For students who only need simple texts, with brief (sometimes scarce) information and simple language, here’s a useful Wikipedia version: Simple English Wikipedia
The very same interface as an ordinary Wikipedia, but with simpler language. Short articles which can be easily read by ESO students. Not much to comment, just browse through the site. Maybe a good idea would be to ask students to enrich articles with more complex sentences or descriptions.
Geocube is a very interesting website for those who want to use English in Social Science secondary lessons or those who want to introduce concepts of Social Science in their English lessons (CLIL).
A cube you can turn with the mouse shows 6 different aspects concerning our world: Living Together, The Fascinating World, Exploring Our World, Shrinking Planet, Earth from all Angles and Useful Geographies. By clicking one of the sides, 9 different issues related to the title of the “side” appear. When you choose one of these issues, a screen appears with information related to the topic, together with illustrating images and videos.
A very engaging layout entices you quickly. The information is concise and clear. Very useful when you work with your students in cross-curricular projects… ideal for PDI’s!
Sit down and relax… this webpage is a gift for all English teachers!
Tales of 20th Century London puts right in front of you 100 years of London history. You can travel back to four different periods of 20th century London and learn how young people lived.
First of all, once you have selected the period you want to travel to, you will learn about life, leisure, food, clothes and history.
You will experience what life was like…
and questions will be asked where you will have to make choices related to that kind of life in thet period.
Learn about life in the period of WWI and WWII, life in the 50′s and the crazy 60′s and finally life in the last 20 years of the century.
Another nice activity you can do with students: Have a look at some districts in London… you will be shown a picture of that area in the past… go to the WWW and find a picture of that same area now, and post it!! Good for describing and comparing.
A very catchy website, colourful and easy to follow. Be sure your students will love it!
Do you want to catch your students’ interest as reporters? Have them shoot their own videos with their news and their experiences and upload them into this nice website, What’s Your News.
Some friendly ants will welcome you. You can register really easily, customize your ant-avatar and watch and upload videos, pictures, audios and texts, and also download freebies.
Your students can even upload videos where they tell how to do things, and post documents telling how to do that activity in class.
Think! is an interesting website run by the British government offering various engaging activities for teens concerning road education: You can play a game showing you are smart enough to manage time and attitude to reach a place safely. Investigate an accident and find out what shouldn’t have been done but was… Worth having a look, believe me!
Have a look at this site… CREA is a section of edu365.cat. It offers reference of different collaborative and innovative tools, most of which can be successfully used in our English classrooms.
I’ll be posting articles about these so called 2.0 tools. Let’s create cartoons, movies, stories, posters, polls… let’s create real time collaborative writing, timelines, and many other things… let’s make things catchier in our lessons!
If you think we must use our classrooms to spread the idea of a different approach towards our environment, have a look at this site
The Story of Stuff is basically a 20-minute videoclip where Annie Leonard shows how we are deteriorating our planet. Clear animations and a very good narrative for a cross-curricular approach. The only drawback is the absence of transcript. It shows the process of overuse of our natural resources, their transformation into products and their latter change into pure rubbish which increasingly fills our planet. Specially adequate for advanced/Batxillerat students.
This social NING platform is devoted to the dissemination of ideas related to the use of videogames in education. teachers can talk about their experiences and comment on others’
A good number of ELT teachers use videogames in their classrooms. You only need to register for free and sign in.
Let’s forget this is an ELT blog for a while. This video from Matt Harding shows us the plain truth: The world is full of good people who are always ready to start dancing when they hear the simple beating of a rythm. Dance is in our souls, and when we take out our inner child and start moving, jumping and swinging to the rythm of music, we take the best of ourselves. This is just a tribute from a simple language teacher, to all those teachers of the most important language across boundaries: Dance
Visit Matt’s webpage Where the hell is Matt? This website offers different possibilities for us teachers. It is worth reading the section “About Matt” after you have watched the video with your students. It tells Matt’s story… really interesting, and easy to read. In the section “Journal”, a blog shows different articles concerning Matt’s project… his travels, his meetings…
Use this website to talk about values, about friendship, peace, music, dance, life… I knew we would end up saying we could use it in our lessons!
Watch this video if you believe lessons are a place to innovate, create, produce, share, feel, learn and, of course, teach. I wish everyone agreed with the terms Ken Robinson deals with. Are we really all made of the same pattern? Should people gifted for dance be trained to be a linguist? Should natural born mathematicians be pressed with learning biochemistry or latin? …well, they all should learn English anyway
