On 10 March I had the chance to take part in an outstandingly magical, surprising, inspiring ELT event called Surpr@ise Day in Kosice organized by Vladimira Michalkova and Chuck Sandy.
Prezi on using Facebook in ELT:
2012. március 13., kedd
2012. március 8., csütörtök
Reflection
Exam training can be quite boring. Sometimes students just lose the motivation as they are really conscious about the mock test results. Also test-preparation materials can be pretty boring themselves. By asking your students to give a short reflection about a given task their learner autonomy can be awakened. Good to know why they do a certain exercise.
You can set up a poll in Facebook question:
What was this activity good for?
You can add answer options as well of the members can provide those.
Music
The simplest way of exploiting your learners passion for music is to ask them to share their favourite music videos. Then they can do a range of things with those favs.
They can easily find the lyrics and turn them into cloze-tests with the help of a cloze-maker http://l.georges.online.fr/tools/cloze.html
They can use the images of a video. They stop the video at a point, they note the time but keep it in secret. They describe the scene in a comment and the others have to find the given scene in the video and write the time point in a comment.
They may simply lip-sync the video like this:
They can easily find the lyrics and turn them into cloze-tests with the help of a cloze-maker http://l.georges.online.fr/tools/cloze.html
They can use the images of a video. They stop the video at a point, they note the time but keep it in secret. They describe the scene in a comment and the others have to find the given scene in the video and write the time point in a comment.
They may simply lip-sync the video like this:
You can just take phrases or words from the songs they submitted and play a quiz to find out which song it was from. Write a collaborative stories/letters using the phrases, words.
Translate grammar sentences
One of the low-fun activities for me is the translation of sentences from L1 to L2. Some exams still have this tasks and some students still choose exams that have it. Of course they are beneficial though. Khmmmm...
Suppose your students are to translate a couple of sentences that are examples of a certain grammar points. You can post these on Facebook, you can assign two or three sentences to one student. After having translated them peers can correct or comment on each other's sentences.
Variation:
Suppose your students are to translate a couple of sentences that are examples of a certain grammar points. You can post these on Facebook, you can assign two or three sentences to one student. After having translated them peers can correct or comment on each other's sentences.
Variation:
They will use Google Translate, it will give them sentences with errors. Why don't they correct them?
You can also give them google-translated sentences with errors, they would have to correct them and find out the original L1 sentence.Coursebook exercises with non-connected sentences
Coursebooks often have guided practice exercises where you find single sentences numbered, under each other, students are to use the appropriate word or the words in brackets in the right form.
I often find that students simply neglect the meaning they do the task automatically. They are simply too lazy to think and say one or another answer, not really wanting to get it right. It is funny but also a waste of time. When I see that my students are missing the point with tasks like these I try to make them imagine the situation depicted in the task.
An example:
Sentence from the exercise:
Billy has eaten/ate all the watermelon form the fridge.
Digital teens tend to quickly choose one of the options without too much thinking. Let’s colour it a bit:
How old is Billy?
What does he look like?
What was the last thing he ate?
On Facebook you can start a conversation about 'crucial' thing like Billy's hair, it may make the exercise a bit more memorable. If these comment threads are fun enough students might take up looking for the the meaning in these seemingly monotonous tasks.
I often find that students simply neglect the meaning they do the task automatically. They are simply too lazy to think and say one or another answer, not really wanting to get it right. It is funny but also a waste of time. When I see that my students are missing the point with tasks like these I try to make them imagine the situation depicted in the task.
An example:
Sentence from the exercise:
Billy has eaten/ate all the watermelon form the fridge.
Digital teens tend to quickly choose one of the options without too much thinking. Let’s colour it a bit:
How old is Billy?
What does he look like?
What was the last thing he ate?
On Facebook you can start a conversation about 'crucial' thing like Billy's hair, it may make the exercise a bit more memorable. If these comment threads are fun enough students might take up looking for the the meaning in these seemingly monotonous tasks.
Trollfaces
Do you know trollfaces?
Facebook teens are surely familiar with them.
They can create their own trollface comics to practice any kind of dialogue. To make it collaborative they can create a whole comic book and put it on issuu.com.
Facebook teens are surely familiar with them.
They can create their own trollface comics to practice any kind of dialogue. To make it collaborative they can create a whole comic book and put it on issuu.com.
Principles for designing Facebook activities
- collaborative
- allow for creativity, individuality
- cater for stalking and narcissism
- students should work more than the teacher
- bite-size activities
- relevant to life and language aims
- fun
- account for differences
- look like Facebook (Facebook genres)
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