English Studio

Some of the bad aspects of teaching Grammar is when you feel your students find the practice activities really boring. I always say that sometimes students have to put up with boring grammar exercises. But they also have the right to see something different (and not so unattrative) from time to time. You can create a funny video to get them to do what you want them to practise: One thing I learnt while exploring the web is that you have to be on the alert all the time-you can discover extremely varied sites /tools / resources that will trigger further ideas. This happened to me when I came across this site and I tried it . Then you can always use sites like Classtools.net to create some activities. ( Process shots ) I once used the same video to get students to practise a harder exercise

Voicethread is a web application that has caught my attention since I discovered it online. I think it holds a great potential to be exploited in class both to be used as an online presentation , to offer students audio extracts of written discourse that has to be read aloud to practise pronunciation -when students are in class they can ask for the pron of words to the teacher but they can't keep the teacher's voice in their schoolbags unless they record it while the lesson is being delivered and limitless possibilities. I used the video below last week to get students to listen to daily routines (sth they had been dealing with before)and show them what they can do to actively interact with a webpage , synchronously or not. There is much more that should have been done, but it was just a first step. First time they had to listen , watch, react and record their reactions after understanding how the web application works(everything at the same time).- Related post

Practice, practice and practice on paper is time consuming for students to copy from the board and, honestly, quite boring ! Boring activities, experience tells, are sometimes necessary in the English classroom. However just a simple idea may make the difference. A Synchronous online activity can be developed and the "practice atmosphere" is likely to change for the better. Using the messenger to replace paper and pen is something new for students and typing the same sentences they might have to copy on their notebooks in a boring way turns into a challenge that implies fun for them. You type "Sheila is in London", expecting that they type back "She's in London" . You type "Tony and Joseph are at school", expecting students to type back "They're at school" , etc. You also have the chance to type OK / right/ wrong (provide instant feedback) so as to give students the chance to correct themselves if they type s

Sí. Es la red social que adopté finalmente para ellos. Todavía estamos en la etapa de análisis del sitio y lo adecuado o no que pueda resultarle al grupo. Pero me gusta. Para empezar, me gusta. Lo fundamental es la seguridad que ofrece al chico. Todo está dentro de un marco de permisos que , habiéndolo configurado yo en mi rol de docente, permiten total control de todo lo que hacen en línea. Por ello sólo ya es un muy buen sitio para iniciar a los alumnos dentro del sistema de "Networking". La registración es muy sencilla y el inicio de sesión, igualmente. Antes de comenzar a usar el sitio debo habilitarlo yo, que configuré mi cuenta dentro de la misma red, como "parent", o sea que de golpe me encuentro con 10 "hijos" / alumnos a los que debo autorizar - o no - a hacer cosas dentro de la red sin que ellos perciban mucho mi monitoreo. De hecho NO lo perciben. Sencillamente les avisé que iba a estar siempre pendiente. La realidad es que diariamente rec

One of the classics was presented through this videoclip: Students were then given some info about the background to the song . and they answered some questions about what they could infer from the video images and random voice sounds/ sung text they were able to get. Next students were provided with an interactive-gapped text containing the song lyrics -"interactive" because the gapped text was made using an office word application which showed blanks. On placing the mouse cursor on the gap and pressing the F1 key , hints for the gapped words were released to guide correct text completion. The follow up activity was to get students to memorize the song. But not by simple "parrot like repetition". A new webtool was to help them: MEMORIZE NOW , a great resource I came across while exploring the web. It gives students the opportunity to learn and enjoy songs, which is -as Nik Peachey affirms - an excellent way to improve listening, vocabulary and pro

It's always a nice idea to get students to practise the "classic" language items through innovative ways as they often tend to get bored at doing exactly the same sort of things. Do you know how many times they've gone through the Present Simple Tense? And the classic "read a text and answer questions in the present simple" kind of activity? Well, this could have been another boring practice again : Three different texts taken from somewhere online ( Scarlet , Amr and Asan and their habits around their school lives)- Sets of 10 questions per pair (they were working in pairs) that they made themselves-ie each pair was assigned a text an allows d they had to prepare the set of questions for that text. They would then interchange questionnaires and answer the questions the other teams had made. Typical activity that could have been well developed orally or even in writing (on paper). However, a new alternative has come up : Typewith.me , a web applicat

No es novedad que hoy la red Twitter es parte de la vida de un alto porcetaje de cibernautas que lo han adoptado incluso como reemplazo de blogs, facebook e incluso aplicaciones de mensajería instantánea. Pero, como todo lo que es usado masivamente, al menos en mi opinión, deja de tener la utilidad que alguna vez fue objeto de su uso. Puntualmente hoy uso twitter sencillamente porque las personas a las que sigo lo usan. Y me interesan sus posts / twits. Pero hay muchísimas alternativas a Twitter que me ayudarían a filtrar los mensajes que me interesan. De las personas que sigo en Twitter solamente una ha adoptado, por ejemplo, una de sus alternativas, Shout'em , pero nolo usa regularmente. Supongo le ha ocurrido lo mismo que a mí. La gran red de contactos está en Twitter y cambiar red es empezar todo de nuevo. Una lástima, porque Shout'em permite la escritura de 300 caracteres y no sólo 140, lo cual a veces facilitaría lo que queremos compartir con colegas en mi profesión

No. No es la nueva versión del clásico de los Rolling Stones. Es lo que sentí particularmente en la clase de Upper Intermediate ayer,cuando los vi a mis alumnos del grupo (a todos) trabajar tan segura y fluidamente con los elementos ofrecidos por la computadora: Bloc de notas, navegadores web abiertos en varias pestañas, auriculares a full en sus oídos y ojos completamente inundados de material mostrado en las pantallas de sus monitores. Interactuaban. Creaban. "Luchaban" con los contenidos de la clase y no con los recursos tecnológicos extraídos de la PC. Mucho tiempo intenté que ocurriera ello. Y , de repente, me di cuenta de que lo estaban haciendo con total naturalidad. Ya no me necesitaban todo el tiempo. Ya no me volvían loca al encontrar dificultades no solamente con el lenguaje que estudian sino también con los recursos con los que deben trabajar. Me sentí libre al verlos manejar su libertad. Ya ni siquiera me necesitaban para consultar vocabulario (los diccion