Search results matching tags 'vocabulary', 'upper intermediate', 'young learners', and 'online resource'

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?

Online Teaching Resource: Primary Pad

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 10:32:25 GMT

Thanks to Tommy Holt for spotting this and mentioning it on facebook!

Primary pad is an online synchronous editing tool – learners can access and edit the same document at the same time. This is the first tool I’ve come across that allows synchronous editing and as such is quite an exciting development! It’s free and requires no registration, though “public pads” only last for 30 days, so longer term projects would require a sign up to the “professional” paid for version.

Take a look at it here: http://www.primarypad.com/

There is a google docs presentation on the site by Simon Haughton, which lists five ways that you can use the tool – synonyms generation / sentence correction & development / online interviewing / task achievement identification / collaborative writing tasks.

I really like the idea of the collaborative writing task as it puts the learners in the positions of writer and reader at the same time, thus hopefully allowing for a peer teaching mode where good ideas are justified and bad ones discarded. It could also work well with text organisation and structure as ideas would need to be grouped effectively and paragraphed. I can see this being used with exam preparation classes a lot!

It would also be perfect for use with Grammar Dictation / Dictagloss tasks – if you’re not familiar with these, the basic premise is that the teacher has a short text (which can be littered with examples of the target language structure) that they read to the learners initially for a content reaction, then read again. On the second reading the learners take notes on what was said. They then try to recreate the text exactly as it was read out. A common problem I find with this, is that the learners’ notetaking ability varies, and so different reconstruction pairs achieve the task with differing accuracy. Bringing all the learners together to recreate the text using primary pad would solve this issue and might lead to a more effective collaboration and reconstruction of the target text!

Also, I like the idea of error correction tasks. As it is a synchronous tool, learners could work together to correct a set of teacher generated sentences, before challenging each other by adding additional error strewn sentences to challenge each other with. I really like asking learners to deliberately make errors – after all they have to know what the correct form is before they can make a deliberate error, and it can raise their awareness of incidental errors that creep in!

One further idea is in identifying the main ideas in a reading text. Useful, again, for exam preparation classes, but with a target text uploaded onto the primary pad, learners can reach a mutual understanding of the text by discussing their ideas below it.

As far as I can work out, the system works with the teacher creating an initial “primary pad” and then simply sharing the URL. So you just send all the other computers to the same web address and they should be able to simply get on with it! And if they don’t finish in class, they can still access the primary pad from the comfort of their own home! (for 30 days!).

Only one word of caution – it’s called “primary pad” – but personally, I think the “primary” is a bit misleading. I can see chaos ensuing if this was used with a class of 24 six-year-olds… and I’m not sure whether it’s bright and shiny enough for the younger end of the teaching spectrum! But teenagers and adults could happily get into it and get a lot out of it.

It’s currently the Easter break with me, so no opportunity to use this with a class at the moment – any feedback from those of you who have tried it, and suggestions on what you did with it are gratefully received!

Other sites that do much the same thing:

A quick look through Larry Ferlazzo’s archive reveals “The best online tools for real-time collaboration”: where he lists primary pad alongside http://sync.in/ and http://piratepad.net/front-page/ and http://typewith.me/. Though pirate pad appears to be exactly the same as primary pad and typewithme.

Not used any of them – so again, any feedback appreciated!

A Lesson on Linkers

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:15:27 GMT

This is a lesson that aims to increase the range of linking devices / expressions learners have available to them, and in particular focuses on five relatively simple devices: In order to / so that / as / in case / otherwise.

The lesson as given would probably be best for Intermediate, Upper Intermediate and maybe FCE as a revision lesson, though with some simple adaptation (i.e. changing the target linkers) it could easily be used for lower and higher levels. All of the content in the lesson is provided by the learners, so it should be more meaningful and memorable for them.

The lesson is available as a pdf file to download here: teflgeek – A lesson on linkers

If it’s not entirely suitable for your class, there are additional materials available on the web which might help you to adapt either the language focus or to extend the lesson with further activities. Resources that I came across that might be relevant include:

Scott Thornbury has an article in the methodology section of onestopenglish on Coherence and Cohesion and the importance of linkers.
ESL About has a reference guide to sentence connectors with additional links slightly down the page to linkers for specific purposes (cause and effect, comparison, contrast etc) that might be a good starting point for a lesson, but doesn’t include any activities or tasks to use with them.
The British Council teaching english site mentions ”Writing Consequences“, though you would need an input stage that actually focused on the target linkers.
Cambridge ESOL have resources on cohesive devices for FCE, CAE, BEC H & BEC V as well as a task on linking devices for PET and one on textual cohesion for CPE.
ESL Printables has worksheets like this one on linkers, though it requires registration to download.

As always, any feedback, comments, criticisms and queries are also welcome!

Online Teaching Tool: Kubbu

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 10:40:06 GMT

This website has the potential to be an invaluable online teaching tool and is worth checking out!

I only came across this the other day, but they’ve been around for a while and further research reveals that Larry Ferlazzo mentions this site in a post from 2009!

Kubbu offers a “free account” to teachers who register, which allows you to create student profiles for up to 30 learners and limits you to creating 15 resources. I’m not sure if you can then delete old resources / student profiles and create new ones.

Here’s the list of things that Kubbu say you can do with their site:

Match – extended form of a classic matching excercise. It is an ideal tool for language practice. Matching helps assimilate new words, idioms, meanings, collocations, synonyms, etc.
Divide – used when some notions, terms, concepts or definitions must be classified into categories or groups.
Slider – a type of a dynamic quiz. It contains three types of activities, classic single and multiple choice questions with four answers, as well as a unique “climb up” quiz which leaves no place for mistakes.
Composer – a tool for teachers who want to introduce their own concept of a quiz. With Composer you can create quizzes with single and multiple choice questions, true/false questions, fill-in or short answer questions. Pictures as well as sound files can be used to make your quizzes fully multimedia and interactive.
Crossword – with a crossword generator you can create crosswords using your own list of words.

It also allows you to create / print paper versions of your tasks, so that theoretically you could give them the task on paper in class and ask them to complete it online for homework.

There is also a tracking feature that allows you to monitor learner achievement, how they did, and to track that over time, thus allowing you to track progress.

All in all, well worth a visit!