Search results matching tags 'video' and 'listening'

Great StoryCorps Video Animations

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 05:51:50 GMT

The wonderful StoryCorps stories on NPR are great pieces to read and listen to on the radio. They also have converted a number of them into short video animations, and many of them (though not the one I’ve embedded below) … Continue reading →

Video: “The Chinese New Year: From Fear to Festivity”

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 02:24:27 GMT

The Chinese New Year: From Fear to Festivity is the title of this video from English Central that I’m adding to The Best Resources For Chinese New Year. More importantly, though, it’s the first English Central video that I’m embedding … Continue reading →

Teaching Resources: Steve Jobs

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:16:36 GMT

It’s not until someone goes that you realise the impact they had on your life – Steve Jobs was one of those public figures who inspired belief and achievement in others.

One of my classes was asking if we could talk about Steve Jobs and his life, and clearly he meant a lot to a lot of people – so here are some resources that you can use with your learners.

The Guardian has a reader tribute interactive here: “Dear Steve, your products changed my life.” They also have a photo slideshow featuring reactions from around the world.

Also from the Guardian, this page “Steve Jobs: the 10 best tributes“.

The Lexical Press Blog from the American TESOL institute has a comemorative lesson plan available here: http://americantesol.com/blogger/?p=366

Cecilia Lemos at Box of Chocolates has an obituary style lesson plan available here: http://cecilialcoelho.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/hot-off-the-press-an-activity-about-steve-jobs/

@MrTESOL tweeted this link to an interactive online Steve Jobs quiz: http://www.tutor2u.net/business/bizquiz/061011/quiz.html.

Eva Büyüksimkeşyan at A Journey in TEFL has a lesson idea here: http://evasimkesyan.edublogs.org/2011/10/06/a-lesson-idea/, she also mentions Sean Banville’s News English lesson: http://www.newsenglishlessons.com/1110/111006-steve_jobs.html.

Finally, you’ve probably seen it elsewhere on the web recently – but here’s Steve Jobs’ famous speech at Stanford university:

The disabled access friendly world blog challenge: Creature Discomforts

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:30:31 GMT

Following on from the recent blog challenge on raising awareness of disability access issues, I came across the Leonard Cheshire Disability campaign whilst watching Shaun the Sheep dvds with my daughter.

The campaign is called “Creature Discomforts” and has very similar aims to the blog challenge – namely to get people to think about the way they see disability.

If you go to the Creature Discomforts website, there are eight short video ads (about 20 – 30 seconds each) and nine short radio ads. Both of these have tapescripts available, so would be relatively easy to adapt into short listening tasks – the ads are very visually appealing and would be great with young learners.

There is also a “fun and games” section which contains a quiz about disability in the UK. It could be interesting to do the quiz (which is multiple choice, one question at a time – questions change each time you do it) and get learners to compare the answers with the situation in their country. For example, apparently only 50% of train stations in the UK offer step-free access to the platforms – what’s life like where you live? The section also offers four different games that put the game player in the position of having a disability – in the Callum the Chameleon game, you can play with or without sight as you try to catch the flies buzzing around. Sonny the Shrimp attempts to rescue fish from their hooks – from his wheelchair. Tim-the-crutches-using-Tortoise attempts the long-jump, and finally Millie the mouse attempts to feed peanuts to her elephant friend. I like the way the Chameleon game makes you think about the difference between playing the game sighted and unsighted – the other games are not quite as educational, but fun to play for the younger classes.

Leonard Cheshire Disability is also running a campaign called Action for Access from which you can download access survey forms for shops, organisations and buildings – there are separate forms for transport options. If you work in the UK, then a class project could contribute to developing the access map on the site and making a positive contribution to the local community. If you work outside the UK, then you could adapt the access survey forms (they’re available in pdf or word) to fit your surroundings and develop a class project to survey the area around your school. Some thoughts anyway!

Summer school teachers – have you considered that this could be a handy project to work with one week? You could even incorporate some of the work into one of your trips out and about in the UK?

A film or DVD based lesson (any film)!

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:55:22 GMT

It’s the end of the school year at the moment and most of my classes have been badgering for “Movie, teacher! Movie!” for some time. Resistance would seem to be futile….

Basically, what they want to do is sit down and watch a film for the entirety of the lesson, “practising” their listening skills, but otherwise doing nothing. The pedagogical conscience within me rails against this – no! they must do something useful! But let’s face it, at the end of the day, sitting around watching subtitled movies but otherwise doing nothing is how most of them will use their English as time goes by…. so you could justify doing just that?

