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!!
This is good fun… and learn!!
Bombay TV is a nice and catchy website where we can add text to short Bollywood clips… amazing to foster oral and written skills, as well as vocabulary and accuracy.
Choose a clip containing different scenes, with typical bollywood actors and stories… traditional, religious, modern…
Add text into the clip: You can either write it down, record your voice or use the text to speech tool. All three ways incorporate your message into the clip, in text or soundtrack.
Have your students watch the clips, choose the most suitable one and then ask them to add a short story which matches the pictures… easy and engaging!
You can embed the clip or send it to others… share your work!
If you or your students are not Bollywood fans… try B Movie TV… the same interface, but related to those old movies from the 50’s… good fun as well!
Fodey is a simple but catchy webpage that lets you and your students create newspaper clips very easily. Add a made up newspaper, a title for the article, a date… and write. have fun and imagine incredible news. A very good resource to practice vocabulary and writing skills… easy peasy!!
Time for an online videogame. Destination Death takes students into a scary story where they are supposed to fight some strange aliens who have taken up the city airport.
It is a game where objects must be used on other objects and the main character must ask the appropriate questions to the rest of the characters in order to save her sister from the fiendish aliens. It was created by the BBC for English speakers who learnt Spanish, French and German (Check these versions here).
A good resource for ESO 3-4 and Batxillerat students… try to have them work in groups and take decissions together… and talk about these decissions with the whole class… oral skills can be thus reinforced with a catchy tool!
Time for the youngest! Domo animate is a very beautiful site where kids can create their own animated stories, a bit like ZimmerTwins.
A very intuitive interface lets you choose characters, background, messages, music and effects. just click and place the item in the scene.
Once the item/character is in the scene, it can acquire movement, expression, it can perform actions… just click and choose!
Keep adding scenes until the story is finished, and then publish it!
It’s really easy… make sure kids think of the story before they start editing, once they are familiar with the application. You can embed it in your website, your blog, or you can email it to people… parents?
Enjoy it!!
People from Amanita Design have produced a beautiful online videogame for the BBC educational website: Questionaut
Travel with a friendly voyager in pursuit of his friend’s windswept hat, and answer multiple questions from different fields in a dream-like world, flying with your balloon and winning oxygen by answering correctly. There’s fun and learning, and it’s in English! Worth a visit!
This is a nice way to introduce internet guided chat in the classroom.
Thanks to amycapdet, author of the ELT blog Cloudy Seaside Mood, who has showed us this interesting website.
Poptropica is a website where young people can create a very simple character which can be customized with a few details.
This character is taken to Poptropica, a world with different continents where he/she will be able to carry out different activities: Chatting with friends in a very guided way (the content of what is said comes out of a list offered to the player, so everything is under control as players can choose out of a limited list of possible sentences).
As players travel to the different parts of Poptropica, they can play different games, and what is most important, pay attention to what people in Poptropica say to them, as they must gather information and objects in order to succeed in carrying out different missions across that world. Once all activities are carried out, theer’s nothing to be done. That will avoid having students constantly hooked on the game.
A nice way to introduce Primària students to the world of adventure games and quests, simple, catchy and always under your control (as long as they play in the school, of course)
This a really nice game! It’s not a simple click and go thing, you must think as a responsible manager, a responsible mayor who wants to run a clean city with happy citizens. The main focus is the wise use of energy, but it appears together with other aspects that create an extremely catchy educational game. Take some time to learn the rules, and you’ll be able to get the most of the game with your students next school year!
Have your students glued to their chairs in front of the screens as they practise their typing skills and subsequently learn a lot of vocabulary. Typeracer is a free Internet application where students test their typing speed and challenge their colleagues to see who’s the fastest in the group. It’s online, it’s easy and catchy. Have a look!
