- Spicing up my lessons!
Category Archives: freeware
Lesson Plan: Talking about Your Hometown .
This is a lesson for Elementary students.
Step 1. Reading and Listening
Mind mapping is a very important learning tool for visual learners. This mind map has been created with Exam Time, which is very easy to use and embeddable, a feature I always appreciate.
There are some steps previous to this mind mapping we wrote on the board, essentially reading and listening about this issue. Form these listenings and readings we gathered and sorted vocabulary that was, then, written on the board.
Step 2. Mind Mapping
What you see below is a nice way of displaying what was written on the board of the classroom with the help of my students.
por cristina.cabal
Step 3. Speaking
For this activity, instead of the typical photocopy with the list of questions to talk about, I have put students in groups of three or four and given each group a set of cards, which they had to place face down on the table. Students in turns pick up a card and talk for as much as they can about the given question. At this point I give my students the usual talk about how important it is now, to “show off.”
This is a snapshot of the cards. Click here if you want to print them.
Copyright Free Images to Use
Are you looking for free images to use? Then, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve put together, using Symbaloo, lots of sites that offer links to free stock images and copyright free images. In some of these sites there are some guidelines you need to follow. In most cases, photographers have retained the rights to these photos but they have allowed their use. Needless to say , you need to give credit to its creator if you use them.
Convert Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Images, Web Pages and other files to PDF and the other way round
Although I normally use just one computer to prepare my classes -the one at home,if you want to know – I find that, sometimes and for different reasons, I need to use the computers at my school so I end up unwillingly working with four different PCs; and I’m sure you know the feeling of frustration when you suspiciously start the computer only to find out that the program you need to work with, is just not there. Bugger! 
🙂
One of the programs I very often need is a PDF Converter but unfortunately, what one seems to think as essential is not so important to others…. and there you find yourself staring at the computer …trying hard not to scream in frustration.
Anyway, this is the online PDF service I use where there is no desktop tool available.
Steps:
♣Type http://www.freepdfconvert.com/
♣Select the file you want to convert
♣ Choose output format
♣ Click on Convert
♣ Once it is converted, download it
Hope it is useful!
Downloading , Cutting or Editing Audio : Everything you need is here!
Blog de Cristina is also on Facebook. Follow me! 🙂
It is the beginning of the school year and there are some tools that I need to make sure are working properly. You know how everything works on the Internet. Some sites close down, others that promised to be free are now charging you and some others are still there but they don’t seem to work anymore.
Anticipating these problems that I may encounter, I am almost sure, one of these days when I am up to my eyes with work I have searched the net for some new tools that I know are working right now and therefore won’t let me down.
♥First of all, a much needed video downloader, free and easy to use. I never know when the already weak Internet connection in my school is going to crash.
The name of this site is CatchVideo.net and the only thing you need to do is paste the url, choose the format you want -or even just download the audio- and off you go! Your video is downloaded into your computer and ready to carry with you in you Flash drive. Here’s a snapshot
♥Still working and overused at home by both me and my children to download the audio from youtube is my Listentoyoutube.com. Post here
and then there this 123.apps which is incredibly helpful when you need to cut or edit audio and the audio of a video. It offers, “online”, everything you could possibly need for free and you don’t even need to register.It offers six different audio or video related tools
♥Online Audio Cutter: It is an online application for cutting audio. It supports mp3 or other formats. If you open a video file, then the audio will be extracted. How do you cut the audio? Easy: 1.Open the file (video or audio), 2.adjust the interval and click Cut. 3.Save the track
There is also a Fade-in and Fade-out function, in case you need something a bit more sophisticated.
♥Online Audio Joiner: To join multiple audios into a single one. It supports all media formats and it can combine them, but it works better and faster with mp3 than with any other format.You can choose between the two modes of sound merger. If the “Crossfade” function is enabled, one track will gradually fade into another: the first track will gradually vanish, while the second will grow louder. This allows smooth transition when combining music tracks. Click here for more detailed information on how to merge audio
♥Online Voice Recorder: Records sound from a microphone. After the recording you can trim the sound and then download it.
♥Online Audio Converter. Converts audio into a wide range of major formats such as mp3, wav, ogg, m4a, m4r, flac… You can also convert several files at a time which will be compresses into a zip-archive to ease the download.
♥Online Audio Extractor: extracts the audio from videos and saves them as OGG, MP3, Wave or FLAC files.
To extract audio tracks from video files, just open video from your computer, select proper output format, and click the “Extract audio” button.
The application supports all major video formats (AVI, FLV, MP4, MPG, MOV, RM, 3GP, WMV, VOB and other).
♥Online Video Cutter: Once you have downloaded your video with CatchVideo.net you might need to cut the videos to remove an unwanted part. Well, this is just the tool you need. Open the application and just follow the instructions – It is fairly simple but I have to say that I have tried with a youtube video and it hasn’ t worked. Still, I think it is worth a try.
♥Online Video Converter : free tool that converts almost any media format to MP4, AVI, MPEG, FLV, 3GP. It also extracts sound from video and can correct video resolution
So, here you are! Honestly, this post is more for the sake of my memory than for any other reason. If… it can help anybody..it’s killing two birds with one stone!Keep posted!!!! 🙂