey

AudioBoo to Posterous: Audio Podcasting from the Classroom

2010-11-26T14:19:00.001-08:00

For a while now I've been using Posterous in class and in training sessions to help show teachers and students just how easy it can be to create a blog.
(Basically, all they have to do is send an email to post@posterous.com with the title of the posting in the subject line and the text they want in the email along with and media as attachments and within minutes they'll get a link back to their published posting.)

No, though with the combination of Posterous and AudioBoo, the process of publishing audio directly to the web within minutes has just got easier too.
AudioBoo is a great free platform for publishing audio online. You can either go to their website and start recording straight away, or you can download a free app either to your Apple device or Android smart phone.
The site really does enable almost single click publishing once you have registered and set up your profile, but better than this it can be synced with a Twitter account, Facebook profile or blogging account so that any materials you record go directly to your network.

Publish directly from the classroom
I've found this really useful, particularly as I have the app installed on my iPad. This means that I can wander round class recording my students and then click a button and have their recordings published directly to my blog with seconds.
Then I can go to the blog later and build review tasks around the materials or students can go to the blog pages and comment on each others' recordings.

Here you can see and hear what the result is when you publish direct to Posterous: My first AudioBoo to Posterous recording from iPad

With students
Having this ability to instantly record and publish students' speaking can be very powerful, particularly when using a task based approach, as students are often reluctant to review and repeat speaking tasks that they have already done once. However, knowing that their speaking will be recorded and published gives them the extra motivation to repeat tasks, focus on what they have learned and concentrate on achieving a level of accuracy.

Setting all this up is very simple. Once you have your Posterous blog account, register on the AudioBoo website, create your profile then go to settings and click on 'Post to other sites'. There you can decide which services you want to synchronise your AudioBoo account with. Then you just start recording and publishing.

AudioBoo and Posterous together can help you to build a powerful and versatile publishing platform for your students work and they are both free, so why not give them a try.

I hope you find them useful. Here you can find speaking activities to use EFL / ESL with students.

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Nik Peachey

Get Students Checking Grammar and Collocation

2010-11-25T13:46:00.001-08:00

Phras.in is a really handy site I saw today that allows students to check two different ways of saying the same thing, so that they can decide which is most likely to be right.

If you type the two different ways of expressing something into the two fields, the site checks these through Google and shows you which is the most popular. This is a great way to get students checking paired sentences with their common mistakes against against each other. Also great for getting them to check collocations to check that they have the correct combinations of words or how popular different collocations are.

What's also nice about the site is that it shows you the context in which it found the examples, so students can reinforce their learning by seeing some examples of the phrase used correctly in context. So you could also use this as a source of authentic materials to build grammar lessons around.
Students can even click through from the phrase the the source to find out where and how the expression was used. This is a great tool to get students editing or peer checking thier work together and to encourage more self correction.

I hope you find Phras.in useful.

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Nik Peachey

iPad Apps for English Language Teachers

2010-11-07T08:49:00.000-08:00

Well like a lot of people I’ve bought an iPad over the summer and I’ve been having my first taste of shopping for apps to extend the capabilities of the iPad. I’ve also been having a look at how some of these can be used for language learning, so I thought I would share with you a little bit of information about the first few apps I’ve tried.

Forvo
For those of you who don’t know Forvo, it’s a marvelous pronunciation dictionary site which is collecting together audio examples of of the pronunciation of different words from languages and speakers all round the world.
The app works as a simple pronunciation dictionary which you can carry with you in class and whenever a new word comes up, you can get an example pronunciation form it. For many of the more common words in English you can get multiple examples from different speaker (male, female, UK, US, Australian etc.)

The app could be really handy for use in class, especially if you aren’t confident about your own pronunciation or your students want to study a particular accent. The app runs on iPhone or iPad. You’ll need to have a connection to download the pronunciation examples and unfortunately there isn’t any capability to record and upload your own examples (you’ll need to go to the website to do that), but it’s still a pretty useful tool.

It isn’t free, but it’s pretty cheap and you can download it from: http://itunes.apple/forvo-pronunciation/

Dragon Dictation
This app is from the makers of the popular Dragon voice recognition software and as you would expect it is designed to recognise your words and transcribe them as text. It works pretty well too, though it does make some mistakes which you then have to correct. You can correct the errors by typing in the corrections or tapping the surface where the error is and trying to say the words again.
This would be a good way to get students working on their speaking skills and correcting errors in text. It’s also a very handy tool if you don’t like typing a lot as once you have created a text on it you can either copy or send it by email or post it straight to Facebook or Twitter. You don’t need a connection to use the voice recognition part, but you’ll need to be connected to share your texts. It also works best if you have an external microphone for your device.

Dragon Dictation is also free http://itunes.apple/dragon-dictation/

Mobile Air Mouse
This is a really clever little app that transforms your iPad, iPod or iTouch into a remote touch pad controller and keyboard for your computer. That might not seem like such a big deal, but what it means is that once you have the free software installed on the main computer in your classroom, any student that has Air Mouse on their mobile device can take control of the computer, write or draw on the board and interact with your learning materials without leaving their seat.

This duplicates a lot of the functions of an interactive whiteboard and slate, so it might also save some money. There’s a free version and a pro version. The app runs through your wireless connection.

Air Mouse: http://itunes/air-mouse-free-remote-trackpad/

Flipboard
Flipboard is my favourite app so far. It is a type of feed reader for the iPad. The really great thing about Flipboard though is that it converts the feeds into a magazine type format that you can then easily browse. This is particularly useful for feeds from things like Twitter, which can be very reader unfriendly and I’m now getting a lot more information a lot quicker from Twitter than I previously was using a desktop based app.
So this is a great app for keeping up with your PLN as well as finding images and text to use in class. Flipboard is also free, so that’s another big bonus, but you will need a connection while you are using it.

Flip Board: http://ax.itunes/flipboard/

Here’s a video showing how it works:

MeeGenius
This is an app that has been developed to support the website (or could it be the other way around) MeeGenius contains a collection of illustrated books for primary level kids. The books have audio accompaniment and words are highlighted as the kids listen.
Great to get younger learners reading and listening in English. The app isn’t free but it’s very reasonable priced (especially compared to buying the books) and it contains 12 free books 6 of which are ready installed and 6 more that you need a connection to download. If you want more books after that you can buy more.

You can find out more about the app from: http://www.meegenius.com/iphone

SonicPics
This is a handy app that allows you to add audio to images or sequences of images and then export them as video files. There is a free version that allows you to create videos of up to three images and 10 mins recording time, or you can buy the pro version and make unlimited sequences. This is really handy for grabbing screen shots from your iPad or iPhone and adding audio to them or for adding audio to photographs.
Describing pictures and images is a handy way of getting students to practice their speaking and the videos can then be exported for sharing.

SonicPics: http://itunes/sonicpics-lite/

I hope you find some of these apps useful, and if you don't yet have an iPad, I hope they give you some idea of the enormous potential that these tools have.

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Nik Peachey