Links landing in my mail box

All of the following links came to me via the excellent Developing Teachers.com Monthly Newsletter for July.

• 50 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do, which might make a great discussion topic before your learners ever look at the site: Can they brainstorm their own list...? Once they get to the site, How many did they correctly predict...? And once they do get there, they'll find some fascinating reading
  
• The story of Jamie Livingston, who took a polaroid every day until the day he died, which (though you might want to limit it to, say, 30 days) would make a great project if you had a class blog -- get your learners to take the picture, in other words, and publish them together with a suitable, accompanying text describing the picture
  
• I was less impressed by StickyBall.net, which has games, jokes, vocab lists, worksheets and so on, though you might find things you could use.
  

The difference between the first two, above, and StickyBall is an important one, I think: in the first two cases, you would be getting your students to do things. In the latter case, it would be you downloading, printing and photocopying, to a considerable extent. Doing will produce learning, photocopying is much less likely to, if you ask me.

Don't go looking for things on the Internet, I always say: have things come to you. The DT Monthly Newsletter always brings lot...

Would you mind if I take a photo of you?

... and could you take one of us, too?

Here's a small project suggested to me by a colleague, Susana Ortiz, who got her students to take their mobile phones out into the street to take pictures.

They'd been practising making requests and asking for permission, and what they had to do was, in pairs, (1) ask a complete stranger if s/he would mind taking a photo of them, and then (2) ask another complete stranger if s/he would mind if they took a photo -- of the stranger.

Foreign students learning Spanish in Barcelona, they then returned to class to report back how they'd got on (no, none of them got themselves punched, though in most cases they had to explain what it was for, and they did get quite a few "no way's" before they got their pictures!).

What do you think of it as a project...?

splendid-speaking.com

Splendid Speaking, which concerns itself with "Speaking skills for advanced learners of English", has free materials that you might find of interest if you are teaching CAE or a similar sort of level.

More image links and ideas for using them

Yet another useful link from Larry Ferlazzo's amazing collection, to Nations Illustrated, which has over 7,000 images -- free for non-commercial use -- organised by countries of the world.

I like Larry's idea of exploiting the fact that you can send the photo's as e-cards to a friend (or your teacher)... Perhaps you could also have your learners create a story based on a series of e-cards sent to you from different places around the world...?

Note also the "play puzzle" feature, if you're a jigsaw puzzle fan, which allows you to turn the images into jigsaws. I wonder if you could have people doing that in class in pairs, perhaps with one person having the original picture, which their partner isn't allowed to see... Or have them work together to work out how the puzzle must fit together logically ("that bit must go there", "that can't be right...").

>> In the same post, on About.com, Thirty Free Image Resources on the Web

Experimental School Gets Rid of Classes, Teachers

The New Country School in Henderson, Minnesota [website], has decided to do away with teachers, says this story on NPR.org, and pupils now "spend most of their day in front of their computers, working on interdisciplinary projects".

They have no classes, working instead on projects they select themselves; no teachers, no school bell, no fixed schedule, no walls and no janitors (the loos they have to clean themselves!)

Would it work...? Would it work with your learners...? What do they think...? Sounds like a discussion that might work...

NPR is also a great site for listening material -- and one you could recommend to your learners.

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.

Bizarre stories from Ananova

In our session June 11, I mentioned an article I'd spotted out of the corner of my eye on one of my default start pages, Ananova.com, or more specifically Ananova's "Quirkies" bizarre news stories section.

The headline read:

Green blood shocker
Surgeons operating on a man were shocked to find he had green blood

Other recent stories have included:

Robber caught - by mum
A Czech armed robber who targeted McDonald's restaurants was grabbed by the ear and marched to the police station by his mum

Beatles blast for beer burglar
A judge sentenced a Beatles-loving thief by quoting 42 of the band's song titles in his verdict

What could you do with them?
With a story like the first you could obviously ask students to predict what they thought the explanation might be. They could then read the text to find out if they were right. I remember playing a game called Balderdash, in which you got a word, a correct definition of the word, and had to invent three more, with your opponents then having to guess which was the correct one; you could do something similar with stories like this one.

With the second, and others like it, there's always the question of whether or not such stories are true, or merely urban legends -- a discussion topic I've always found works well.

And the third might make an interesting piece of writing: how many song titles can your learners cram in, but still make a coherent story. They could obviously use someone other than the Beatles.

Not searching, having things come to you
In our session, I mentioned Ananova.com being one of my start pages as an example of how you can have things come to you, and not have to go searching the Internet for them.

An alternative to Ananova would be Yahoo's Oddly Enough news section, with similar stories.

Changing your default start page
Check this previous post if you aren't sure how to change the default start page of your browser.

List of faux pas, by country

Not sure that you'd get a lot more out of this than a class discussion, but Wikipedia has a list of faux pas, ordered by different countries.

Not sure that students here in Spain would agree with some of the faux pas in Spain -- but that in itself would get the discussion rolling...

Why are British teenagers so badly behaved?

Here's a discussion on the BBC that might make for an interesting class activity -- Why are British teenagers so badly behaved?

Basically it's a list of reader comments. You could get your learners to read through it, noting suggested answers to the question.

You'd then have the basis for a class discussion (which do they think are the most likely/unlikely explanations, etc), and could compare with their own country...

They could also write answers on the BBC discussion board.

Hard Bargaining (speaking activity)

Old and looking a bit dog-eared on the shelf in the staffroom, but still packed with good ideas...

This one came to my email inbox in the DevelopingTeachers.com "Weekly Teaching Tip" (details below). The original source is Jill Hadfield's Advanced Communication Games (Nelson, 1987), a collection of photocopiable speaking activites.

'Hard Bargaining' involves getting the students to barter. Each student has a card and they have to negotiate with the other students in order to get what they need. An example card might be 'You have but don't need 10 sheep' and then 'You need 4 pigs' and each student has different things in each section.

Here the focus is on animals but a simple change to the cards can produce a lexical set that has been introduced that week for example. The students could be bartering with anything and reviewing whatever vocabulary you wish.

You can see the past tips on developingteachers.com. You can also sign up to receive them weekly in your mail box.

See also
In a previous post, there were other things that you can receive in your mailbox. "Don't search, have things come to you!" I always say.