As I seem to be looking at a rather grueling next couple of months, I have decided to take a brief interlude from blogging. In the timeless tradition of Fred(a) (Blue Peter’s trans-gender tortoise) and providing there are sufficient air-holes in my cardboard box, I should be coming out of hibernation sometime in the spring.

I leave you all with The Test Card! Goodnight! … Give me a kick in springtime!

Note : Older followers of this blog may prefer to view The Potter’s Wheel, which incidentally went on to inspire director Jerry Zucker’s classic Demi Moore Pottery Scene in the 1990 film “Ghost”).

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P.S. I will still be @ij64ing during this period!

Here are five Christmas activities I’ve used over the last few years! Nothing very original I’m afraid, but then again Christmas isn’t, is it? Feel free to take your pick!

1. Personalised Christmas greetings from Santa

Get your students to send each other personalised Christmas greetings direct from Santa. Here’s an example message. You’ll find the website here.

A message from Father Christmas

2. Christmas questions

Put your students in pairs or small groups and ask them to discuss the following questions.

3. Christmas Wordle definition game

Put your students in two teams and give oral definitions of the items in the Wordle below. Students identify the words. Award points for correct answers.

Christmas Wordle

4. Retelling Mr Bean’s Christmas

Bean is Back! Take advantage of a whole new generation that don’t have the faintest idea who Mr Bean was!

Put your students in pairs. Student A watches 00:00 – 03:38 and describes what happens to student B. Student B then watches 03:38 – 08:00 and explains to student A. Pre-teach any vocabulary you feel necessary e.g. mousetrap, turkey, stuffing, cracker etc.

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5. The best Christmas song ever!

I make no apologies for this! George Michael is The Chosen One and your students should be informed even if their parents weren’t even a twinkle in their grandparents’ eyes in 1984! Gapped lyrics here (tell your students not to panic at the number of gaps in the chorus, they will hear it several times).

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Merry Christmas and see you next year!

Hurrah! It’s Edubling season again! Medals are pinned to chests, backs are slapped and awesomeness abounds. As always, the key to maintaining a sense of proportion at this time is to avoid getting carried away. While I wince at the sometimes desperate-sounding pleas of vote-for-me, vote-for-me, vote-for-me, I also tend to cringe at overly-earnest don’t-vote-for-me-I-am-NOT-a-commodity discourse.

Fortunately, most people seem to keep a clear head and treat the whole thing as a bit of harmless fun which makes people feel good about their blogging. Because, let’s face it, the need for peer validation is probably as hard-wired into us as our desire for food, drink and the occasional spot of rumpy-pumpy. In moderation, and taken with a pinch of salt, it’s quite nice and makes us go all gooey! … And, for those who are worried about the feelings of bloggers who were not nominated, to be perfectly honest I’m sure they won’t lose any sleep over it. As the nominated/winners will also remember: it really isn’t that important. Life’s too short and there are far more important things to worry about!

Anyway, back to the main point of this post. Although I’ve largely taken a back seat as regards this year’s Edublog Award festivities (apart from taking the proverbial Michael now and again), it would be ungrateful of me not to thank the people who have been kind enough to support this blog. So, I hereby express my gratitude to everybody who nominated or voted for Tefltecher! … Thank you!

Note : I am particularly grateful to Kieran Donaghy, Pascal Shaw and Steve Muir for their blog post nominations (if I’ve left anyone out, please accept my apologies).

I was going to gush a bit further, but as gushing is not really my thing, I thought I’d just post a new lesson plan. The theme is …  you guessed it … thanking! I hope you find it useful! Ian James | @ij64 (13/11/11)

The Thank You Lesson

Step One : Lead-in

• Show your students the “Thank You Wordle” below and ask them to identify the languages.

Thank You Wordle

• Answers : Shukran – Arabic | Eskerrik asko – Basque | Xièxie – Chinese | Dank u – Dutch | Merci – French | Grazie – Italian | Danke schön – German | Grazie – Italian | Arigato – Japanese | Mange takk – Norwegian | Obrigado – Portugese | Spasiba – Russian | Gracias – Spanish | Diolch – Welsh
• See if you can agree on which sound the most “thankful”. You may also like to do a bit of research and then chat about the etymology of some of the expressions.

