Category Archives: Resources

ELLA: English Language Lab Asturias

Audio, In the Computer Room, Listening, Resources, Speaking, Vocabulary, Writing, , , , ,

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to recommend you this wonderful site , but …better late than never!
This site has been created and is maintained by three colleagues from three different EEOOIII . On their own they have been awarded different prizes and together they have created this wonderful site. My admiration and thanks to you three: María (from EOI Oviedo), Carmen (from EOI Mieres) and Javier (from EOI Luarca).

Now , for you my dearest students and because I can guess that right now you must be frantic (exam is on Monday) looking for new listening comprehensions to do, I am going to link you straightaway to the listening section of ELLA. The link will lead you to a page with all the listenings , find the ones for you level…. ADVANCED.
http://web.educastur.princast.es/proyectos/ella/?cat=17
If you like the site , don’t forget to send them a post. It is always nice to hear that all you effort has been worthwhile !

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Understanding “some” Spanish

Audio, Funny Stuff, Listening, Resources, ,

What I’m about to show you is a good example of why English, after all, should not be considered such a difficult language to understand, especially if you compare it to understanding some Spanish native speakers.
Have fun!!!

No kidding now!!If you need to improve your listening skills, why don’t you visit this site? You won’t find any comprehension questions after the audio but you might consider it interesting and useful. The site belongs to the New York Times and it’s a collection of stories of people from New York. Click on the image and it will lead you straight to their homepage.

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Playing with images: Bookr

Create your own stuff, Resources, Vocabulary

Playing? Working? Teaching?Let’s not beat about the bush and call a spade a spade …yes , I am playing , playing with images . It is my firm conviction that when you see something you remember it better. That’s why , once again, I have used the same tool I used when teaching Food and Cooking : PimPamPum . This is a version called Bookr , and as its name suggests it creates photobooks using Flikr images. The photobooks are very simple to create, you just need to type in a key word to find the images you want and then drag them onto the pages and add what you need to be taught and illustrated.
I think this a nice way to teach parts of the animals and I’ve also added some idioms containing animals that need to be studied. 

Animals by Cristina

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Subtitling Videos: a nice way to practise

Audio, Listening, Resources

So, let´s imagine that lately you ‘ve been having some problems with understanding listening comprehension and all of a sudden ,you realize it’s May and you’re taking your listening test in about a week or so. In that case, there are so many good websites I would recommend that I could keep you busy for the whole year. Today ,let me show you something that I bumped into quite by chance.
It’s a place where you can find subtitled videos and what’s more, you can even request for some videos to be subtitled too. This place is called SubPLY .
As we are learning about food and cooking I tried searching the site by writing the word “food” and I found quite some interesting videos where you can revise vocab.
Why don’t you try it and let me know what you think? Now, click on the image and it’ll link you to their website and ,from then on, you can do your own search.

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Wordle: creating “word clouds”

Create your own stuff, Resources, The English language, Vocabulary, , , ,

It is not the first time I ‘ve used this tool, but it is the first time I’ve used it to revise vocabulary. I like it because it is easy to use and also attractive and we all know that students appreciate it when you give them something different.
How does this tool help me? Wordle is a “toy” for generating “word clouds” from the text you provide.
In the past I mainly used it to decorate some posts and in class to retell a text. It is a great tool for retelling as the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

But today I’ve discovered a new use to Wordle. I needed tor revise some vocabulary. I normally do it as a competition game with strips of paper and the word to be revised written on them. But today I tried writing the words to be revised and this is the result. I’ve created two word clouds as I am going to split the class into two and let them compete against each other by giving them a maximum of two minutes to try to define the words to their team. So, I’ve printed the word clouds and used it in the OHP. Hope they like it! I had a great time too tweaking the fonts, colours and layout.

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