Wordle

Do you know WORDLE? I have just discovered it!

WORDLE is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Here I show you an example about my blog:

TRY IT!!!: ***WORDLE***

Interactive Whiteboard Tips

Here are a selection of tips and ideas for making the most of an interactive whiteboard:

Revealing Vocabulary:
To revise important vocabulary, you can prepare a Smart Notebook file with a few words on a page. Each word is then completely covered with coloured blobs, stripes or even pictures so that children cannot read it. During the lesson, you then use the rubber tool to slowly reveal parts of the word. As the word is being revealed, children are then challenged to write the word (if they can guess what it is), and its meaning on their own mini-whiteboards.

Countdown:
This is a wonderful (free) piece of software, which is perfect for the interactive whiteboard. It is based on the Channel 4 TV show and children in my class have really enjoyed using it - they simply use the chosen numbers to find the target number within a given time limit.

Isn't it frustrating when you have just delivered a hugely dynamic introduction to your lesson and the children set off to work and then the first question as they open their excerise books is "What's the date?" and now all you can do is swap from the stimulating, thought provoking brainstorming ideas to a new window and display the date.

Most data projectors have a ‘Still’ or ‘Freeze’ button. This button is very handy because it lets you freeze the projected display. However, you are still able to use the regular display on your computer (i.e. the laptop / monitor screen).

This enables you to prepare things in advance, or check something for reference without distracting the children and still showing them only what you want them to see.

Find the Still / Freeze button on your projector - it’s very useful!

A FEW USEFUL SITES:
***Whiteboard Room - Offers lots of free downloadable whiteboard resources, covering different subjects / topics
***The Whiteboard Blog - Danny Nicholson's excellent blog for Interactive Whiteboard users. Has tips, links and resources to use.



***Source***: Teaching ideas

Hot Potatoes

Like JClic, HOT POTATOES is a freeware software that offers a wide range of possibilities. If you are busy and you don't have time to create them you can use the resources published on the Internet. Like this:

***Chicken Little***

Children can watch a movie trailer and then complete the gaps.

YouTube

YouTube is an invaluable site full of resources that can be used in our ESL classes such as clips from Disney movies, from American and British tv shows or songs and educational videos.

For example:

From Full House (aka "Padres forzosos" in Spain) we have the best quotes from Michelle Tanner:

It is a wonderful way for our students to get in touch with the real accent and to see the importance of English in areas like TV or cinema.

Webquest

Are you very busy to create a webquest?
Do you want to know some examples uploaded to the Internet?
Here we go:
*** Snakes Alive
*** Moonquest
*** Pilfrim Life Adventure

And a priceless library of webquests:
*** Webquest UK library
There you can find a wide range of webquests ordered by subjects.

Writing task with The Lion King

I want to share you a writing task. I created it with PowerPoint Presentation from Google Docs and I used screenshots from the Disney movie, The Lion King. Children in groups have to write the complete story.

Listening with GOEAR & GOOGLE DOCS

In relation to an activity requested by my University, I prepared this listening task to children from 2nd Grade. It is about the days of the week and parts of the body. I uploaded to goear.com a song from www.dreamenglish.com and I made a worksheet with a gap-fill exercise.

THE SONG:

THE WORKSHEET:
*** Days of the week (Google docs)