Step Two : Conversation

• Give your students time to read and think about the following questions.
• Ask them to discuss the questions in pairs or small groups.

Step Three : Video

• Focus on Question 7 from the above activity and do a little open-class chatting on the shoulds and shouldn’ts of expressing gratitude when receiving presents.
• Show your students the video below and ask them to take notes on the advice given. To round up, ask your students to what extent they agree with the advice.

How to thank someone for a present

Step Four : Write or record your thanks

• Ask your students to think of someone in their family or social circle that they would like to thank.
• Give them time to think, then ask them to explain who they would like to thank and why.
• For homework, suggest that they express their gratitude to their chosen person in one of the following ways (you may of course like to give feedback on your students’ work before they send it off):

• Write and send a Thank You letter using a simple text-publishing tool like Pen.io.
• Record and send a Thank You audio message using a voice-recording tool like Vocaroo (tutorial by Russell Stannard here).
• Record and send a Thank You video message using a video-recording platform such as MailVu (tutorial by Russell Stannard here).

That’s about all for now! But, before you leave …

… click here for a final Thank You from me!

In most staff rooms when a teacher comes across a video with teaching potential news gets around by word of mouth. This sort of sharing is of course jolly helpful, and benefits everyone … that is, everyone who happens to be in the right staff room at the right time.

Last academic year, the English Department of the Servei de Llengües UAB decided to facilitate the sharing process a little bit more by setting up a video resource blog. You can have a butcher’s hook (US Eng: check it out) at how it turned out here.

The idea was simple: to create a blog, and then encourage teachers to publish any  interesting video-finds so that the whole department could benefit from them. We chose Posterous as a blogging platform because it enables posting via email, something that even the most tech-reluctant of teachers wouldn’t find too intrusive. Posting via email basically means that when a teacher wants to post a video the only thing they have to do is send the blog an email of its URL. The video content is then automatically embedded in a new post, which takes as its title the Subject of the email.

To see how easy is it to post a video to a Posterous blog via email here’s a short tutorial!

There’s not much more to it than that really. But before I sign off here’s a couple of tips you might like to bear in mind if you decide to set up your own video blog.

Tagging

Once videos start coming through, be a little careful with the nomenclature of your tags. Things can get awfully messy if teachers are posting videos on the same theme but using a variety of different tags, e.g. Food, Eating habits, Diet etc.  You will probably want to appoint somebody to be responsible for making sure there is no duplicating of concepts, which may require a little manual editing from within the blog itself.

Email syntax

Care should also be taken with the syntax of emails. The slightest divergence from the example below (e.g. not closing the brackets in the subject field) will result in a fail mail. It may be worth posting this up on your staff room wall as a reminder.

That’s all for now! Cheerio!

Hope you find this post useful!

This lesson is a fleshed out version of an idea I tweeted last week.

The video in question is the true story of a 16-year-old burglar who, as part of an Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme for young offenders, is made to write a letter of apology to the victim of his latest crime. However, far from expressing remorse, our hero shifts the blame onto the victim for not securing their home, and throws in a few insults for good measure.

The first three steps of the lesson (a lead-in conversation, the video and error-correcting the burglar’s semi-illiterate letter) build up to the main task of writing the victim’s reply to the teenage burglar.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin!

Step One : Lead-in conversation

• Introduce the topic of burglary, then put your students into pairs or small groups and ask them to discuss the following questions.

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Two : The video

• Show your students the video, which appeared on the BBC’s website on 24th November 2011.
• I haven’t had time to design a listening comprehension task for this, but you might like to ask your students to take notes on what is said and then hone in on some of the language used: I’m not bothered about …, He has a point, adjectives like obnoxious, rude, unrepentant etc

Step Three : Correcting the burglar’s letter

• The burglar’s letter is full of wonderful spelling and punctuation errors. Ask your students to search and destroy (i.e. identify and correct) them in pairs.
• When you’ve discussed the errors ask them for their reactions to the content of the letter.

Step Four : Letter writing task

• Put your students in the role of the victim and ask them to write a letter of reply to the burglar.
• You may like to scaffold the task by feeding in some functional language such as How dare you … | Given the fact that … I am prepared to … | I hope you feel … | If I were you I’d … | You should be ashamed of yourself … | I wouldn’t have dreamt of … when I was your age | …. is no excuse for … etc
  

Hope you find this lesson useful!

