TED talks worth using in your English classroom!

Just wanted to share this! I think Sarah Kay’s talk is a fabulous resource for students and teachers of English alike! A mixture of poetry performance and poetry writing seminar – it makes me want to run out and form a spoken word poetry club.

The second clip is Suheir Hammad’s TED talk. I think the ways you could use these clips with students is pretty limitless. What are your TED talk favourites?

Atiya

GIVE YOUR STUDENT A MOUSE TODAY!

Mouse Mischief is free educational software from Microsoft that allows your whole class to connect to your computer/interactive whiteboard using individual mice. It integrates into Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, letting you insert questions, polls, and drawing activity slides into your lessons. Students can actively participate in these lessons by using their own mice to click, circle, cross out, or draw answers on the screen.

Share your slides with authorSTREAM!

http://www.authorstream.com/

authorSTREAM allows you to publish and share your PowerPoint presentations. It also allows you to download published presentations as videos. It is based on PowerPoint formatting, is easy to use and offers some very useful and unique features. Offering more than the basic PowerPoint creation greatly expands its value.

Special features of authorSTREAM include the ability to make public presentations, download presentations as FLV, MP4, AVI, and WMV files, present live to an online audience anywhere in the world, and the ability to create a “channel” or collection of all your online work. With this application, you can add YouTube videos and sound narration directly to your presentations.

DRAMA IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM

Drama is an excellent tool for developing educational strategies in the English classroom. Through drama, students put into practice the use of the language they are learning in meaningful contexts and situations, enhancing their language skills. Real communication involves feelings, ideas, emotions and all these aspects can be developed through the use of drama techniques. As many experts have proved, drama techniques in the English classroom releases imagination, fosters the social, intellectual and linguistic development of the children as well as a sense of responsibility and co-operation among students. It also has a therapeutic effect and, one of the most important things, IT IS GREAT FUN!

 

A Teacher’s Guide for The Merchant of Venice

These useful lesson plans and classroom activities are provided by PBS as part of the ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre series.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/merchant/tguide.html

60 Second Shakespeare

This is a fabulous site for the Shakespeare teacher or simply the Shakespeare fan. It includes all of Shakespeare’s most famous plays done up in student-friendly and attractive, attention-getting form. The challenge is for students to develop their own ’60-second’ bit of Shakespeare. The site includes examples of different formats and offers everything from teacher lesson plans to “master classes” in teaching students how to do things such as audios, films, and photo slideshows as well as the more common newspaper articles and acting classes. The site also allows viewers to “vote” on their favorite renditions. This website requires Windows Media Player or Real Player.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/shakespeare/60secondshakespeare/watch/index.shtml

A Guide to Teaching the Interpretation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It

Walter Deverell, The Mock Marriage of Orlando and Rosalind, 1853

These 8 lessons were designed by Dwight H. Inge for inner-city high school students. Students work with vocabulary words, character traits, reading comprehension skills, and seeing parallels between the events of the play and modern life. A final assignment asks students to use the writing process to write a review. Also a very good classroom teaching/lesson planning resource for English teachers.

http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1987/2/87.02.09.x.html

http://www.zooburst.com/

http://www.zooburst.com/

ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that is designed to let anyone easily create their own customized 3D pop-up books. Students can use this to tell a story, and be creative and imaginative. The 3D pop-up really brings a story to life and makes it much more fun. You can rotate around the book in 3D space, add your voice to the characters to have them speak, and even use a webcam to add yourself into the story in augmented reality. Very cool!

There is a gallery of stories, so you can search and get some ideas. You can upload your own graphics and images or use some of the 10,000 free images and materials they have on the site. You can share the book by sharing the URL or you can even embed it in a site.

This is a great way to get students creating stories while having fun and being engaged. It can really bring out their creativity. Students can even use it to show their mastery of a topic by creating a tutorial book on that topic.

Atiya

ASYNCHRONOUS YET ENGAGING!

VOICETHREAD: ASYNCHRONOUS YET ENGAGING!

One of the best free tools available to teachers and students who are learning with the world rather than about the world is Voicethread.

VoiceThread is an interactive collaboration and sharing tool that enables users to add images, documents, and videos, and to which other users can add voice, text, audio files, or video comments. A trusted tool for collaboration, professional development, and digital storytelling.

Atiya

http://www.photovisi.com/

http://www.photovisi.com/

PHOTOVISI is a web application that turns your pictures into a collage which you can then download free. Great to illustrate story telling in an ESL class!

Atiya