English Assisted by Computers. I mean it.

Great debates on the use of Technology have been on lately and they food for thought.

The reading of those posts found me in front of my screen this morning, almost not remembering that I had to set up an activity for my pre intermediate teens who are dealing with the past simple forms these days.

Here's how I exploited the computer / internet aids that I has at hand:

I needed a song to deal with the PAST, so I asked "Google" for a famous song to practice the PAST TENSE (I didn't want to use the classic "Imagine" by J. Lennon) so there I was, asking for another classic...the feedback was immediate: "Summer nights" (from the musical Grease).
Yes ! Lovely -I thought.
So I looked for a clip on YouTube and the lyrics.
The idea of a very long clip didn't sound appealing, so I used Chop Tube , a magic online tool to cut long YouTube vids short. And ...voilá ...this is the extract I decided to exploit with my students.
I cut and pasted part of the lyrics from the web page indicated above and prepared a ppt file that I then uploaded to google docs (the lyrics were pasted on slides that were then placed in the wrong order). Students would later have to download this file from the web (in ppt format)and they would reorder the slides while listening to the song.
They might even check they have sort everything out correctly by visiting another brand- new - chopped YouTube video that I published on the web to serve the purpose.

Is there any other better assistant than the web and technology? The issue presented above might be really simple and basic before the endless debates arisen after the blog post mentioned in the first paragraph. But - I want to point this out- this is one of the reasons why I like working with technology. It certainly helps me by making my life easier.