This was a context builder for a sequence of lessons on viral videos, viral ad campaigns, viral marketing, etc. It’s similar to the idea I shared for introducing recipes. Anyway, used this with B1+ teens, worked well.
Task 1
Find loads of links to (good) viral videos. Our focus was on viral marketing, so I chose lots of ads. Create a QR code for each vid and add these onto a handout in a table like this one:
I gave students this instruction: (more…)
It’s the penultimate week of term. State schools are on holiday, so the students have already requested something ‘fun’ and ‘light’ for lessons this week. The current topic is food. It’s lacked a creative task so far, and I don’t want to go over old ground (designing a themed restaurant, menus, crazy recipes, and so on). It’s time (I think) for the Bake Off…
Note: this lesson does not involve baking! (more…)
I was asked on my FB page where I find good videos for class. I stumble upon them now and then (like here, thanks Lana), but I also find these sources pretty useful. Hope this helps! (more…)
Here’s a simple idea for introducing recipes. Put these QR codes up around the room:
I do love a good video-based lesson. Jamie Keddie at lessonstream does them really well. Kieran Donaghy’s lessons on Film English are good for focusing on certain themes. Vocabulary in Chunks and AllatC are two great blogs sharing video lesson ideas – the latter isn’t updated much now though. There are lot more video related content around (like the ISL Collective video quizzes or the listening tasks on TubeQuizard), but there’s always room for more.
Fluentize (formerly known as Veslio) offers ‘modern English language lesson plans based on real-world videos for teachers with teenage or adult students’. Nik Peachey recently endorsed it on his LinkedIn feed so I blagged a promo code off the creators to check it out. (more…)
I feel like I say this a lot, but thanks to ELT-cation (Svetlana) for yet another great lesson idea. Your post on Wordless Videos for ELT was awesome.
I used the Western Spaghetti video from PES as inspiration for a crazy recipe task…
The basis of the task was for students to…
1) choose a dish they know well, write down the ingredients
2) think of a theme (sports, school, music, etc)
3) relate each ingredient to the theme – so for a school theme bread might be an exercise book, pepper might be chopped up pencil lead, etc
4) Write the recipe and illustrate
5) post-it note vote on the best/strangest recipe
Svetlana’s post came along at the perfect time for our module on cooking. It was a great end of term task for the students. They produced some really creative work that on the whole was pretty accurate and included plenty of target language for cooking processes. Thanks for planning my weekend lessons Svetlana! I guess that was a gift from one British Council to another!
In Developing Materials for Language Teaching (2013) Tomlinson introduces a text-driven approach to materials development. He goes into quite a bit of detail regarding text selection, offers a suggested framework for the approach and provides a practical example (pages 99-114). I won’t attempt to summarise, I’ll just say read the chapter! It was the most useful and applicable reading I undertook on my recent MA course.
For the purpose of this post, here’s the framework overview, taken from Tomlinson (2013:110, ©Bloomsbury)
click on the picture to enlarge
We had to plan a lesson using the text-driven approach for a unit assignment. I chose to use my favourite poem as the text – Blessing by Imtiaz Dharker. Here’s a nice dramatization of it (I think originally BBC):
You can find the full text here
These activities are pitched at upper-intermediate, for young adults/adults.
I’m based in Bangkok, hence the personalisation in the first activity… (more…)
Lessons that involve designing a new invention or product have cropped up at 5 of the 6 summer schools I’ve worked at. I came across this video the other day that gives me a new lead-in to the topic…
After 44 seconds the video starts to reveal a series of interesting inventions to help with routine/household tasks. The inventions include a plate smashing machine, an automatic thumbs up/down hand, and a bed separator! (more…)
You really must check out these two sites: All at C and Vocabulary in Chunks. I’ve started to use a lot more videos in class and these have some great resources on them!
Sometimes I come across resources, especially videos, that make me think ‘this would be really useful for introducing a lesson on [INSERT TOPIC HERE]’. I often forget about them if the topic doesn’t come up in the textbook soon. I’m going to start storing these videos in my ‘lesson ideas’ section, so I can come back to them when needed! I hope you find some of them useful too! When I get enough videos I’ll put them all into one post.
First up, here’s one I found yesterday. It’s about a radio-controlled car who creates their own little adventure:
(more…)I use a lot of videos in class these days. There’s no shortage of inspiration for film lessons online, and a bit in print too. We received a 
copy of Film in Action last June, which Martin Sketchley reviewed here. This book (plus the accompanying website, Film English) has great resources and ideas for using videos in class. There are some other brilliant sites to bookmark – notably All.at.C and Vocabulary in Chunks, which choose some great clips to build lessons around! The best resource I’ve ever come across for using movies in class was Shrek in the ESL Classroom by Brian Boyd (of Grammarman fame). When I create my own video resources I often find myself delving into this booklet.
Anyway, here’s something I made recently. It’s based on a classic kids cartoon called Funnybones (which were great books too). I used it with my 10 year olds during Halloween and it went down well.
This post is less about the actual video, and more about showing some example activities to use with short film clips. I hope it gives you some ideas for making your own lessons using videos, especially with YLs.
Here’s the clip:
