Docking at the Right Harbour

Have you ever had problems to find useful resources on the net for teaching English? Have you ever wonder what are the best ESL/EFL resources, the best Edubloggers in the English teaching field? Many times when we want to use Internet as an education tool, we get lost due to the great amount of information contained on the net. In order to avoid this, Gorka Palazio, professor of the University of the Basque Country, has developed two great sites: English Harbour and English Tube.

English Harbour, a RSS website where you will find a selection of the best content for English teachers and students. This tool captures the last posts of top English edubloggers. Therefore, you can be up to date with these teachers' experiences in the classroom and with advances in new technologies applied to English teaching. But the advantage of visiting English Harbour is not only to read interesting post written by other ESL/EFL teachers or ELT proffessionals, but also to interact with those teachers who are interested in the same topics that you are. In this way, we are contributing to create a real learning virtual community, which can be expanded Twitter. The URL of Twitter is English Harbour.

However, if you are looking for new resources, English Tube can add visual spice to your University lessons mainly. After class, your students can continue learning English at home, in a cyber café or wherever they wish, watching videos on this site. The videos, which have been taken from the major video services such as Youtube, Blip, Vimeo, Veoh or Metacafe, are organized by level (beginner, intermediate and advanced) and by skills (grammar, listening, speaking and writing).

One thing I love about English Tube is that its content is really well-organized. Besides, it is an interactive site in which students can leave their comments on the videos they have watched. I hope that this is only the first step to expand and create a bigger English Tube full of videos for primary and secondary students, as well. A great idea would be that all those useful videos included subtitles, and there was an option to show or hide them depending on the student's English level.

Expocampus 09 Palazio

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Youtube Edu - Open Culture and Education in Youtube

Last 26th March, Google launched a new sub-site called Youtube Edu which was released in Youtube Blog . According to Youtube Blog, "YouTube EDU is a volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities. We'll feature some of these videos on the home page on Friday and elaborate further in a separate post on that day. "

This project is very similar to Academic Earth one. There are more than 20000 videos about lectures, full courses, etc, on Youtube Edu and growing each day! Now, you can go on learning anytime and anywhere browsing videos by college or university name in the Directory.

Youtube is a tool which many teachers like using in their classes, however, this sharing site is blocked in many schools around the world and in many countries. Therefore, has Youtube developed this new sub-site to avoid sutting the site out?

There is no doubt this has been a great idea, but when is Youtube going to launch a sub-site for ESL/EFL teachers full of teachers' classes, activities, projects, experiences,etc to know what other teachers are doing all around the world in just one website?

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YAPPR - A new way to learn English

How many times have you tried to learn English or other languages with videos but you could not understand anything? Now, it is possible to improve your language with Yappr, a new free tool developed by Patrick Nee to learn languages in a funny way with entertaining videos which you can choose from different categories such as Christmas, comedy, music or cartoons. Therefore, if you are learning English, this site can be a very useful tool since it avoids the problem of not understanding because the videos have subtitles in English and Spanish. Besides, the videos are short and you can use them in the classroom to do other kind of activities.

Many students prefer watching interesting and funny videos to reading books because videos have sound and images. The advantage of this site is that with the subtitles, the videos can be understandable for beginners or intermediate students. Youtube videos are good for advanced learners but not for beginners of intermediate ones, since sometimes they do not have subtitles. Users can also upload their videos and even contribute with their translations to their own videos or to others ones. Besides, there are also games and a chat to talk to people from all over the world and practice English. What are you waiting for joining to it and sharing with your students and friends? There are fourteen languages available in Yappr, therefore you have no excuses to learn languages.

A similar website is Dot Sub. If you want to know more about Dot Sub you can read Nik Peachey's Blog, he has an interesting post about it with some ideas to use these videos in class.

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Tools for Teaching English

It's no wonder the growing interest of teachers in using tools like Youtube, Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis or other web 2.0 tools in the language classes since NTIC are having a huge impact in education in the last recent years. But what benefits can NTIC provide to our language classes? You will find the answer in the following video:

In my opinion, using Youtube in class can be very effective since students are exposed to real English, I mean, to English in real situations; or they can also use this videos to reinforce some English points they have not understood in class (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation...). They can watch, listen, and even take ideas to make their own videos for the ESL class. For example, the teacher can organize a TV News programme, a play... with his/her students, record them and after that create a blog or website to upload the videos made by the students. This can be a way to motivate your students since they feel part of the learning process and can express their own ideas. 


However, if you want your students learn English at home by their own, some useful videos I have found on the net are Jennifer ESL ones. The explanations are really clear and they also include exercises with explanations. Besides there are many topics on it (grammar, vocabulary, intonation, pronunciation, typical mistakes...). This is an example about 'Prepositions in the context of meals' :

Youtube is not a useful tool in itself but with the teacher guidance can be very effective. I also posted an entry about how to use ESL videos in class and PhD Cristóbal Suárez Guerrero has also an interesting post about Educative Youtube (in Spanish). Another example is Teachertube full of videos for education and lesson plans although they are not just for English but also for other subjects.

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USING VIDEOS IN CLASS

Using a video in class has not always been really appreciated by administrators in education since they considered it as something used by teachers when they did not have anything better to do, or when they had not prepared their lessons. But using a video in an appropriate way can be really useful for your students because they can learn English in a natural way and associating vocabulary to a context. It is really important to present vocabulary within a context. What is more, as videos are a tool for communication they become more motivated than just doing exercises in their notebooks, because they can express their ideas and therefore, they feel important in class.

I have posted some interesting and funny videos which just last some minutes. Some of them are songs for primary and other ones are children stories but I am sure you will find also resources for teens.

Videos are a source for listening and speaking practice.

Teaching tips:

ONLY PICTURES: Introduce the video without sound (only in children stories) and ask your students to tell you what happens in the story. After that play the story again and make them questions about it.

ONLY SOUND: It is the other way round. Play the video but without the pictures, and students have to interpret what they listened.

THE FROZEN PICTURE: The teacher stop a picture and asks his/her pupils what they think it is going to happen next.

ROLE-PLAY: you can adapt a story to perform it, and do a video with your pupil’s story. You can also use the grammatical points you have explained in class for doing other communicative activities with your students. For example, when you have taught present and past simple they can be journalist and make interviews to other partners or to the people who works in the school; they can make a recipe, a cake… and explain how they are making it in order to practice food vocabulary and the imperative. While they are making the cakes or other recipes you can record them.

DICTATION: we can also use the video for dictations. This video is not for children, but it is for elementary learners. It deals with directions and places in real situations.

This one is for introducing yourself and spelling names

There is another interesting video about countries and nationalities. Maybe they cannot understand everything but I am sure they can identify some simple structures they have learn, such as “My name is…”, they country they are from…

There are many videos about this topics in YOUTUBE. BE CAREFUL WITH COPYRIGHT, there is no problem if you only use them in class.

FILL IN THE GAPS: you can also use the videos to create your own worksheets with the text where they students have to fill the gaps with the right word.

JUST A HALF: divide the class in two groups and show just the half of the story to one group. After that show the second part of the story to the second group. Then one group have to tell the part they have seen to the another one and vice versa to reconstruct the story.

MAKE A NEW STORY: the students after watching the video have to create a new story using some words which appeared in it.

a) This is a 4 years children singing Ten in a Bed. They are really adorable! This is a song which was performed by a class. It is important to teach songs through mimic since they can remember more easily.

b) An ABC song for children.

c) Teaching tips with the song Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes

d) Song with body parts + can. THE BATH SONG.

e) Teaching Tips. Game: Who took the cookie?

f) Days of the Week Song.

g) Funny video about Itsy Bitsy Spider Song. Animated.

h) A teacher teaches the song to their children through mimic.

There are several versions from the song There was a lady who swallowed a fly. It is very useful for teaching ANIMALS:

1. Muppet Show - "There was an Old Lady who swallowed a Fly" Super, super funny. It is from a Sesame Street Chapter. It is a simple and funny story to learn animals since it is very repetitive.

2. Song There was an Old Lady… It is another version performed by an Asiatic teacher.

3. This is another version with the animals pictures while the song is listened.

4. The tale with images in a video.

5. And this is my favourite one (CARTOON SONG) There was an Old Lady who…

The visual must enrich the text but don't forget that we cannot exploit a song and a video in the same way.Tom y Jerry’s video.

All these videos are good because they don’t last too much, just a minutes, so you can plan many activities with them. And at the same time, children will pay attention because it is a different activity, it has got images, a different voice…

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