Aprenda Inglês - Voxy for Portuguese Speakers

Super excited to relay that in less than a month, Voxy for Portuguese-speaking English-language-learners is the number #1 education app in Brazil and has been downloaded a whopping 30,800 times!


If you're a English Language Teacher based in Brazil, do check it out and share with your students:

http://www.voxy.com

Aprenda Inglês - Voxy

What is Voxy?

Voxy uses web-based and mobile technologies to create a fun, flexible, contextual and convenient learning environment, providing interesting supplementary materials which support the language learning experience.



Why use Voxy?

It's free... and all lessons are based on current real-world news stories.  Learners have full control over the pacing and frequency of use and simple repetition games ensure students review the words they've encountered within articles they've read.

Geo-location based phrases provide relevant expressions they want in the moment they need to use them and camera flashcards help students to stay on top of words they're interested in knowing.

How can teachers use Voxy in the classroom?

1. Predict the Story

• Choose a few words related to one of the articles on the Voxy website and put these up on the board/ IWB.
• Before reading, ask students to guess what the story might be about.

2. Predict the Vocabulary

• Choose one of the most recent Voxy stories that has been popular in the local media.
• Before reading, get students to brainstorm the vocabulary which the story may contain.
• After reading, ask students how many had guessed correctly and what words could also have been added.

3.  What's the Grammar?

• Choose one of the Voxy articles.
• Ask students to analyze the different tenses used and discuss the reasons why these were chosen.
• Can they rewrite the story using other tenses?

 4. Choose a new picture!

• Get students to browse through current Voxy stories and to choose one they are most interested in.
• Can they find a different creative-commons licensed picture to go with this story?
• Ask them to explain why they prefer the picture they chose.

5. Rewrite the headlines!

• Get students to browse through current Voxy stories and to choose one they are most interested in.
• Can they write a better headline for the story they chose?

6.  Where in the world?

• Using a world map in your classroom, encourage students to pin-up printed out Voxy stories which have taken place all over the world.

7. Track and update stories

• Get students to browse through current Voxy stories and to choose one they are most interested in.
• Can they create a timeline and continually update the story as it unfolds or develops?

8. Discuss and debate

• Choose a controversial article and then divide up your class into two teams.
• Tell one half they believe in one side of an argument and the other half believes something else.
• Encourage them to debate the issue(s).

9.  Roleplay

• Choose a story with multiple roles
• Encourage students to pick roles and to write up a dialogue (e.g. an interview, a conversation)
• Get them to practice and role play the various events surrounding the situation in the article.

Have you got any other great suggestions on how teachers can use Voxy in their language-learning classrooms?

If you've already used Voxy in your classroom - what do your students think of our site?


Best,
Karenne
Disclaimer:  I am an ELT-Academic Consultant for Voxy


Useful links

• Voxy blog
• Voxy for Spanish speaking English learners
• Voxy for English speaking Spanish learners (in Beta)
• Voxy gets a further $2.8M investment

What's in the News?

"Pick a card, any card.

Share with us what you heard in the news today /this week/ this month..."

"Interesting!  I didn't hear about that, did you Frank?"

"No way!"

"He said what?  Anna, what do you think about people who do that sort of thing?"

"Uh huh, I agree."

"So what happened next- oh, the word you need for that is prejudice - preh.djew.dis - golly! Oh yes, Stefan, do write it down, it's spelt p-r-e... that is terrible and then what did they do?"

"Well done.  That was a very, very good story.  Thanks for sharing it with us, I hadn't followed the story myself... oh yes, you can put the card back on the table, yes face-up's fine.   By the way, Stefan, great grammar, I didn't hear you make more than one or two mistakes - perhaps you can work on your past perfect when you get home this evening - uh, huh, use link to the games I gave you last week.

So, who wants to go next?  Jakob?

Pick a card, any card..."


"Tiger, really - back, is he?  Funny."

~ ~


Best,
Karenne

p.s. Teaching dogme-style (or in any other communicative way) means that you put the student at the center of your classroom, or... let me see if I can say this in other words - Der Weg ist das Ziel (the journey is the reward) and not getting to page 65 by next Tuesday :-).  

It means your work is in the classroom, not before or after - but intensely paying attention to your students in TT focused listening; it means you encourage them and help make sure that the words that need to come out come out.

It means they spend most of the class time simply speaking.

Tech Tips for ELT Trainers-3: Using Wordle for Vocabulary

Have you heard of Word Clouds?

