Blog & Teach

Posting will become scarce in the following weeks… summetime has come!
Here’s my last post, just to show you that we still must work really hard if we want this country of ours to show some reasonable level in the use of English… and still harder if we want it to show some style and good taste!!
Bon estiu!!

A gift for those of us who praise the gift of language… of languages… of languages in the world, our link to our past and our culture’s life vest!

Dipity is a very good timeline creator if you want your students to work with time, tenses or describing events or someone’s life. Catchy interface that allows you to create your own timelines and add images, video, audio and Internet links.
The working area is really user-friendly, and element integration is really easy. We can later share it through our usual social network.

The Guardian have produced an interactive timeline showing the most relevant milestones which have arisen in the Middle East uprisings. A good tool to work time in English, and, of course, to foster oral skills… students can describe the “path” followed by events in these countries where people have risen against dictatorships in the last months.

You can navigate through time and see the different relevant events by country and category: People’s protests, political moves, regime changes and international responses.
Use it in class, or pass it to social science teachers who want to use English in their lessons.

The British Council has produced a very good video which helps people understand the proper terms when referring to the UK, Great Britain, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The website offers some nice follow-up activities to make sure pupils understand the concepts of nation and state within the UK.

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.

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!

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.

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

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

Still, there’s room for ELT, as usual!

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