Youtube subtitles tutorial

This is a video tutorial for creating subtitles for your videos using nothing but youtube web interface.

Recorded with Screencast-o-matic.

Sad Mouse - Mark's story (an activity)

This is a lesson plan I developed for my TP teaching. It focuses on transforming words from one part of speech to another (so for instance happy, happily and happiness) and correct usage of the forms in sentence. The whole lesson is designed around a story. Recommended level of students is intermediate.

1) I begin with telling students what we are going to do today (create a story) and tell them two pieces of information about the main character (his name is Mark and he is not happy). Then I let them brainstorm both questions and answers using question words (What is Mark's job? Why is he sad? Where does he live? etc.) We end up with a basic idea of the character.

2) I show students a slide with several pictures depicting reasons why Mark is not happy. I let students discuss in pairs what I each picture represents. Afterwards, they share their ideas with the whole class.

3) After the these two warm-ups designed to intrigue the students, I get to the main aim of the lesson. I begin by making a table on the whiteboard with three columns - nouns, adjectives and adverbs. I give them an example on the first line, such as surprise, surprised and surprisingly. Then I hand out pieces of paper with a short text on them:

The students will find ten words in bold in the text. They are asked to determine the correct part of speech of each of the words. This way, they see the different parts of speech in use in the text. Next task of theirs is to rewrite the sentences by transforming each word in bold into a different part of speech. This task requires a bit of invention from their part but it is good for practicing working with the language. It is important to stress to the students that they may change the sentences any way they need in order to work the given word in the sentence. So the first one might be: "Mark didn't wake up happy because his dog sadly ran away the previous day." Or a more fancy version: "Mark woke up with sadness in his heart..."

nouns	adjectives	adverbs
happiness	happy	happily
sadness	sad	sadly
possibility	possible	possibly
honesty	honest	honestly
patience	patient	patiently
surprise	surprised	surprisingly
hope	hopeful	hopefully
luck	lucky	luckily
amazement	amazing	amazingly

4) Students will watch a three minute video (I subtitled mine but can't make it public for copyright reasons). Then, they are asked to summarize the video in five sentences. A screen with the events in the video in several steps was provided to guide them.

After they're finished, they will need to insert one noun, one adjective and one adverb form into each sentence. They may choose from any word from the text from the previous activity or choose from suggestions on screen:

The sentences may go something like: Mark patiently waved at people, or With luck, he met another person in costume, or He angrily kicked a street trash bin.

At this point, the lesson was taken over by my colleague who went on teaching phrasal verbs that has to do with the topic of relationships and Mark and the girl in the costume became a couple. As homework, the students were asked to finish the story any way they like. There was also an interactive element, because we asked them to include a part where Mark leaves a message for her girlfriend on an answering machine and the students actually recorded this message with their own voice using Vocaroo and pasted the link to the recording directly into the story. I think this was a nice way to make otherwise common task more engaging.

The idea behind this lesson plan was to give students idea of how are nouns, adjectives and adverbs commonly used in an English text (they often mixed these parts of speech in the past) by presenting them with the text in the activity n.3 and then make them work with the language autonomously in the activity n.4 without any guidance.
During the feedback however, it was pointed out to me that more guidance would be appropriate. So I would suggest to include another activity for smoother transition between n.3 and n.4 and to basically take it babysteps with students.

Fotobabble

Fotobabble is an internet service providing an easy way to record your voice to a picture of your choosing. In terms of teaching, it can serve as a great tool allowing students to record themselves describing pictures. Since describing picture is a common part of English speaking exams, this is a great way for practicing in the comfort of home.



(As stated in assignment description, this is me talking about a picture on the topic of knitting.)

Who Wants to Be a Millionare? English quiz

This is an example of a revision quiz themed as the once popular TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionare? Here is the link to the quiz. The Flash site uses authentic sounds and graphics and can be used to create your own customized quizzes. We used it in our teaching group as a revision before handing the students the actual exam. According to their feedback, they enjoyed the experience very much :-)

1. Jimmy (age 10): I (go) to school every day. (am going, went, go, am go)
2. (There is) a dog in the picture. (there are, there is, is, is there)
3. I play tennis twice a week. I (often) play tennis. (always, often, never, seldom)
4. Barbara (reads) a lot of books. (is reading, read, reads, reading)
5. John doesn’t like (dancing). (dance, to dancing, danced, dancing)
6. I (be, never) to France. (never was, was never, never have been, have never been)
7. (Have) you ever tried bungee jumping? (Did, have, do, has)
8. The women in the picture (are shopping). (is shopping, shop, shopping, are shopping)
9. Michael (bought) a nice pair of shoes yesterday. (buyed, bought, has bought, has buyed)
10. (Did) you go to the cinema last week? (have, has, did, do)
11. I can’t help you in the kitchen. I (am watching) TV at the moment. (watch, am watching, am watch, watching)
12. I have never done yoga before. I (would like to) try it one day. (want, am wanting to, would like, would like to)
13. The Earth (goes) around the Sun. (is going, went, would like to go, goes)
14. I only bake cookies at Christmas and Easter. I (occasionally) bake cookies. (often,frequently, occasionally, never)
15. Are you now ready to take the test? (Yes I am, Yes I do, Yes I will, Yes I have been)

Afterwards, we awarded students with a coupon allowing them to take the mid-term exam :-)

My Vocaroo recording

Vocaroo is a simple web service that can be used to record your voice or voice of your students, just like I did here in this post. The recording can be then shared via e-mail, link, tweet, web embedding, whatever...

Record music with Vocaroo >>