iTunes and Using Podcasts.

People are often put off looking into iTunes because they don't have an iPod, iPhone, etc, I know I was, but in the oft-quoted words of Mr Stannard:

'You don't have to have an iPod to use iTunes'! 

This is a phenomenal resource which can open up a world of listening resources, most of them free, and you can listen on any computer.  All that you need to do is to download the iTunes software onto your desktop, and it's all yours!  Probably the most useful part of all this is the podcasts that are available for authentic listening practice and for specific lessons in English (or in a wealth of other languages...).  If you're still thinking, 'What's she on about?!', a podcast is like a short (usually) radio programme that is produced on a regular basis and the majority are made non-commercially by people like you and me. Ther are also video-podcasts (or vodcasts) on the site, but we'll stick to the audio for now!

Here is a small selection of the podcasts for learning English that were on the first page I looked at -but there are literally hundreds of others. 



As you can see, there is a 'subscribe' button next to each - teh best idea is to listen to a couple of episodes and you'll soon decide whether or not this person's approach accords with your own!  If they do, you can click 'subscribe' and every time a new episode is published, your computer will pick it up and download it automatically for you - what could be easier?   They'll show up on your iTunes page (see below) and are then accessible to listen to on yor computer, or download to your iPod etc and listen to on the move.

Here's a link to Russell Stannard's step-by step video on how to get the best out of iTunes, not just podcasts, but also apps for language learning. This will tell you everything you need to know!

http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/iTunesNew/index.html



Podcasts are great for langauge learning for all sorts of reasons.  They are, of course, a great source of authentic material, both for teachers to use in class and for learners to use outside class.  There is such a huge variety of material on every subject, it would be impossible not to find something that would interest any individual.  You could challenge your learners as homework to find a podcast that they really like (maybe by telling them that they have to listen to a minimum of 4 or 5) and then post the links on a class blog, or a Wallwisher (see other posts about these) so that they can all try out each others.  Hopefully, if they find something useful/ interesting, they'll stick with it and this is an ideal way of motivating learners to continue to learn, week after week, on the long haul that is learning a language.  The only difficulty is the sheer amount of material that is available, some of which is brilliant, and some of which (of course) isn't so great.  If you search for a certain type of podcast, eg put TEFL or ESL into the search box, you'll get a list that will also show you how popular each one is, and this can help to be some kind of guide as to the quality.  At least once you've found something that you like, it's not a one off - it'll keep on coming!

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A Picture's Worth...

...a thousand words.

This lovely site that I found through Nik Peachy's 'Learning Technology Blog' is full of contributions of a photograph and a short essay to accompany it.  These are between 300 and 1000 words and are as diverse as you could imagine.  Here's one example:

They are a window into so many different lives and they are touching, funny, interesting and very personal.  They could be used for readings in class -  as short, self contained authentic readings, written in generally quite straightforward language, they are great -  but you can also get learners to read some outside of class, choose a favourite (they're quite addictive - once you start, you keep reading them!) and present theirs to the class, or to explain it a partner.  You could also print a few out and get them to match the pictures with the text.

You can't upload your own directly, they have to be submitted for consideration by the editor, and then they may be published on the site, but you could get learners to write their own 'Picture's worth' and display them in the classroom, put them on a blog or submit them to the site to see if they were accepted (or all of the above!).

Limitations?  There's no embed code, so you can't include one from the site on your own blog, which is a shame, but that's a small point.  They only other problem is that some of the stories might make you cry.....

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Nik's Daily English Activities

This blog is absolutely brilliant!  Nik Peachey has so many great ideas for using the internet, and this is a list of dozens of websites for learners to use outside the class.  It's also a great one for you as a teacher as many of these ideas can be adapted to use in class. 

Here's an example - A city love story  using a short film (9 minutes) from You Tube about Beirut.  I used this is class - opening with a discussion of places you have been that have surprised you (because they've been better or worse than expected) and then discussed people's impressions of Beirut.
I then showed them the first minute (showing what a beautiful city it is) and asked for impressions.



They then watched the next 6 minutes and noted the things that the girl and the boy like.  It's not in English, but there is really nice language in the subtitles (he likes the elasticity of cheese, for example!).  We did watch  the end of the film, but my main focus was then on the learners writing what they like about their cities or towns.  It was really inspiring!
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Animoto

This is a really nice site for creating videos of pictures or video content that you can upload from your own computer or from the internet (or from samples on the site).  You get to choose a soundtrack for it and different backgrounds and the result looks something like this:



Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.  When you've made your video, you can save it, facebook, tweet or embed it, and it's very easy to use.  You do have to register to use it, and the free version only allows you to make 30 second long videos - if you want to make longer ones, you have to sign up and pay.  Still, 30 seconds is still enough to make something worthwhile for a language class.

