EdCanvas - http://www.edcanvas.com -  Create an interactive online lesson with this brilliant site. Upload and curate all the resources for a lesson in one place and access them with one click. The site works with Office files, PDFs, flash files, small videos, images and internet links and even connects to Google Drive and Dropbox. Then simply ...

This is a good an excuse as any to listen to a good song, and, at the same time, be reminded of the suffering the great nation had to endure earlier this year. Why not use this video as a springboard for a class discussion on natural disasters, for example? You might like to read this post on activities using songs.

I recently responded to a blog challenge by a video recording of myself - you can see it by clicking here. Most EFL teachers are probably aware of the activity where students are asked to say some things about themselves, and the others are to guess if they're true or false. I suggested taking this a step further and have the students bring video ...

I've always loved this song (written by Jagger/Richards, and released on the Stones' Let It Bleed album towards the end of 1969), and, as you probably already know, I'm very fond of Playing for Change, too. They are good enough reasons for me to link it here in this blog.But how can we use it in our lessons, you might ask. Well, think about it and ...

In January 2011, I posted a video showing how they were building a music school in  Kirina, Mali, from scratch. The school opened its doors in October 2010, and Playing for Change takes us into the school to see what teachers and the kids do... Related posts: Building a school from the ground up

Ted Talks has a speaker with a difference - he isn't going to speak! Don't worry - it isn't a silent video, lol. Jackson Browne is one of my favourite singer-songwriters, and he has written many powerful songs in his long career, this one here being no exception. What I would like you to do first is to watch and listen to the song, and try to ...

In We Are The Champions, I wrote about several ideas you could do with songs in the classroom, so if you'd missed it, you ought to take a look now. Warm-up Play the video, freeze it when Paul McCartney can be seen. Ask if anyone knows him, what they know: the group he belonged to, the instrument he plays, the period the song was written, ...

''The next thing we knew the music started playing, children gathered for their own personal concert, and we all transcended to a place with no time, no fear, and no difference between us.'' And so, we watched, mesmerised by Mali's Tinariwen's desert blues, reminiscent of the late great Ali Farka Touré. Boy, do I love this music. These are the ...

A lot of teachers who use songs for ELT restrict themselves to a gap-fill activity plus a singalong, but there are, however, many other activities you could do besides those, some of which I've set out below, and I also created a quiz incorporating some of them. Due to copyright problems, I'm not allowed to embed the video here, but click on the ...

Here's a simple beautiful song by the equally beautiful Norah Jones.  Look at the word cloud - all the lyrics are there - and see if you can put the words in the order in which Norah sings. You can click on the image to see a larger version. As you probably already know, we use the conditional sentence type 2 to talk about conditions that, ...