Using Videos

Hi everyone,

it's me again ;-) (I wanted to put this up yesterday, but then I didn't finish it.....)
I really liked Fiona's ideas yesterday and I am also very much into films.
That's the reason I gave some more thougts to the topic after class and I remembered, that I have used a video to revise past simple last term. In the unit about the past simple in my coursebook they talk about different inventors and my students were most interessted in Walt Disney. When I found this short video on a page about biographies online, I designed the following exercise to go with it. The two worksheets are for a little differentiation / different levels.You could also use the sentences for a sequencing exercise like the ones we talked about yesterday.

 

Do you have other ideas or examples on how to use videos/films? 

Fopp

A few of you have been asking where you can buy DVDs - I would recommend Fopp in Covent Garden


http://www.fopp.com/stores/london/







If you want to buy ~EFL books, I suggest Foyles on Charing Cross Road or Waterstones Piccadilly.

Differentiation

We will be spending some time this afternoon looking at ways of catering to different levels in the same class, ie differentiation.

For extra background reading, I think you'll find the sites below really interesting, I've been looking through them and can already see some ideas which I'm going to adopt in our multi-level classes here at IH.

Varinder (my Director of Studies) has recommended reading a book called Evidence-Based Teaching by Geoff Petty.



Geoff Petty is regarded as the leading expert in this field. He also runs a site with a huge range of materials, which you can access with this link

http://geoffpetty.com/training-materials/differentiation/

There are more ideas and activities in this article by the BBC


http://www.bbcactive.com/BBCActiveIdeasandResources/MethodsofDifferentiationintheClassroom.aspx

We also have a session on Differentiation in our IH TT Special called Current Trends.

Lovely website/blog with ideas for using authentic films in class

Here is the link to a wonderful blog which is run by a Brazilian teacher and has loads of ideas for lessons using films. In most cases there are lesson materials as well as embedded clips of the films. You can search by level and by grammar point, and there are useful links to other sites for background reading on how to design your own lessons.
It's called Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals but it's more about imaginative teaching than assessing!


http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.co.uk/

Creative Writing

If you want to do some "traditional" writing, I found this link on busyteacher.org and I really like some of the topics / ideas (and there are 600 different ones!):

http://busyteacher.org/creative_writing_prompts_part_one.html

In addition, you could also use them for speaking or other activities! :-)

Some examples: 

How to laugh online in other languages

This is the visual I used today in class - enjoy! Do you know any other ways to laugh online?

Dialogue and Drama lesson

Hi guys, just a few comments about the Dialogue and Dramma lesson. Since most of the activities and resources that we were provided with are as useful as interesting from my point of view, I would like to mention just a couple of them to keep in mind for my next lesson programs. Firstly, the lead-in activity before watching the video. We were given the first part of the conversation written and we had to guess information about where, who and what the video consisted on. This helps students be aware of what may happen in the story, although they may be wrong; which is the funniest part. The second one focuses on the simple fact of showing a photo which leads to start a sparkly debate. Telling the students they are going to debate about whether the teacher should eat a piece of cake doesn't produce the same effect on them as showing them a photo of a delicous piece of cake, or even you can bring a real piece of cake, why not? An image can help a lot sopporting some activities and making them more entertaining.

EnglishCentral

For me, this website and its App are great resources for dictation activities!
It provides authentic materials from youtube--the videos are graded, categorized into different subjects, along with various follow-up practices. Why don't you just take a look at it!

http://www.englishcentral.com/videos#/!/index