If, like me, you have a soft spot for the old Second Conditional and its Presentation, Practice and Production (at this point unplugged teachers may like to desist from reading further), but are fed up of asking …

“What would you do if you found a big hairy spider in your bath?” or even worse …
“What would you do if you won the lottery?“

… you may be interested in a “hidden camera”, moral dilemma TV series called What Would You Do?. The series is produced by ABC and is in American English.

Here’s a sample episode! Ask yourself the question below, then watch the video (you may have to click through to Youtube).

“What would you do if you’re sitting in a bar minding your own business and you saw an attractive young woman being persistently harrassed by a male stranger?”

Here’s some more (+ 2nd Conditional questions)

• Video 1 : What would you do if you were viewing a house for sale when you saw one of the other potential house-buyers putting things in her handbag?
  
• Video 2 : What would you do if you were in a restaurant when you saw the waiter drop some food on the floor and then put it back on the plate that he was going to serve?
• Video 3 : What would you do if you were in a bar and you saw a drunken young woman being led away by a man that she had just met?
• Video 4 : What would you do if you were in a bar and you saw a couple of pilots who were about leave for the airport obviously drinking too much alcohol?
• Video 5 : What would you do if you witnessed somebody trying to commit fraud by deliberately slipping in a supermarket and then threatening to sue for damages?
• Video 6 : How would you react if you were in a restaurant sitting next to a couple whose kids were screaming and generally misbehaving?
• Video 7 : What would you do if you were in a café and you overheard a young man trying to persuade his pregnant teenage girlfriend to have an abortion?
• Video 8 : What would you do if you saw a group of girls harrassing and insulting another girl for being overweight?
• Video 9 : What would you do if the person you had just let in front of you in a supermarket queue won an enormous cash prize for being “5 Millionth Customer”?
• Video 10 : What would you do if you saw a mother using her child to shoplift from a clothes shop?
• Video 11 : What would you do if you were walking down the street and somebody collapsed on the pavement right in front of you?
• Video 12 : What would you do if you were in a bar and saw a man drugging a young woman’s drink while she was in the toilet?
  

What I might do with these videos

Here’s a few ideas!

1. Ask your students to discuss the questions in class, then ask them to choose one of the videos to watch for homework. At the beginning of the following class, ask them for a brief explanation of what they learnt from their video.

2. Roleplay : Show your students one of the videos, discuss the issues involved, then ask students to reenact the scene in pairs.

3. Show your students one of the videos with the volume down and ask them to write the dialogue between the  people who appear. Stop/start the video to give them time to imagine and write down what the different people say.

4. … what would you do?

Returning to the title of this post (What would you do if you came across these videos?), if YOU have any other ideas on how these videos might be exploited, please leave a comment below! Thanks for dropping by! (Ian James | @ij64)

Hope you find this post useful!

In this lesson students watch a video on how to interpret photographs, then go on to describe and identify a series of famous photos using the 5 Ws strategy outlined by the presenter. There is an optional conversation activity at the end.

The lesson is best suited to upper-intermediate and advanced learners who have a certain amount of cultural baggage, i.e. those who will be familiar with some of the most iconic photographs reproduced in mass media. Have a look at the video first before seeing how it can be exploited.

Step One : Video and questions in pairs

• Tell your students they are going to watch a short video on how to interpret photos. Show them the video a couple of times and ask them to take notes while they watch.
• Stop the video at 0:28, put your students in pairs and get them to ask each other the 5W-questions mentioned by the presenter (see downloadable .doc below).
• Get some open-class feedback from your students.
• Stop-start the video (tricky, but not impossible) between 01:25 and 01:56 so your students can read the entries in the Explaining-the-image form at the end of the clip.