Wordle is a great site that allows you to create word clouds out of a text.

You can use this

• to pre-teach vocabulary, 
• do a predictive exercise on an article or a reading you're about to do, 
• make a vocabulary review exercise based on a lexis presented in a textbook and you can even  
• make a poster for your classroom of discussion starters.

Here's a video that explains how to use it:








Pre-teach vocabulary based on an article:
Simply copy a recent article on a subject your students are interested in (online from the net) and then paste this text into wordle. The most frequently used, key-words, will be larger. Get your students to focus on the smaller words and check understanding. 


Predictive exercise based on a reading you're about to present:
Read through an article and then choose around 15 words which you think are an essential part of the story. Type these words into wordle. Multiply the most relevant words exponentially so that some words take on greater importance, i.e. copy a couple of the words and then paste them in ten, fifteen, twenty-five times etc. - depending on how large you'd like some of the words to be.

Give the sheet to the students and get them to tell you what they think the story/ article will be about.

Make a vocabulary review exercise:
Take a list of vocabulary based on a course book you're currently using and import these into wordle, along with synonyms and antonyms, if you wish.

Give the list to the students and review them. You can also do a matching exercise with these.

Consider working different lexical sets within one wordle - say car parts, automotive collocations,  frequent idioms about cars, name of manufacturers and then get your students making different groups out of the words - try turning it into a conversation exercise.



Conversation starters:
Type a list of topics which are regularly seen in the headlines or brainstorm topics you know your students are interested in discussing into a wordle.

Print the wordle(s) out, magnify and paste it up on your classroom wall.

Regularly encourage students to choose which topics they'd like to talk about at the beginning of each class and hold 10-15 minute conversations based on the ones they chose.

Homework activities:
Get your students making their own wordles of words they would like to review in the next class with you.

Useful links related to this posting:
A Wordle I made about Facebook for Business English students
Article that goes with this activity
Notes and further lesson ideas I wrote on the biz-e-tech wiki.
More tips on teaching with technology here.

• Update 18March2009 -just found a few extra tips on Nik Peachey's blog, here.

• Update 20April 2009 - Tom Barrett has created a comprehensive list of different ways to use wordle. The list is mainly aimed at primary/secondary educators but contains many ideas which can be adapted for the EFL classroom.

•  Update 29May 2010 - Marisa Constantinides has written a post comparing different kinds of word cloud tools. JamieKeddie discovered a really useful way of keeping phrases together here.

Best,
Karenne
This post was last updated 29-05-2010

Have you already used Wordle

to create BE lessons? 

Have you got a great tip to share?

Technorati: education

Obama's big day is finally here!

Yep, that's me.

And yup, that's Obama in the background. Really, it's not photo-shopped.

It was taken in Berlin during the big speech back in July last year... I'd flown up to volunteer with Dems abroad and had a super-super-duper day.

However, as you can imagine, I've got to be around for my boy tomorrow to watch all things, via Facebook this time, so I'm not going to have time to blog about using this mega event in our English lessons.

I'm pretty sure you'll be 'dogme'ing it anyway but just in case you came on over for a tip or two, allow me to point you in the direction of another great teaching blog with lots of great suggestions and cool links!

Jeffrey Hill's The English Blog

Best,
Karenne

Happy! Happy! Day!

p.s. a week later: I used Jeffrey Hill's slideshare of Obama cartoons and got lots of mileage - my students were the ones who spotted the connections (the type of shoes thrown etc.,) that I'd have missed. Provoked much conversation however would recommend doing this only with students who have an interest in Politics, right?!

Flight 1549: disasters as fodder for EFL lessons?

UPDATE 8Mar09 - this lesson plan now has an additional animated video which can you use to discuss process with students -especially good if teaching ESP:Aviation students.


Disasters in the news are great opportunities to get your students talking.

Whenever a major crisis hits the news media, words and facts fly out and students begin embedding statistics about the event in their brains.

If your students are anything like mine, after any major incident, they arrive in the classroom bursting to share what's happened (maybe because I'm constantly reminding them that I want them to small talk).

They're often able to tell us in English- even the lower level students - just how many people were involved, where 'it' occurred and the process: the before, during and aftermath.

They have opinions too.

Sometimes in their passion of finally having a story for me, though, I see clear areas of grammatical weakness and occasionally their sequencing adverbs are a little off.

Does this happen to you too?

If you'd like to test this exercise out, the crash of Flight 1549 into the Hudson River is a great example. It's dramatic, it's almost everyone who fly's greatest fear and it had a happy ending.

