Slide over to slideshare.net, EFL Tech-Tip -4

If you've been reading my blog postings for a while now then you'll already know that I'm a big fan of slideshare and even have my own page there.

If not, then let me quickly introduce you to a super source of material for your business, general English and ESP classes; teacher-training tips; grammatical explanations and much, much, more.

Slideshare is basically a platform where trainers, normal people and experienced consultants load up their powerpoint or open office presentations so that anyone who might be interested in learning from them can.

It's a wonderful source of authentic material, mostly highly professional and very informative.

The best of these are written with very few words, many images and thus work as excellent skills prompters.

You can use them as a basis to get your students chatting, writing, dissecting the issues in context or extracting core vocabulary. Get them making predictions, explaining backgrounds behind the ideas, comparing cultural influences or just simply learning English by learning something they're very interested in knowing more about.

Downloading from this site is a simple procedure: above each presentation which allows this function, there's a button you can use to do this. Look for the little pink heart which marks favorites - next to that there's a button with a down arrow indicating you can take the presentation and store it on your own computer.

And of course, if you don't have access to a computer in your classroom, you can also set the slideshares as a pre- or post-task activity (a.k.a homework) by sending your students the link(s) via email. Best, of course, is getting them to slide on over to make their own choices.

Useful links related to this posting:

Lesson tips using slideshare

Stuff I've used with my students, stuff I learned from, stuff I save here.
(see left side for tag types)

Best,
Karenne

p.s. If you've got any other great tips to share with us on how to use slideshares in the ESL & EFL classroom or if you'd like to tell us how you used one of them with your students, don't hesitate to do so - we can all learn together - click on comments.

Update 25-March-2008 for the smartphone/blackberry and i-phone users:
Slideshare available on your mobile phones (as far as I can tell, still free)

Introducing SlideShare Mobile: use SlideShare on the go!

View more presentations from Amit Ranjan.