Optical illusions are a Facebook genre, they are often shared, they are fun.
Look at the red point for 30 seconds and blink at the wall:
Hmm? Great, isn't it? There's a difference between the inverted pic and the one you see when blinking at the wall :)
How can it be used as a Facebook EFL/ESL task?
1 Ask your students to create and post pictures like this or you yourself create one. (Portraits, places, objects, all depending on what your language aim is.)
How to make a pic like this?
Get an image, invert its colours (image editors can do it, even Microsoft Paint, you can do it online at http://www.converthub.com/invert-colors/ for example).
Draw a dot in the middle of it.
Done.
2 Students are to comment on the pic. (It can range from descriptive sentences, opinions, something like
"First I thought it was a sad face then it turned out that it's a happy one."
"It was surprising."
3 Tag some studets (2-3), assign them to write a summary of the comments. (The summaries are supposed to be the very last comments.)
4 Peer review:
Ask them to "correct" the language used (all the comments and summaries) by rewriting it in their own correct version. (No red marks, just a new version, hopefully they will consult references, Internet, dictionaries.)
5 Reflect/review on the reviews (diagnostic, remedial work.)
This seems to me as a relevant task, because
- it's on Facebook
- it's semi-authentic language use
- the subjects of the photos can be your students themselves, anything they are proud of, anything that they use to build their 'brand', 'image', they have a chance to show themselves (if they want to)
- it may be a hip activity with little teacher effort (students provide pics, they comment, tagged people summarise, peer review)
- it doesn't take too long or require much work
- fun
- personal
Please try it if you fancy and meets your aims, comment and add your ideas!