Or not, because of course our role as teachers is to help learners access the content of movies in English, and just sitting their watching them isn’t necessarily going to help them do that any better!

This lesson won’t necessarily help learners do that any better either, though it does contain a prediction task and a comprehension check at the end, so it stands a better chance of doing that than doing nothing….

And it’s incredibly simple and can be adapted to use with absolutely any movie at all! So go for it!

What you do:

Before the class do a google image search for “name of movie + screenshots” and make a handout of jumbled images taken from stretched out moments of your film. Put them on your first handout in a random order.

This handout then forms the predictive task – can the learners identify the film? Any of them seen it before? What happens / what do they think is going to happen? If the class is strong enough, learners can work together in pairs to write a 50-70 word plot prediction summary.

While they watch: they check against the handout to number the images they see in the order that they appear during the film.

After they watch they can compare and check the sequence of images with each other / get full feedback. They can also compare their plot predictions with what really happened.

Also after they’ve watched the film, you can give them a comprehension task based around the plot synopsis. Before the class, look up your target film on either wikipedia or the IMDB or your personal favourite film review site…. Copy the plot synopsis from the site (being careful to credit the originating source) onto another handout. Then gap the handout – remove key plot elements / events / characterisations. In essence this should leave you and the learners with a “skeleton framework” plot summary. Working together, the learners can then complete the summary from memory.

Note of Caution:

Check the copyright laws in your country to be sure your use of proprietary images / texts / display of the film is legal or seek the advice of your director.

Also, on a personal note, I hate it when I don’t get to watch the last fifteen or twenty minutes of a film because the class has ended and we ran out of time. Using the tasks as given above will probably add 30-45 minutes to your run time, so make sure your film will fit into the lesson time! You might be better off with a 30-45 minute episode of a TV show if you have something suitable available (that your learners won’t have seen / be bored by!).

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children

Anonymous — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:54:20 GMT

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children - thanks to Greg Fuller for posting this on facebook…..

There’s a lot of information here and obviously the most interesting thing for any class to do would be to pull out all the statistics that relate to their country and decide whether or not they agree with them, why, and what could be done to change the situation….

Who knows – we could start a social revolution right here?

But information transfer tasks are good ways of processing information and creating a meaningful context for language learning to occur in, so designing tasks around the huge pile of data that Save the Children provide would all give a good reasons for learners to develop their linguistic resource. Poster tasks, presentations (with or without powerpoint), charts and graphs all spring to mind. Of course for IELTS candidates, there are a lot of graphs and charts just waiting to be described in the data!

There’s also a documentary available on the website which could provide the basis for both listening tasks and discussion afterwards (though maybe not a good idea to watch if you’re expecting, or have just had, a recent addition to the family).

These are all just some initial ideas – if you have any plans, materials or ideas you’d like to share to develop this topic, please let me know!

Free Audio and Video Files of Famous Speeches at American Rhetoric.com

Anonymous — Mon, 09 May 2011 21:45:37 GMT

With so much literature, grammar, writing, and vocabulary to cover in our curriculum these days, it’s easy to overlook the importance of oral language in our classrooms. Consider also how reluctant many students already are about “getting up in front of the class,” and it’s easy to put off teaching about speeches and oral presentations. But with evermore rapid advancements of technology and the internet, listening and speaking skills are becoming increasingly important. The authors of the Common Core State Standards put it this way: “New technologies have broadened and expanded the role that speaking and listening play in acquiring … Continue reading →

A lesson on Learning Goals – Ken Robinson TED Talk

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 18:07:45 GMT

I first watched Ken Robinson’s TED talk – “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” some months ago – a thought provoking examination of the aims of the educational establishment. It has influenced my thinking about the aims of teaching quite heavily, though perhaps more on this in a later post.

It occurred to me that this would be a nice talk to use with a class…

A basic lesson outline is included below the talk – it is primarily a discussion based lesson, so any language input would be reactive and immediate (i.e. when learners want to know how to express their views in a particular way) rather than pre-planned – though I would suggest following an output-feedback model and making careful notes on language use throughout the discussion period, so that a corrective feedback / reformulation stage can follow at the end.

This also functions as a class needs analysis, so you might also want to take some detailed notes on the content of their ideas! By the end of the lesson, your learners may have arrived at a set of learning outcomes or, at the very least a set of more general goals they would like to try and achieve by the end of the course. This may well guide your thinking when planning out the course or individual lessons, and by relating the lessons to the goals the learners decided for themselves, it might help increase learner motivation and participation in the classroom.

