Category Archives: In the Computer Room

Lesson Plan : Personality adjectives

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

Step 1. Look at the mosaic below with the faces of some well-known celebrities and, bearing in mind what you know about them, write a description based on their personalities. Make sure you use personality adjectives. Do not mention the name of the celebrity you are describing as your classmates aim will be to find out who you are describing. Please, don’t be too flattering or too hard on people. Remember that “not all that glitters is  gold”.

Important: the description should be written in the way of a comment to this post. How to do it? at the end of the post, click No Comments (or 9 Comments  if hopefully I have already published nine comments), leave the comments in the right field, repeat the required anti-spam word and click Submit Comment.

Step 2. Let’s have some fun. How would you fancy converting text to music? This funny programme allows you to type any words and it sings them back to you. Try typing some personality adjectives and listen to them sung by different people. The site is called Text to sing.

Step 3. Exercises. Do the following online exercises .

Exercise 1 Exercise 2

Step 4: Writing. How do you see yourself and how others see you? This task, as you can imagine, requires mature students as it involves writing and reading about you. First, students  find a classmate they know pretty well. Secondly, students write about their own personality and then, about their friend’s personality. Encourage students to explain and exemplify why they have chosen a certain adjective to describe them and also to describe a negative trait in their personalities as well as in their friend’s. Students pair themselves and compare what they have written.

Step 5. Singing Hand in my pocket by Alanis Morisette

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!

Saying my goodbyes or see you laters

Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Resources, Writing skill, , , ,

And there we are again! The school year has finished and we are again saying our goodbyes . This year has been very special for me , professionally speaking. I don’t know whether I’ll be given the chance to ever work here again but it’ been really nice and this is my big thank you to everybody who’s made this year a really pleasant experience. I’ll be leaving for Malta  in a week’s time to do a course to Spice Up my Teaching so this blog is going on holidays until September. Hope to virtually see you then.

GoAnimate.com: Saying my goodbyes by cristina.cabal

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!

Spelling Revision with Spelling City

Audio, Create your own stuff, Games, In the Computer Room, Vocabulary, , , ,

We are almost on holidays and students are beginning to feel the heavy burden of passing all their exams. It’s never too late to start studying, is it?

English spelling is difficult. There is no point in pretending otherwise but… nevertheless, students have to learn to spell so let’s choose a motivating activity to speed up their learning.
I plan to take my students to the computers room and use the excellent website Vocabulary and Spelling City.com.

Aim: to revise the spelling of words and practise their pronunciation.

Procedure:
♥Assign a computer to every student (or alternatively to every two students)
♥Tell them they are going to help their classmates revise the spelling of some of the words studied in this course. Decide on the numbers of words you want to revise and ask students to go to the website Vocabulary and Spelling City.com
♥Students type the words in the spaces provided and click on the button Spelling Test. .See pictures below.
♥Ask students to stand up and choose a different computer. Students click on Say It and Sentence to guess the hidden word and type it. Click Check me to see your score and then there is the possibility of clicking on the button Teach me where the word will be spelled.
♥You can ask them to repeat the procedure and revise new words. They will surely love it.

If you want to read a bit more about English Spelling, click here

You might also want to read:

Creating posters for the classroom with Juxio

Funny Stuff, In the Computer Room, Slides,

There it is! I don’t think you need any further explanation for what Juxio is. I can only add that it is great fun and that actions speak louder than words. Have a look at these two posters I’ve made for my classrooms and then just explore the website. I only hope my students , after reading this post, will be thrilled  about decorating the walls of the classroom with their own posters (in English, of course)