Back in November 2008 I published Part 1 of a series of articles intended to explore the use of WebCams in education. I have now finally got round to writing Part 2 which is a collection of 20 activities EFL ESL teachers can do with their students.
I came across these videos today while I was trawling through YouTube and was instantly struck by what great materials they would be for EFL ESL students.
Daily autonomous online learning for students of EFL and ESL. Translation can be a very useful tool in helping you to learn a language. It can make you think much more closely about the relationship of your language to the language you are learning. Translating also makes you think very carefully about the meaning of the text you need to translate and how to express it in your own language.
The complete two hour session was recorded and can be viewed online (warts and all), so if you would like to hear me talking and displaying some of these tools then you can go to: Nik Peachey on Web 2.0 in the EFL Classroom
I will be meeting up with Dennis Newson and anyone else who is interested to chat about my experiences in Second Life and what I see as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to delivering English language instruction there.
ESL Video is a great free site that enables you to create your own quizzes based on video clips from popular sharing sites like YouTube or BlipTV. You have to register and log in and then you just grab embed codes for the video you want to build you quiz around. The site is multilingual so it doesn't just have to be an English language video.
I've always found wise (and sometimes not so wise) quotes really useful, both within the classroom with students and as a way of introducing a topic when writing materials. I've used lots of different websites to find quotes over the years, but iWise is certainly about to become my new favourite as it seems to have taken wise quotes to a new level.
WordMagnets is a simple tool that allows you to paste text into a field and then click a couple of times to change the text into word tiles a little like fridge magnets that you can drag and rearrange.
QuickDiff is an interesting tool that analyses differences in two very similar texts. It was actually developed for examining programming code, but could be a really useful tool to use with students to get them to look more closely at the texts they write and notice the mistakes and corrections and differences in the text.
QuickDiff is an interesting tool that analyses differences in two very similar texts. It was actually developed for examining programming code, but could be a really useful tool to use with students to get them to look more closely at the texts they write and notice the mistakes and corrections and differences in the text.