VideoJug: a cool alternative to YouTube

Halloween? Kissing? Halo 3 Tips...? The "How to" video is on VideoJug

My colleague Carolyn Edwards has just told me about VideoJug.com. It's not quite YouTube but has stacks of "How to" videos on it.

As a lesson, you could probably get a lot of mileage out of asking your learners before watching "How to" go about a particular task; get them to make notes of the stages involved; then watch and, while watching, get them to tick in their notes which are mentioned in the video -- giving you student-generated, ready-made, photocopy-free listening comprehension questions.

As a follow-up, assuming you have access to a video camera (or video-equipped mobile phones), get them in groups to (first) storyboard a video of their own and (then) film it.

Your films could then be uploaded on to VideoJug or YouTube, and/or embedded on a class blog.

Not so sure the Love&Sex section is somewhere you want to take your (young) learners (like "Creative Kissing" or the hilarious Avoid Trapped Arm Whilst Cuddling In Bed) but with adults there lots of fun stuff there, and in the site's other sections.

Oh, and don't miss the Halloween videos...

Eyes: an idea for a class blog

Mystery eyes: someone in our class

Here's an idea that might be fun if you have a class blog: every week, we publish a photo of the eyes of someone in the class, and we then attempt to guess who our "mystery eyes" belong to.

By a "class blog", I mean one on which your learners author and publish the content and, besides class projects [example], and what you might publish as being of interest to your students [example], having a different pair responsible for the blog each week will get the students interested and involved. You could have such things as a "YouTube video of the week" or "Album of the week", which the students would be responsible for picking -- and "Mystery eyes of the week" would also be fun.

You want the students to take the photos and edit them and want to ensure that other students do comment on the blog, something they could be doing before class, during class, or at home...

An important issue is privacy, so do make sure you have appropriate school/parental permission before you start publishing photos, especially if you are doing this with young learners!

Witches and more stuff for Halloween lessons

WhaaaaaaaaaahHHHHHH! Photo: KateT

It's getting round to that time of year again... On the British Council's Learn English Kids site, you have things about witches and wizards -- "things" being songs and jigsaw puzzles and stories and and stuff you can print, a link which I picked up from the Council's excellent ELTeCS list.

Don't print it, make it!
Stuff you can print...? I've always had my doubts about that -- especially if we are talking about young learners. Who was the teacher trainer I once heard say that it broke her heart "to see young learners all with the same photocopied picture"?

You want ideas, not printable activities, I would suggest -- and for pictures, you want to get your young learners to draw them. If you've got a class blog, that's where they should be published.

If we're talking teenagers, for whom drawing witches is undoubtedly not going to be cool, you could get them to take photos of Halloweeny things on their mobile phones -- which again could be great on a class blog.

Don't worry so much about the quality of the images -- just quick snapshots like the one at the top of this post (detail of the decorations at Reception here at school) will produce a great collection.

Creating, not consuming
If you then got your learners to write ghost stories (possibly featuring the creatures they've taken photos, or drawn pictures of), then they'd be creating, not merely consuming -- and that's what technology allows us to do.

In Spanish, here's another idea that makes a great Halloween activity.

Related posts

>> A Halloween project
>> Halloween lessons

Great stuff on YouTube for English teachers

Bruce Springsteen interviewed on the OGWT in 1978

There's a ton of great listening comprehension on YouTube, stuff that's so much more interesting than the things that come on your coursebook CD -- to start with because (especially to kids!) watching a video clip of (say) a song is so much more interesting than a CD...

Getting them to do the work
One of my colleagues suggested having the learners, in pairs, search for a suitable interview with a famous person, and then write listening comprehension questions for another pair. Get them to choose the video -- don't you make the choice.

Doing that means that there is so much more active involvement of the learners, with them wanting to listen, and wanting to listen again. Whether or not they come up with great listening comprehension questions is not important either: what the activity does is make them creators, not merely consumers of content.

Or letting someone else do the work...?
If you prefer someone else to do part of your lesson planning for you, teflclips.com is a site which will interest you.

On yappr.com you have YouTube-like videos conveniently sorted by subject and level of difficulty, many of them with a subtitle option.

In a recent issue of HLT, there were more ideas for exploiting YouTube.

And here's another idea from Nik Peachey's excellent blog...

October 12: Columbus Day

This coming Sunday is Columbus Day, or El Día de la Hispanidad -- which might make an interesting webquest (not something your students will thank you for, if you make them do it Sunday ,-)!

You'll find ideas for other "Days of the Year" here; and on TeachingEnglish.org.uk there are some neat ideas for how you could exploit the days of the week, etc, with kids, just about any day of the year.

RSS feeds for ELT

Bloglines: promises, and delivers!

Real Simple Syndication [definition; Wikipedia entry], or RSS as it is better known, might at first sight sound like another bit of geeky technology that you can live very happily without, thank you.

Basically, it will involve you setting up an account (eg at Bloglines) and specifying which website(-s) and/or blog(-s) you want to track for new content. The next day (say), you will have to log back on to your new account to read any new content that has been found and brought to you at your account [+ info].

Which websites and blogs publish an RSS feed?


Not all websites publish what is called a "feed", which is what Bloglines et al use to gather the content for you.

If, as in the image above, in the address bar you can see an orange icon that looks like it is transmitting radio waves (red arrow), then the site has an RSS feed which you can very simply add to your Bloglines account, and start receiving content from that site too.

Is it worth it...?
A very long time ago, when even email was in its infancy, I came to a seminar at my present employers, at which someone explained that the teachers (now my colleagues) had not wanted to use email until they discovered how useful it could be to them personally -- for things other than teaching.

I'd suggest that RSS is like that: discover that it's useful to you personally, to bring you things on your hobbies and interests, and you'll quickly be convinced...

5 RSS feeds of general interest
Below, five sites on topics that interest me: try them, or look out for others that will interest you...

• BoingBoing.net
  
• Digital Photography School
• Lifehacker.com
  
• Simply Recipes
• Tabletop Gaming News
  

5 RSS feeds of interest to English teachers

• Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day
• Nik Peachey's Learning Technology blog
  
• Quick Shout
• TeachingEnglish.co.uk
• The blog you are reading now...
  

Try RSS. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it...