Design your own handbag

Here's one from Larry Ferlazzo's excellent collection of links: a site where you can design your own handbag (shown, right, the one I created).

My doubt about it as a website to use with students is whether or not they would actually learn that much English while interacting with it. It's pretty much point-and-click, with very little to actually read in English.

However, if you put your learners in pairs, and the task was to see which pair could design the most attractive bag, you might get a speaking activity out of it.

It might work nicely if you then got each pair to view all the other bags and then have to choose which three they would buy for a maximum of 900 USD, with "the winner" the pair selling the most bags. (The site, a genuine handbag manufacturer, prices and then offers you the chance to actually buy your own creation.)

It's possible to mail your bag to a friend (you could mail it to your teacher). Or your learners could capture the image from their computer screens and edit them as I've done, above).

Larry Ferlazzo is a site I would definitely recommend adding to your RSS feeds if you use them.

Cutting your images down to size

The pictures from the camera (left), around 0.9 MB each, reduced to under 10 kb (right)

Someone asked this at a seminar I gave last month: don't the images you upload on to your blog quickly take up all your available space?

If you are using Blogger, you've in fact got 300 MB of space for images, so you do have quite a lot of room. If you're using something else, like your school's own server, for example, you might run into problems quicker.

There are two things you can do to trim the size of the images you are uploading:

1. Adjust the settings on your camera (assuming, that is that you are using a digital camera to create your own images) -- so that the resolution is low and the size of the images small
2. Edit the images using an image editor -- like Photoshop or Fireworks, Gimp (which is free) or Picasa (also free)

The images in the illustration at the top of this post were taken on a good digital camera, on which the settings had not been altered. By editing the images with Fireworks, however, reducing the resolution and cutting the size of the images to 200px by 200px, the saving was enormous, as you can see.

From sessions August 9

One of the photos Aitziber (I think) took, as an example of project work. The project suggested was producing a "picture plus accompanying text..."

A couple of things from today's sessions on our CELTA courses...

This was the BBC article on the Yangtze river dolphin, which I suggested as the basis for a webquest. It comes from the BBC's Words in the News section, a great one to suggest to your learners as their default start page -- so that they get some reading and listening practice every time they log on to the web.

The link to the Dfilm animations that you created didn't actually reach me. If anyone likes to provide them...

In a separate post, Dan tells us about yesterday on the course, which he did as an example of podcasting.

And for any of you that feel you really don't know that much about technology, I think I mentioned the Technology 101 section here on this blog, with some of the basic things that it is useful to know.

Day 6 on the CELTA course

Celta course trainee Dan Arp tells us a little about Day 6 on the course which, among other things included looking at various language analysis issues:

At times it can be hard to take all the information on board, Dan tells us, but he sees what his tutor Gerard is doing as being "planting seeds to cultivate over the course of [our] teaching careers".

Footnote: We produced the audio as part of a demonstration of podcasting in the session on technology on Day 7 of the course.

Why is it wrong to steal images... and text

Not actually stolen from Google, legally downloaded flashcards... But, if there's no involvement, that's almost as bad!

Why is it wrong to steal images?
First a misconception most users are under: no one has given Google (or any other search engine) permission to grab all their images off their websites. It is therefore wrong for Google to steal images in the first place -- and that doesn't make it right for you to steal the same images from Google. Neither does the fact that "everyone else does".

As an educator, I think that you have a moral responsibility: you cannot condone and must condemn theft, and therefore can neither steal other people's images and use them, for example, on a blog, nor allow your student's to do that.

Images or content -- text, that is.

Why bother creating your own?
But there's more to it than the moral considerations, which I imagine are not going to convince many people nowadays.

For example, with text, in a webquest you have asked your learners to find the answers to certain questions, and then to "publish" them in some way -- in a Word document, as a PowerPoint presentation, on a blog. If they merely "copy and paste", as many will do, they are very unlikely to be doing very much manipulation of the language; they are not getting to grips with it, getting "under the bonnet" and getting their hands dirty, tinkering with it and reformulating it in any way. Merely copying and pasting it isn't going to do a lot for their language learning.

Teach your learners not to copy and paste, but to copy and paste; select judiciously, cut ruthlessly and quote correctly... And provide the language for that ("(....), according to Yahoo News"; "says a report on CNN" [+hyperlink]; etc)

And images...
If it's images, it's far better for them to create their own, than handle stolen property from Google. Why?

What you want, for learners to be truly engaged in their learning, is for them to be creative, to be imaginative. Google Images is not creative.

You want affective involvement in their learning -- you want them to care. When they do, they learn more.

What you want is for them to be proud of what they've created. There isn't a lot of pride to be had in handling stolen goods.

How do they create their own images?
Images can come from digital cameras, from mobile phones, from hand-drawn art work (which is then either photographed or scanned), or be created in a simple image editing program like Paint.

Is it worth the effort?
Yes. Why? Because of the pride to be had in the creation...

Dreamweaver and FrontPage

Someone on our technology courses last month wanted to know about more about Dreamweaver and FrontPage, two html editors [definition] for creating webpages.

Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver (price currently 347 GBP from Amazon.co.uk) is much the better of the two, and is a program I've used -- and liked very much -- every working day for about the last five years.

It's not that difficult to start to learn, comes with a full manual, has good online support and tutorials and is a very professional solution for building webpages.

You also want to know about the following, sooner rather than later, as webpage design is not just a question of learning to use Dreamweaver:

• Good design principles (lots of ideas on A List Apart)
  
• Basic html (coding)
• CSS, including positioning (some great tutorials from MaxDesign)
  

Personally, I'd recommend learning a little about html and CSS even before you start with Dreamweaver.

Microsoft FrontPage has now in fact been replaced by Expression Web (price 256 GBP from Amazon.co.uk, 85 GBP for an upgrade from FP). FrontPage had its limitations, Expression Web looks to be on a par with Dreamweaver, though I've not used it extensively.

But do you really want to know about such programs?
You can create webpages with other programs, far less sophisticated ones, like those available at Yahoo and Google, for example.

Or -- if you want something professional looking and dead easy to set up -- your best bet would probably be to set up a blog.

Student-generated webquests

Student-generated questions for a webquest...

One thing which I think makes a successful webquest is to have the students produce the questions, rather than the teacher dictate to them what it is that they have to find out. Why find out what the teacher is interested in? Maybe that's not what interests the learners...

In the illustration, above, from a course I did last month, my learners pooled what they knew about the running of the bulls in Pamplona (San Fermín). As you can see, they knew something at least, but came up with as many questions as answers... That was their webquest.