Flipgrid as a student involvement tool

Flipgrid is a relatively new tool which has been created for educational purposes and its essence can be described in one sentence - the teacher asks a question and students post their video/audio answers online.

The idea of the tool is very simple, however, it represents a great up-to-date method of student involvement. Not only does it require the students to use technologies (webcam, microphone) for posting their responses but also it eliminates the need for paper worksheets and classroom time.


Setting up the site for the students is very easy. The teacher creates an account and makes the first room (grid) for posting the questions.

After the grid has been created, the teacher writes a question for the students to answer. In the example, I have written 3 questions for my students.

What the students see when they go to the link provided by the teacher looks like this.

Now the students have to click on the question and record their answer. A cool thing about the tool is that the camera takes a snapshot of the student's face and it appears next to the student's answer.

My students do not know yet what has been prepared for them. Tomorrow I am going to invite them to record and post their answers. If you are interested, I can write a follow-up to this post. Mention it in the comments below.

Hollywood is dead or is it?

This is my contribution to the 33rd ELT Blog Carnival titled Songs in ELT Classroom.

I made this worksheet quite a while ago and had forgotten about it until I read the theme of the current blog carnival. I thought it would be a good opportunity for my worksheet to have a second life.

This is one of my favourite Michael Bublé's songs Hollywood. The great Canadian singer himself has described the song as "being about his "tongue-in-cheek statement on the culture of celebrity". Notice his impersonation of Justin Bieber, it is amazing!




You may download the worksheet below with the traditional task - while listening, students have to write the missing words which they hear or insert the given verbs or nouns. The pictures serve as prompts.
The song lyrics are included in the worksheet, as well as the link to the video on YouTube. The second page need not be given to the students.

After listening, you may discuss with your students the idea of the song and ask the students if / how they understood the phrases "Hollywood is dead", "you sold yourself for this...", "love what is true...". Discuss the notion of celebrity culture, its illusions and false values. Ask why Hollywood represents a magic place where all dreams come true and if they always become reality.

Some ideas from the OUP conference

Today I attended ELT conference Motivating and Inspiring Teenage Classroom organised by the Oxford University Press and Dace Miska as its representative in Latvia, and the British Council Latvia. The speakers were brilliant Ben Wetz (OUP author), Martyn Clarke (OUP teacher trainer) and Joanna Gore (BC Barcelona).

Below I have listed a few ideas I jotted down while listening to the speakers (and I regret I did not write down more). The activities can be used in any lesson and they should work with all teenagers. Even though I knew some of the activities before, I realised this blog is a perfect place where to save and keep them because so often notes get lost and good ideas are forgotten. This post is basically a reminder to myself and anyone else who happens to read this.


1. Listen and react.
Revision of vocabulary. The teacher prepares a list of words and reads them one by one. Students have to touch their mouth if the word is food, pat their heads if the word is furniture, mime the action if the word is a verb, cough politely if the word is an adjective. The teacher can pick the word categories depending on the lesson theme. Fun is guaranteed!


2. Sentence drills.
The teacher prepares and reads aloud sentences with various language structures taught at the lesson. Students repeat the sentence if it is true about themselves but keep quiet if not, e.g. I love onions, I ride a bike, I am happy, I am scared of snakes, I enjoy skating etc.
The sentences can contain various verb tenses. A hilarious example by Ben Wetz:

Teacher: I've been to the zoo. (Students repeat it.)
Teacher: They've asked me to stay. (Laughter in any case, repeat or not repeat.)


3. Memory test.
Oldie but goodie. The teacher writes the words (taught at the lesson or before) on the board and wipes them away one by one asking the students to name the missing word. This activity can be easily done onscreen (using, for example, PowerPoint) or on the interactive whiteboard.
For creating this type of activities digitally, possibly the best online tool is Textivate.


4. Revision with songs.
Oldie but goodie. Students listen to the song, e.g. Why does it always rain on me? by Travis. They identify present simple, present continuous, present perfect, past simple verb forms, either by listening or by reading the lyrics.


5. Chinese whispers - a variation.
The class is divided into 2 teams. The teacher gives a slip of paper with a phrase or a sentence to the first student in each team. This student translates the sentence into his mother tongue and whispers it to the next student. The student translates the sentence back to English and whispers it to the student behind who in turn translates it to his mother tongue again, and so it goes on until the final sentence is said aloud. Then the first and the final sentences are compared and the differences are analysed.


6. Nonsense words by Martyn Clarke.
The teacher writes the sentence on the board and asks the students what they think the underlined word means.