A very 'real' way to demonstrate the importance of adverbs of sequence/ adverbials of time.

- first
- then
- next
- after that
- finally

get this picture here

If you'd like to spice things up and get your students stretching their linguistic muscles, add things like:

- initially
- firstly, secondly...
- while

Stick up words/ phrases + adverbial clauses like
- by the time
- during this time
- in the aftermath.

What exactly do stewardesses say?

To really hone in on the point, once you've finished discussing the story as it occurred in the news, why not go through in-flight safety instructions.

And for my TwIT teachers, I really don't have to remind you that you can grab videos of flight 1549's crash (here) to turn this into a great multi-media lesson. You can also use this tracking map from the New York Times.

SimplyConversations lesson:
Business Travel (freelancers, institutions)

Any more tips, tricks? Related links? Don't hesitate to add them below in the comments box. Ta!

Best,
Karenne

New:March8,2009

Animation Video



Recommended book: Aviation English
USA + world
UK
Germany

Noticing the news

Do you occasionally use news articles with your English language students?



Do your prefer using newspapers or do you like searching for articles on-line?

I used to use the articles from the Guardian Weekly (about once a month there's a lesson or two enclosed) however, these days I tend to prefer the stuff that's on-line.

The BBC's Learning English site has lessons bundled together with vocabulary activities. Often the topics they've chosen aren't that interesting or, surprisingly, not that topical either!

There are also a couple of sites which utilize news stories to springboard more in-depth discussions and active conversations.

I recommend:

• Breaking News English Lessons
  

• Languages Out There - materials which go way beyond just reading and looking at vocabulary. Challenging speaking activities - much different from the norm.
  

*if you'd like to recommend a site related to this theme, don't hesitate to add it below.

However if you've checked through these and unfortunately haven't found what you're looking for or you're simply in the mood for putting together your own news lesson, then here's a quick techie-sort-of-tip for you below.

PREP (10-15mins):

• Go to Google, look at the top bar and click NEWS.
  

Make sure your computer is set for Google.com (in English).

• Look at the left-hand side of the screen where it reads Top Stories >World >US >Business >Entertainment etc.

• Click on one or all of these and choose one article for each student you have. Choose stories you know are currently in the popular papers of their countries, if possible, or articles related to their professional fields. Print.
  

PRE-DISCUSSION

• Hand out a news story to each member of your class.

• Ask them to scan the article for content and also to highlight INTERESTING words and phrases. Make sure they understand that
  

they don't have to understand every word, they should focus on the story.

• Stop them after a reasonable amount of time has passed.

DISCUSSION

• Break your students up into small groups and get them to share each others' stories.
  

• Encourage them to use the words and phrases they highlighted when paraphrasing.
  

POST-DISCUSSION

• Ask students to transfer the highlighted words and phrases that are useful to their lives/professions or interests into their notebooks.

• Ask them to write new sentences using these.

Also read my blog posting on using
CNN student news


Useful links related to this posting:

GoogleNews

NewYorkTimes -LearningNetwork

Simple English News

Voice of America (listening)

A real-techie-TwIT-tip
Manga (good for lower levels, not really for business classes, not really news but you may find a cartoon or two that'll fit).


Useful book
on using newspapers and articles in the classroom

via Amazon, links

• Germany
• UK
• USA + world

If you've got any other top tips, please do feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

Best,
Karenne

CNN student news

23 September 2008

This morning I woke up late with a headache and the scratchings of a cold on the way.

Instead of my normal 6am start: time for checking my emails, facebook updates, web statistics, reading, etc. I slowly made a cup of coffee, potted about, got dressed and then realized too late that I hadn't prepped my 8am lesson.

My 8am's only 15 minutes walk from home but by the time it occurred to me that beyond their homework I didn't have any materials ready for our lesson, I had 15 minutes to go.

So, what'd I do?

CNN student news, of course.

If you haven't seen this site and haven't used it in an EFL lesson yet then check it out!

The site comes with video (mp4 via i-tunes), transcripts of the text and question sheets. Simply print out what you need, download the vid (free) pack up your computer and go.

In class, watch the video a couple of times (once without the transcript, once or twice with), go through the difficult vocabulary, do the questions and discuss the most relevant story in detail.

This takes an hour/hour and a bit.


If there's something of specific interest to your students within the report (in my case with this week's: the US financial crisis) then their homework is to follow-up on the story in the local press and report back next week.

Easy!

Karenne,