Having fun learning to type, or learning a language...

Being able to touch-type (all fingers, no looking at the keyboard) is a skill you want to learn -- or teach yourself -- if you are going to spend a lot of time in front of a keyboard. It's so much more efficient...

Here's a fun little game for honing your typing skills, which allows you to blast words as they try and sneak up on you. It's not exactly methodical, but it's fun...

Learning to type properly is a bit like learning a language in some ways. Both require hard work to get the basics right. Learning to type "the cat sat on the mat" is a bit like learning "break, broke, broken".

Both should be fun. I think we sometimes jump to the conclusion that using technology is definitely going to be fun. We should plan lessons -- all lessons -- so that they are, but shouldn't just make that assumption. Maybe it's that going to the computer room is more fun than doing Headache Upper-Intermediate.

The game is more fun too, more fun than mindless repetition of "the cat sat on the mat". It's addictive. You want to play.

All lessons should be like that...

Mini-sagas and 100-word stories

Mini-sagas
The idea for mini-sagas came from an excellent book by Puchta and Schratz, Teaching Teenagers, one that I highly recommend if you ever have to teach teens.

Their rules for this creative writing exercise are:

• Each saga must have exactly fifty words
• The title can contain up to a maximum of five other words
• The saga can only be a story (not a joke, description of someone, etc)
  

100-word stories
This idea came from Michael Lewis's The Lexical Approach, another book that all language teachers should read, and is similar.

• Each story must have exactly 100 words
• The title can contain up to a maximum of five other words
• None of the words can be repeated

Yes, that is what is meant: if your title was 5 words, your story would contain a total of 105 words, none of which would be repeated.

You'd obviously require a fairly decent level of English to do this second one -- around Upper Intermediate at least, I would suggest.

What's this got to do with technology?
Of course, both of the above creative writing exercises you could do without ever going near a computer.

Whether or not you used technology for them, I would recommend a collaborative, process writing approach, with students reading each other's work, and commenting on it, before they ever hand it in to you, "finished" (another recommendation: Process Writing, by White and Arndt).

Personally, I would get my learners to write on computers -- apart from anything else as it makes it so much easier for them to edit and correct. Ask students to make amendments to something they've hand written, and they'll understandably be a bit put out. Ask them to amend a Word document, and it's just so easy!

Computers were just made for process writing...

Blogging projects
Both of the above would make great blogging projects. Have all your students as authors on the same "team blog", and get them to write their stories as posts, which they can save as drafts until they are ready for others to comment on them.

They could write new posts for second versions, and perhaps a separate one for final versions.

Important that they do use the comments feature... Blogging was just made for collaborative writing.

Christmas lessons

Happy (Lego) Christmas!

Christmas lessons
In my mailbox this morning, from the excellent DevelopingTeachers.com weekly teaching tip, some ideas for Christmas lessons.

How was your term?
I also liked the idea (same source) of "assessing how the different courses that we teach have been going & how to tackle them in the next term", together with some suggestions for questions you might ask yourself.

Playing with Lego
The image shows the crib my son and I created with Lego Men. For a fun class activity, if you just happen to have some small Lego models plus their instructions lying around, take them into class, give one student the instructions, their partner the pile of bricks -- and the partner has to build the model. What you want is the kind of Lego model that comes in a little box, with very few parts (around 25) -- a dumper truck, that sort of thing, or a police motorbike.

Works best if you specify that only the builder can actually touch the bricks.

See also
More lesson ideas for special days of the year.

More stuff in your mailbox.

Listening material on the Internet

Looking for listening material? There is some great audio material out there on the Internet...

The BBC World Service is a great site to recommend to students. On this page you get the news (and sports and business) bulletins -- one I recommend my learners to visit every day, something which they can easily get into the habit of doing by making the page the default start page on their browser.

There is also some interesting stuff in the BBC documentary archive and note also the stuff you can download from the BBC.

Another great site for audio is National Public Radio.

A selection of other sites for listening material:

• At StoryCorps you can listen to "extraordinary stories from everyday people".
  
• At Short Story Radio, you have "English language short stories from around the world"
• In the archives at Business Talk Radio, you have stacks of audio files (not just on business), which might be the place to look if you want American English.
  
• On ihes.com, we have a 25-part radio series about language, language teaching and learning
  
• At elllo.org (that's the English Listening Language Lab Online) you have a vast collection of listening files, with questions, tapescripts etc. Elllo also has its own podcast...
  
• Less easy to navigate are the free resources at learnoutload.com, which claims to be the "largest directory of free audio & video learning resources
• For a really weird and wacky selection of downloadable MP3 audio files (with no problems over copyright) go to OneWorld radio.
• At fonetiks.org, you've got practice on minimal pairs (and in a variety of accents!), if you really want it...
  

Real English
If you've ever worried that the stuff that comes with your coursebook doesn't sound authentic, or your students have said they understand you, but not "real" natives in England (or elsewhere), the BBC has another site on "the way we speak around the UK".

An alternative are the English Accents and Dialects on the CollectBritain site, or the University of Kansas has a similar site, with downloadable Mp3 files, if you want international dialects of English.

Listening activities
What do you do with your listening material? The excellent teachingenglish.org site has some suggestions for listening activities.

Project work
At RadioDiaries.org they suggest something that might make a great project: making your own radio diary. They provide lots of tips, apart from anything else.

Note that you could do the same sort of thing as a podcast [ >> what the @%$* is a podcast? ]

Strip cartoons with stripgenerator.com

Doctor, I've got what you want. The last known living da-da bird...

Here's a comic strip three of you started in our session December 5th – using my "plan B", stripgenerator.com, which I had to fall back on when we couldn't make animations on dfilm.com, which had been working just fine, 30 minutes earlier.

It (stripgenerator.com) doesn't quite have the same "wow factor" as dfilm (an important consideration).

But the "last known living da-da bird" there looks like it has the makings of a good story. And that's important too because good stories are potentially packed with good language.

As we also commented on during the session, a classroom activity of this kind can also generate lots of use of language (a big consideration) – "let's try…", "why don't we…", "how about having the bird…", that sort of thing.

Vital, obviously, that you get your learners to do things like that in English, not in their own language…

100 greatest albums

Born to Run: the really greatest album of all time, ever... And it did get on Time's list!

Time magazine has a 100 all-time greatest albums feature that might make an interesting class project. You might want to limit it to 25 albums...

Apart from reading and agreeing and/or disagreeing with Time's choice, your learners could produce their own list and argue which albums should be on it... Then they want to start to write it up...

A class blog would make a great way of displaying the information.

Rather than just nicking images of the album covers off of the Web, you could get your students to photograph them (example, above).

Time also has a 100 great movies feature too, if you (or your learners) would prefer that...

No... ? How about 100 greatest books...?

Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2007

If you don't know a lot about technology and how it might be used in language teaching, check out the Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2007 sessions.

A "virtual extension" of the Seattle TESOL 2007 Convention, you can join it and participate wholly online, without attending the face-to-face convention, and without being a member of TESOL.

There are 13 different sessions, which include:

• Beginning Internet Activities
• Becoming a Webhead ("A hands-on workshop on how to use Web communication tools for language teaching and learning")
• Blogging for Beginners
• Digital Gaming and Language Learning
  

Participation is free of charge.

Highly recommended...