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Introducing web tools to students:"Type with me"

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 anallows 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 application that lets you produce document texts, synchronized as you type, so that everyone viewing these pages sees the same text. This allows you to collaborate seamlessly on documents in your Web browser.

Before opening the web application each pair had their questions ready and checked by me so as not to have slips or serious grammar mistakes in the use of the target practice item.

And this is what we got: An interesting practice lesson aiming at grammar precision. Well worth a try.


Click here to see a live recording of the lesson when I introduced "Typewith.me" to my Pre-intermediate teenage froup of students

If you don't get what you must do to turn on the screecast just press "PLAY"as shown below:

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Comments

  1. Gabriela Sellart30 April 2011 at 15:21

    Loved this activity, Alicia. A dynamic way to insist on accuracy!
    I will surely try TypeWithMe.
    Thanks a lot for sharing and for letting me know about this blog.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ALICIA REY30 April 2011 at 15:58

    Thanks for reading Gabriela.
    All the best!

    ReplyDelete

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