Category Archives: Speaking

Two Timesavers: BusyTeachers.org and ISL Collective.com

Audio, Grammar, Speaking, Vocabulary, Writing skill

Being a full time teacher doesn’t mean that I’m not also a full time mum. I am! Trust me! When I get home from a school packed with teenagers I go home to more teenagers, my own children. They take up most of my free time. I help them with their homework, cheer them up when they have had a problem at school, cool them down when necessary, take them to their different after school activities – none of them in the same place where I live… and a long etc. Have I ever mentioned that I also try to teach them some English?
This means that I don’t enjoy as much free time as I did when I worked in the afternoons/evenings in the EOI, so I ‘ve had to look for timesavers and these are, in my opinion, the best online.

BusyTeachers.org is an amazing site offering about 6,300 worksheets divided into skills: grammar, pronunciation, listening, writing, reading, vocabulary. ..etc. . You can also find ppt presentations to illustrate what you are teaching. It’s free and you only need to register to download the files.

ISL Collective is probably my favourite because of the quality of the worksheets. Teachers from all around the globe contribute by uploading their own home-made materials. It is 100% free and you only need to register. Teachers and students of German, French , Portuguese , Russian and Spanish will also find lots of worksheets.

Give them a go and let me know if you know any other great timesavers!

Students in the limelight

Create your own stuff, freeware, Slides, Speaking, Students' Corner

About two weeks ago I wrote a post about an amazing site called Brainshark ( see post here) and today I want to show you the first thing I’ve done with my elementary students.

In the first video , Karen and Alice– from 1st year -perform a role-play called “At the Sports Centre” and in the second one Laura and Alba– from the 2nd year – do likewise with a role-play that I called ” At the grocery”.Thank you ,girls! It was funny, wasn’t it?

Mybrainshark

Create your own stuff, Slides, Speaking

Today I want to show you a tool which has a lot of potential in the classroom. It’s called Mybrainshark and it offer lots of possibilities .

Mybrainshark allows you to:

♥Add voice to a PowerPoint. Upload your Power point presentation and add audio to every slide by using a microphone. You can also add background music.

♥Upload a document and add audio. It might be very useful when you want to explain a grammar point or when you want your students to improve pronunciation.

♥Upload a video and add your voice to it or/and add background music.

♥Make your own photo album and comment on it or add music.

♥Make your own podcast.

Besides, it’s free -you only need to register – and it’s easily shared or embedded in a website or blog.

I’m planning to immediately use it with two levels.
♥Elementary levels. Record students while doing a role-play. I’m going to use the Photo album option and take pictures of them.
♥Intermediate levels. Students narrate their own speeches illustrating them with photos. They can either use the Power Point option or the Photo album option.

Give it a go and if you have any ideas about how to use it the classroom, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

Lesson Plan: Retelling an article using Word Clouds

Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Speaking, , , ,

This is a lesson I did with my upper-intermediate students in the computer room and I thought it might be useful to some teachers. The main idea is to retell a text you have previously worked with in class. This is important as  otherwise the task of retelling might be a bit  difficult for weaker students. This is how I did it.

♣ First, for homework, I asked students to reread the text several times .

♣ Then, in the computer room, I asked students to form groups of 3 or 4  and divided the text according to the number of students in each group .

♣ Now, individually and  using the website Word it Out, which is a word cloud generator, I asked them to select the key words in their texts, type them in Word It Out and generate the word cloud. If two words need to be together, it is easy with this generator. Imagine “suffer from”, you only need to insert _ between the two words and they’ll be kept together in the cloud.

♣ Students in groups again, retell the story with the help of the generated  word clouds.

I especially liked this exercise as students get a lot of fun out of it and they collaborate every step of the way. Here are the word clouds generated by a group. I hope you find it useful!

Ready-made lessons : lessonstream.org

General, Grammar, Resources, Speaking, Vocabulary, Writing skill, , , ,

I have to admit, it’s more like a confession though, that very often I post about some sites that, I am fairly certain, are not very useful  to my students. The reason behind these posts is that by having them published and organised into categories in my blog I make sure they are always handy and never lost to me.
Today’s post is not for you, dear learners(forgive my selfishness), but for us, English teachers.
This site lessonstream.org, is a great site for ready-made lessons. I’ve been following Jamie Keddie ‘s blog   http://www.jamiekeddie.com/ for  while and knew that he was planning to create a new site with new and old- edited material. And Wow! The site is just great and very creative. I love it!
So far there are 44 ready-made lesson you can browse by Language Level, Learner Type, Time, Main Activity ( Dictation: Running Dictation, Dictogloss, Picture Dictation, Speaking, Gap-filling, Collocations, writing…), Language Aims ( adjectives, tenses, passive…)Topic ( Money, school, jokes, love, food..) and Materials