Lesson Outline:

(1) Lead In Discussion: three questions on the board: (a) What’t the point of education? (b) Does education achieve it’s aims? (c) How would you change the system to make it better?

(2) Video Task – play Sir Ken’s talk (as above) and ask them to make notes on his answers to the questions and whether they agree or not. Do some reactive content feedback.

(3) Ask the learners to relate these ideas to your lessons – be prepared to receive some harsh criticisms! But, at the same time try to direct these into constructive criticisms… Some guidance questions: (a) what do you think the aims of our classes are? (b) What do you think the aims of these classes should be? (c) What do you think are the best ways to achieve these aims?

(4) Pyramid discussion. Ask each learner to try and arrive at ten specific goals they want to achieve within the remaining classes of their course. Then pair the learners, who must then agree both on a set of ten and rank them in order of importance. Then put the learners into larger groups of four or five, to do the same task – agree on ten goals in order of importance. Finally, bring the whole class together and hand over the classroom to them – get them to nominate a “scribe” to collate the feedback and to get the list of ten goals up on the board.

(NB) their initial goals can be as frivolous as they wish – mostly the more humorous goals will be winnowed out during the discussion stages. But it is important to guide to into phrasing attainable goals, otherwise frustration looms large!

(5) Let them know you’ll use these ideas to guide your planning of the rest of the course.

(6) Provide a language correction / reformulation as appropriate.

Learn to Put Your Make Up on in English

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:25:00 GMT

YouTube offers you so many opportunities to learn English and also to learn how to do new things, learn how to do things better or teach others how to do things.

In today's activity we'll look at some 'home' produced YouTube channels and learn a bit more about how to use make up and other cosmetics and develop your vocabulary in this area. We'll also look at how you can enter into a dialogue with the people who create the videos.

Task:

You are going to watch 3 short videos showing you how to apply make up. The first video is by Andrea and has no words, just text and images. Pause the video to make notes of any new words you see in the text.

Now look at the new words you noted down and check to find a definition for them on this site: Make Up USA Vocabulary.
Just click on the word to the left of the screen and you will find images of the kinds of products in the video.

Now that you have a bit more vocabulary, you can watch this second video and listen as Michelle Phan describes how she puts on her make up.

The vocabulary in these videos and the range of accents can be very challenging, but if you watch and listen to a number of different ones you will find they become easier to understand, and if you do have a problem with understanding some of the things that they are saying or doing, remember that you can leave a comment or ask a question by going to the video on YouTube.
Here's one more video for you to watch. In this one Elle describes the make up used in the 'Blockbuster' movie 'Twilight'.

One of the great things about people who produce these kinds of videos is that they welcome communication with the people who watch their videos, so you can either go to their channel on YouTube and send them a comment or question or you can follow them on Twitter and see what they have to say and ask them questions.

You can find Andrea's YouTube channel at: Andrea's Choice and follow her on Twitter at: Andrea's Choice
You can find Michelle's YouTube Channel at: Michelle Phan and follow her on Twitter at: Michelle Phan
You can find Elle's YouTube channel at: AllThatGlitters and follow her on twitter at: AllThatGlitters

I hope you enjoy watching these videos, learn a little more vocabulary and have some practice at understanding different US accents.

Here you can find more video based activities for EFL ESL students

Related links for teachers:

Best

Nik Peachey

Learn from and Create Animated Music Videos

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:53:00 GMT

Learning English from songs lyrics and music is a great way to study. In today's activity you are going to be able to watch and enjoy some simple 'stop motion' animated music videos and then find out how to create your own.
The videos for you to watch come from two sources; Music and Muffins and SereneRhapsody and you can find more examples on their YouTube Channels

Task:

For the first part of this task, you can simple watch and enjoy two short music videos and just decide which video you like the most.
This one is "You Could Be Happy" and the music is by Snow Patrol

This one is called "Rain drops" and the music is by Regina Spector

You can find more videos like this at Music and Muffins and Serene Rhapsody
Once you have chosen the video you like best, think about how the images illustrate the story of the song.
Try to think of a song that you like and the story behind the song.
Find the lyrics for the song at: http://www.lyrics.com/ and copy each line of the lyrics onto a sheet of paper.
Put the sheets of paper in order and then do a simple sketch on each sheet of paper to illustrate the line from the song.
Now using a simple digital camera you can create your own 'stop motion' video of the song.
Here you can find step by step instructions showing how this is done.

Here you can watch a video of how to make stop motion videos

Once you have create your video you will need to add the sound track too. This is a great way to enjoy music and develop your English.

I hope to see some of your videos on YouTube soon.

Here you can find 20 + more video activities for EFL ESL students