There are lots of potential applications for this. The video I made depicts a trip to Egypt; you could ask your learners to watch the first time to see where I went, and then a second time, ticking off vocabulary on a list of things they saw (eg sail, pyramid, camel, seagull - including some likely things that weren't there -hotel, shops, bus). Then ask them to describe the trip as if they went, or to prepare a tour operator's persuasive sales pitch for the trip.  The possibilities for this to be a catalyst for lots of language work are limited only by your imagination.  You could also include pictures of your learners or of places that are familiar to them.

My only criticism of the site is that, although it's free, they do keep asking you if you want to upgrade and this can be a lttle annoying......

Jing

This is Russell Stannard's favourite, and it really is a fantastic tool. Like some of the other great ideas on the net, it's very simple, but has loads of useful applications.  It's a screen capture tool, so you can use it to very easily take pictures and make videos of what is on your computer screen.  Whilst you are showing the screen, you can also tape your voice explaining what's going on, or (if you have the Pro version) also use a webcam to make a video of yourself.  The basic version is free, or you can download the Pro version very cheaply ($15 a year - about £10), and this gives you a few more options. When you have made a video, you can save it on your computer, or upload it to the server and have a url or an embed code to retrieve it by. There's a little yellow sun that sits on the top of your screen, so it's always there, easily accessible and it's a very simple application to learn to use.

This is a set of training videos from the Teacher Training Videos website that will show you how to use Jing.

There are loads of ways to use this tool.  For me, it's an excellent way to get a 'connected classroom' going.  You can really easily and quickly make videos that you can e-mail to your learners and motivate them to continue to study throughout the week.  Some ideas -mainly from  Russell - thanks :)

 - Send them a short video of yourself talking, explaining what the homework is this week
 - Put their homework on your screen and then talk them through the mistakes rather than using a correction code
 - Put the vocabulary from the lesson on a word document, and show it, talking them through the meanings.
 - Rather then just sending the url for a website that's useful, send a captured picture of it, with notes attached.
 - Get learners to download the free version and ask them to make their own videos - you could ask them to find an image they like on the internet (perhaps one from the Google Art Project) and describe it.  These videos can be embedded on their blogs or they can share the urls with you and with each other
 - I think that with more and more distance and blended learning teacher training, this kind of feedback will really help to bridge the distance between tutor and trainee and reduce the feeling of isolation often experienced.

Here are some more ideas from Russell.

I recently sent out my first Jing feedback on some homework that a learner had sent to me, and she was really surprised and pleased.  She wrote back:

Hey..

Wow this is kool

I didnt expect you talking to me

I did this in my email program, really quick  I am sorry... I promise the next it´ll be better

cheers

Hopefully it'll be motivating!

I really like the idea of using this tool for giving feedback to learners.  This is a link to an excellent article about this, and here's an example of a video I made on Jing showing how you can give feedback on written work.




Not many limitations with this - it takes a little while to upload a video after you've made it, and the maximum time you have is 5 minutes, but you can always make a series of more than one video if thats' a limitation. All in all, a real winner!
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Language Plants

This is a link to a blog called Language Garden, by David Warr, which has a whole collection of 'word plants' in it.  They're hard to explain, so the easiest thing is to show you a one!  Have a look at this one - how could it fail to brighten up your class?

There are lots of others, some very thought provoking, using lots of different kinds of texts.  This one is one that stirs me.....

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Martin Niemöller,
a German anti-Nazi theologian

I think that they are a really nice way to introduce a text for further work on vocabulary or structure, or for further productive work on  the same topic.  What's particularly nice for lower level adult or teenage learners is that a lot of the texts are quite profound or thought provoking, but quite accessible due to the repetitious nature of the texts.  The visual aspect may also help to add motivation, and comprehension.

Limitations?  I guess you might have to be a bit sensitive to your learners in terms of some of the content (the one above, for example, might be upsetting to some), but apart from that I think they're great for a five minute filler, or for basing a whole lesson around.  Let the garden grow!