Questions for student A + B

Step Two : Describing photos pairwork activity

• Google-search some well-known photos and put them on separate sheets (Student A and Student B) for your students to describe and interpret. You can download a copy of some of the photos I’ve used in the past by clicking here or on the image below (of course, you will probably want to choose different photos, which are more relevant to your teaching context).
• In class, ask your students to take it in turns to describe some or all of the photos on their print-outs (encourage them to use the 5 Ws strategy from the video). The student who is listening should close their eyes and try to build a mental image of their partner’s photo. If they think they recognise the photo, they should explain what they know about it.
• Finish up the activity by allowing the students to show each other their photos and eliciting any comments they would like to make.
• Note : When describing their photos students should not mention the names of any well-known people who may appear. Instead of “It’s The Beatles crossing a road”, they should say “There are four young men crossing a road etc”.

Pairwork activity

Optional Step Three : Conversation

• Put your students in groups and ask them to discuss the following general questions on photography.
• Note : The document below is designed for projecting. If you’d prefer a photocopiable version, click here.

That’s about all I think! If you’d like to see some more photo-based activities, here’s a few on a previous post!

Hope you find this activity useful!

In a drive to reduce costs, the language centre where I work has recently introduced a ban on photocopying hand-outs for students. As a lot of the material I use in class are Word .docs of my own activities/exercises, at first this caused me more than a few sleepless nights. However, the change has forced me to start doing something that I should probably have been doing before: saving on paper and making greater use of the data-projector. But it was when someone turned me on to the wonderful Box widget that things really started to come together.

Instead of churning out photocopies, this is what I’ve ended up doing!

The process goes more or less like this …

• Project your .doc (typically, a grammar or vocabulary exercise) on the screen in full screen mode. This hides ugly toolbars and increases screen space.
• Ask your students to go through the exercise orally in pairs.
• Once your students have done the activity, elicit the answers and type them directly into the projected document.
• When you’re done, close the document, but don’t save it.
• Tell your students that they will find a downloadable copy of the exercise (without the answers you’ve just elicited and typed in) on their class blog. For homework, ask them to open this document, do the exercise a second time and then save it to their hard disks. Suggest that they create a folder (e.g. English Course) on their computers where they can save all the material they download during the course.
• After the class, make the document available to your students by uploading it to the Box widget which you have previously embedded into your class blog. To see an example blog-with-Box-widget click here, or on the screenshot below.

Box widget embedded in Blogger blog

• Note : Students may like to make a brief note of the correct answers as you go through the exercise in class. However, as they will have access to a downloadable version, discourage them from copying everything down in their notebooks.

A couple of tutorials you might like to watch

1. How to embed the wonderful Box widget

Tutorial 1 : Embedding the wonderful Box widget

2. What I do in class

Tutorial 2 : From Word to Box

Advantages

• Students seem to work more collaboratively when doing projected activities than when they each have a photocopied hand-out in front of them.
• Students do activities twice leading to greater possibilities for retention.
• The embeddable widget enables both you and the student to upload and download directly from your class blog.
• Projecting .docs avoids those mad last minute scrambles to the photocopier to reel off piles of hand-outs.
• You save on paper and board pens.

… and finally, here’s a little box music!

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Hope you find this post useful!

Since publishing my last post (a response to Brad Patterson’s Compare and Contrast blog challenge) several people have contacted me asking me to explain how to create spot-the-difference photos for pairwork activities. Here’s a quick step-by step video tutorial on how to do it.

Video Tutorial

Want to play around a bit more?

If you really want to go to town on on layering and erasing multiple photos, here’s a few examples of what can be done … they may be of limited teaching potential, but are fun none the less!

Three layers of photos

Three photos

Eight layers of photos

Eight photos

Hope you find this useful!

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Here’s my humble offering to Brad Patterson‘s (@brad5patterson) blog challenge Compare and Contrast. Most people seem to have chosen temporal themes to compare and contrast, however, not wishing to dwell too much on my 47 years upon this mortal coil (I know, I know … I look younger!), I have opted for something a touch more spatial. With no further ado … Tally-Ho!

Spot the 10 differences between these two photos!

Click on the photos to get the big picture!

Spot the 10 differences (Picture 1)

Spot the 10 differences (Picture 2)

If you’re interested in creating your own spot the difference photo pairs, you’ll need a camera, a tripod (or a friend with a steady hand) and a decent photo editor, like Photoshop. If you’d like more details, leave a comment below or DM me on Twitter (@ij64)!

Hope you enjoy this post!