Quotes

This one is inspired by Shelly Terrell's webinar, Using Quotes to Teach and Inspire Students , thanks Shelly for that and all the other great ideas. Find the recording here.


One of the greatest powers of social media is the free flow of worthy ideas that often come in the shape of quotes. People do share inspirational quotes, no one can deny.
The visual nature of Facebook also causes the flood of quote-images.
True, teens sometimes share things that sound nice, without much consideration. Some quotations are just fake , some make no sense at all. (And of course the source remains unknown.)

This activity will make your students read, create, think somewhat critically and speak.

Ask them to find quotes that they either like or hate, found online, in a movie or in a book.

Tell them to post all of them on your group wall. (This phase will make them search the Internet, look through their Facebook newsfeed, think about films they saw, perhaps in L1, then they have to find the original script or the quote.)

They might want to use http://www.brainyquote.com
A way to use it:

Now that the group has many quotes you can use them in many different ways offline, in the lesson.

Give them the first few words of the quotes and ask them to finish them as accurately as possible

• Ask them to form groups according to which quotes they like and let them explain ...
• Take some colourful markers, coloured paper, crayons, magazine clippings, glue and make them create posters for the quotes
• Ask them to make up fake quotes
• Encourage them to get to know more about the person who said the quote they like 
• Use Shelly's ideas :)

Please add your ideas to these :)

Motivationals, demotivationals

A popular genre to share in Facebook is "motivationals"(image in a b/w frame with a caption).
They are sometimes quite nasty, sometimes pathetic.
Many times wise quotes are shared in this manner. 
To deepen the experience of reading a book (graded readers as well) ask your students to pick sentences from the book they are reading and create a motivational poster with it and share their posters on Facebook. Commenting is mandatory :)

Santa digital storytelling

Ask your students to go on http://www.faceinhole.com/ and create a Santa scenario with their faces uploaded like this: 

Then they are to write a story about how they suddenly became Santas under the post in a comment.

The mini-project requires them to register on the site (Facebook registration is also available although it wasn't able to find my Facebook albums when I wanted to use  an image from there.) 

Finding their ways on the site will force them to read in English and the outcome is a short piece of writing in Past Simple, Past continuous, etc.) 

It is a little bit of creative writing, they will definitely inspire each other.

The site itself offers somewhat inappropriate content here and there so look out for that.

Your precious comments are more than welcome :D

http://www.faceinhole.com/us/my-faceinhole-detail/id=28497dbcc1111361b9

Reading--with a bit of skimming

A Facebook group is an ideal platform to share links. This example is sharing a reading test. My students often use the strategy of reading and translationg texts sentence by sentence, which makes the process of reading extremely slow and I have the feeling they will never ben able to read really...
So I find online speed readers quite helpful (http://www.zapreader.com/reader/, http://spreeder.com , eyercize.com) which allow you to copy any text and set the reading speed then read it at a given speed. If this speed is fast  enough, students will have no tome to "translate" everything word by word or sentence by sentence.
In this task ask your students to copy the text of the reading test itself in the speed reader (http://www.zapreader.com/reader/) and read it at a given speed (300wpm, they can set on the page) before they actually do the reading task.

http://www.examenglish.com/PET/pet_reading4.html
http://www.zapreader.com/reader/