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Web Quests

WebQuests are interactive journeys that learners can make to find specific information using the internet and then report back on it in various ways.  They bring ICT to task based learning and can be very motivating for learners.

This is a link to a ready made WebQuest in which you plan for a trip to Australia.  The introduction states:

In this Webquest your objective is to find out about the culture and lifestyle in Australia. When you go there, what differences do you find? What do you like and dislike about it? What do you miss from your own country? What would you like to bring back from Australia?

and then there are five tasks to complete.  These practise all four skills and also include a lot of helpful functional language. The first task, for example, asks learners to use certain sites to find out specific information, giving them lots of practice in reading.

But it's not all about using the net to find information - the learners are also required to do something with it! 

So, after they have found out the information, there are speaking and writing exercises, including sentence stems to help with language activation (although there would probably need to be some teacher input on the 'I wonder (whether/ if)' structures, too).

There is a wide range of material here, covering grammatical areas such as comparatives and superlatives as well as the functional language. Plenty for several lessons.  In fact, that might be my only real criticism - by the time you get to the end of it, you might well be heartily sick of the subject!

There are lots of WebQuests ready made and available on the net.  The original idea was:

'developed by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University in February, 1995 with early input from SDSU/Pacific Bell Fellow Tom March, the Educational Technology staff at San Diego Unified School District, and waves of participants each summer at the Teach the Teachers Consortium.'

and their website has loads of resources, There is also a linked site - Quest Garden which has templates to make your own WebQuests. You can register for a free trial for 30 days, or sign up and pay for a member ship, but it's only $20 for a 2 year subscription, so it won't break the bank!  Making your own might be very helful if you were, for example, teaching CLIL and had specific content that you needed to cover. Other than that and if you are teaching general English, making your own is a lot of work and  there are many good WebQuests already out there so you could use 'off-the-peg' ones!

Slide Share

This site is really interesting.  It's a huge bank of slide shows on any subject you care to imagine.  I searched for 'efl' and found this one.  There's no sound, it doesn't give you a presentation, but it's a great way of getting information on all kinds of subjects.

Teaching EFL with the Brain in mind

View more presentations from Bertha Leiva.

English Central

This site is an amazing one for listening skills, learning vocabulary and practising pronunciation.  It has a really wide range of video material at different levels, (indicated easy, medium and hard) that you can listen to and transcripts below them so that you can read along as you listen.  That in itself would be helpful, but this site goes a whole lot further!  As you watch each video, you can go back a line at a time and listen again (helpful), you can slow down the speed of the speaker (very helpful - I particularly love this feature) and you can click on the more difficult vocabulary in the transcript and it will give you a definition and a pronunciation guide (how much help do you need?!!).  Fabulous! There is such a wide range of material it should appeal to adults with a wide range of interests and to young learners.  You can register on the site and it will keep a track of your scores, but you can also use it without registering, and in either case it's free.

After you've watched the video, you can also use a microphone to record yourself reading each of the lines and the site gives you a score.  Most of the videos have American accents, so you won't get 100% scores if you don't mirror that, but it's quite forgiving of other accents and even when I put on my most RP voice (ie quite different to an AmEng accent, but perfectly acceptable) it gave me a high score. 

I think that this is something that you could set as a homework task, allow learners time to listen, understand the vocabulary, practice some of the pronunciation, and then come to class prepared to discuss a video that they have watched.  It may be that you want to give them all the same one or they could each choose one and describe theirs to a small group as a jigsaw activity.

This is a really inspirational video. Check it out!

Limitations - I'm stuck to think of any! 

Twist Our Words

This is a really quirky little site - I'm going to send it to my students now and see what they come up with!   You can choose words from a list and make a video of celebrities saying your sentence.  The list is pretty limited, it has to be said – doesn’t even include ‘you’ – but maybe that’s part of the fun. 

It’s certainly a challenge and will make your students think….. if, of course, they don’t discover the ‘Lucky Dip’ button and get the site to create one for them!    Here's mine:

TED - Videos of really interesting talks.

TED bills itself as 'Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world' and it is just that.  This is one example of the kind of thing that's available, but there are talks on all kinds of things -it would be difficult to find something not to be interested in! This is one of my favourites:  (thanks to Nik Peachy for drawing my attention to this one)

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

"Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra's experiments prove that wrong."

The talks are aimed at educated native speakers, and as such are high level, but the content is so nice, and they'd be perfect for listening practice for learners aiming at Higher Education in English speaking countries and wanting to do IELTS or similar exams.
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