I accidentally dropped the plunket on the floor, and it broke. The drapse ran everywhere.

Students try to guess what the nonsense words could mean, e.g. glass, vase, bowl, water, juice etc. The teacher can make a longer story including some nonsense words to make the students think about the importance of context.
 

7.  30 second speaking.
The students choose a letter of the alphabet. They are asked to name some words beginning with this letter. The teacher writes the words on the board. Then a student is invited to pick one word and speak about it for 30 seconds. Another student picks a different word and does the same.


8. Assessment of speaking by Joanna Gore.
The teacher shows the assessment chart to the students and explains how their speaking is going to be evaluated at the lesson.
0 points - the students uses only his mother tongue.
1-2 points - the students uses his mother tongue but also says a few words in English.
3-4 points - the student says some phrases in English.
5-6 points - the student says some sentences in English, no mother tongue.
7-8 points - the student communicates ideas in simple sentences.
9-10 points - the student communicates coherent ideas in longer, well-structured sentences.

Using pictures in language classes

Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words, a phrase attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte although other sources say it has originated in ancient China. Be as it may, teachers use pictures in the classroom very often and with good reason. 

Pictures stimulate thinking, encourage creativity, boost learners' confidence, appeal to visual students.

Take for instance pictures of babies. The internet abounds in them, and you can find numerous images having their own story behind. Here I made a collage of extremely eloquent baby pictures. These images may be used for speaking about human emotions. Students would find it easier to identify themselves with a baby rather than an adult, recognizing familiar emotions easily.
Students can write a caption for each picture or they can simply name emotions/ feelings displayed by a baby in each picture.

Another win-win object in pictures perfect for speaking practice is an animal. As popular as the pictures of babies, and possibly even more favoured, are images of different animals caught in various situations. Animal "faces" are no less expressive than human faces. 

Students can devise a story based on the moment caught in the picture, or they can combine several pictures to use in one story. They can write an allegory where animals represent humans. Again, the pictures are fantastic for describing emotions, feelings, attitude.

 More resources:

Excellent ideas and tips on The eltpics ideas site for teachers Take a photo and... 
Picture This: 5 Unique Ways to Practice Grammar Using Pictures 
Picture Projects for Visual Learners
On Twitter follow the hashtag #eltpics.

#ELTBITES Challenge

Richard Gresswell, the @inglishteacher, has invited the teachers to share their bite-size lesson activities. The activity should be done with minimal resources, just some paper and a pen. Great idea and useful at that!

Here is mine, adaptable to any age.

Spy Adam!

The aim of the activity – to practise describing someone’s daily activities.

1. Divide the students into 3 groups.  Try to put an equal number of students in each group.

Each student in the group has to describe Adam’s (pick whatever name you prefer) activities for a certain period of the day. Tell the first group the time – from 6am till midday, the second group – from midday till 6pm, the 3rd group – from 6pm till midnight. If you wish to include the night, stretch the period.

2. At the beginning of the lesson read an introductory paragraph about Adam. Give Adam’s background, mention some peculiar features, e.g. Adam is afraid of the dark, he is scared of bees, he hates hamsters, he plays the flute, he knows Swahili, etc. Students have to include this feature in their stories. Encourage them to make up funny situations and strange incidents.

3. Remix groups - pick one student from each group and put them together in new groups of three. Students read their stories to the other group members and they decide if they have got a realistic story.

4. At the end of the lesson, the teacher decides which story has been the most coherent or captivating.

Looking forward to new ideas from other teachers and Richard himself.

Compare and contrast: #photoblog challenge

Spot 12 differences in pictures No.1 and No.2 - a task for primary level but anyone can try :-)

Inspired by my PLN.

Picture No.1

Picture No.2

The question: What was being built in pictures No.1 and No.2?
The answer is here:

Picture No.3

Using advertisements to develop speaking skills

An easy way to hold students' attention and develop their speaking skills is the use of advertisements.

Hide the text or other objects which reveal the identity of the product advertised in the picture. Display the ad on the whiteboard / screen and ask your students to take a look at it. Give them a few minutes to get an overall impression and then start asking your questions to provoke a discussion.





What do you see in the picture? Where does the action take place?
Who are the people involved in the situation?
What exactly each of them is doing? Why?
What do you think is advertised in the picture?

You may ask the students to provide details seen in the picture to review the vocabulary. Elicit shelves, shoes, shoe boxes, chair (sofa?), laptop, red, blue, purple, orange, yellow, black, sit, stand, watch, try on, fit, choose, observe, interested, eager, bored, excited etc.

When you have run out of ideas, show the advertisement and let those who guessed the product cheer.

