Technogogy

Clipping videos makes it much easier for us to create activities and tasks that focus on specific areas of the video clip without having to watch the whole thing.

Learning and enjoying songs can be a great way to improve your listening, vocabulary and pronunciation. In this activity we are going to use two websites to help you find, listen to and memorize the words of a song.
First you'll use YouLyrics to find the words and a video of the song, then you will use MemorizeNow to help you learn and remember the words.

I created a number of tasks for teachers which I hope will help develop their ability to use technology and to evaluate and create materials using web based tools. I've decide now to share those tasks so anyone who wants to use them to train other teachers or to develop their own skills can take advantage of and make good use of them.

The wonderful thing about the video is that it shows you the inside of a city from the perspective of two people who live there. So in this task you will watch the video and then see how you can make your own tribute to the place you live.

In today's task you are going to answer questions about yourself and in doing this create your autobiography. You are going to do this using a website called Biographicon which is a site that collects the biographies of ordinary people like you and me.

Many great works of literature have been translated into other languages, but there is nothing quite as good as reading a book in the original language. In today's activity you are going to study a classic of English literature; 'The Old Man and The Sea' by Ernest Hemingway.

Using films and movies in class is a great way to encourage students to learn more language, so if you use them a lot then this site will be handy for you.

Learning English from songs lyrics and music is a great way to study. In today's activity you are going to be able to watch and enjoy some simple 'stop motion' animated music videos and then find out how to create your own.

Most students find learning phrasal verbs a real challenge. They can be confusing and complex, but today's activity looks at a way that you can make learning them a little more fun.

This activity combines two different website Phrases.net and TransL8it to help you learn and test yourself on new phrasal verbs.

There are lots of different widegts out there that you can plug into your blog, but my favourite by far has to be the Wibiya tool bar. I have it in all of my blogs now (except at present this one) and I am so impressed. Wibiya has enables me to get rid of half a dozen other quite baisc but necessary widgets that were cluttering up my side bar and slowing down my site and has combined their functinality and some other very useful functions into one really useful tool bar widget that you can see along the bottom of my blogs. (See Quick Shout)

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. Here's a text that I quickly copied in from an article about J. K. Rowling.

My first encounter with interactive whiteboards (IWBs) was almost 7 years ago. At the time I was working for the British Council in Morocco and was part of a pilot group set up to evaluate them. I was one of four trainers based in different countries asked to do this and I set up a focus group of teachers working at the British Council in Morocco to see how they could be introduced into the ELT classroom.

As I said, I don't have a particular love for the IWB I simply accept them as part of the rapidly changing landscape in which we work these days, and after all, from my experience having one is just better than not having one, so here are my reasons why.