Here is another pair of pictures of an ad which I have loved for years and consider brilliant. See if anyone can guess the product. I bet the image will lead them astray!
(click to zoom)

        

State exams - where have we teachers failed our students?

Students in Latvia are taking the school leaving exams in June and I have been marking the student speaking exam recorded on CDs (which is the procedure for the centralized state exams here). I have a stack of CDs with recorded answers of anonymous students from different parts of Latvia whose speaking skill I have to evaluate.


Task 1 is Interview - the student has to answer the questions on a certain topic read by the teacher.
Task 2 is Role Play - the student has to interact with the interviewer following the script on the exam paper.
Task 3 is Monologue - the student has to give a summary of an extract from an article and his own opinion about the theme.

It might be a coincidence that the students whose exams I have been marking come from the "weak" schools where the majority of learners have poor knowledge and learning skills in general. However, considering the hundreds of answers I have heard, the conclusion is depressing.

Student answers to the questions conspicuously bring out our failure to give them understanding and knowledge of the issues that are part of our daily life and the society we live in. The questions where many students lack the scarcest knowledge all center round technologies, social networks, online activities.

We teach what we know ourselves. We cannot teach what we do not know.

Can teachers discuss social networking with their students if they have not made the acquaintance of the virtual world and learned about the trends in online environment? Our students are there, they just do not know everything has a name and everything has a purpose.
Technologies can be explained, taught and used. If you tell your students that what they do online every day for hours is social networking, they will no doubt understand it and probably remember because they learn easily what they like.


There is a great website Social Networking dealing with the topics a teacher should know about social networks, addiction to online sites, cyber-bullying etc. It gives a down-to-earth explanation about what is social networking. Teachers can turn the text into a reading or discussion task and they won't need more than a couple of lessons before their students have learned the basics of the subject.
More sites have been given in the handout.

I have made a table with a few exam questions and typical student answers which fall short of understanding of the topic. There are some suggestions for the teachers about how to give their students some knowledge about social networking and online activities. 

Download the document here.

Help your students with pronunciation

Very often students who are learning English as a foreign language need help with pronunciation. Those who have a perfect memory and natural language acquisition gift, may remember the sounding of a word from the teacher or a recording.
However, those who have to hear the pronunciation many times before they remember it, need additional help.





The best assistant in helping students with pronunciation of the words is the website howjsay which is an indispensable resource for checking the sounding of English. There are currently 145,328 entries in the dictionary. It also offers apps for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Another useful site is Forvo which contains 969,698 words and 1,017,619 pronunciations in 268 languages. At present it has 77,234 recorded English words. Many words are recorded by more than one speaker.

A fantastic help for checking the pronunciation of names is the website HearNames which has a long list of  names of different nationalities and regions. I tested it with the Irish name Siobhan which I find incredibly tricky, and of course the site had it! I had to hear it six times to make sure I wouldn't forget it.


Teachers can make use of the marvellous phonemic chart published on the Teaching English website. The students can hear sounds by clicking on the symbols. Perfect at the beginners stage!

If you need to transcribe a short passage, here is the site which will do it for you PhoTransEdit. You only have to type or paste the text in the box and click Transcribe. You can even choose between the British or American variant of the pronunciation.
I am quoting the website: "Text2Phonetics is a PhoTransEdit Online application that transcribes small English texts into broad phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)."


Finally, I'd like to mention two great sites which offer IPA phonetic symbols for writing the pronunciation online - Type IPA phonetic symbols and Script Typewriter 1.3. Use them when you need to show the pronunciation of a word on the screen or teach IPA symbols.

Homework sent in as an audio file

I have a group of very bright students who love trying out new things. This time it was homework recorded online and sent in for me to evaluate.

For recording the speech, I chose the simplest tool on the web - Vocaroo. It is seldom mentioned when different audio recording programs are discussed but it is absolutely perfect for beginners or young students. There are no buttons, no frills, no nothing, just a box which you click to record. And yes, the only thing you need is a mike. The tool does everything itself and at the end you just send the file to an e-mail address. (In this case, students sent their files to me.) The file can also be downloaded and it can be embedded which I am going to do here. Awesome!

For this homework my 16-year-old students had to write and record the story My first date because we are studying the theme Relationships. They were allowed to tell the truth or invent the story, and here is one of the stories told by a boy who is an avid gamer.


Updated on December 1, 2011. Just learned that Vocaroo does not keep the recorded files for long (my guess is half a year), this and many other files recorded by my students have been removed. I was not smart enough to download them or save in some other way. Disappointed.........