Webwatcher: online tools for teachers

Advertisment

spot_img

Russell Stannard pans for more internet gold.


The websites I am recommending here represent a gold mine for teachers. There is something here for everyone, including whole books with both the print and recorded audio available, a fantastic collection of excerpts from films, TV and the news, an amazing website of vocabulary exercises and a site that helps you find words with similar sounds, which is useful for creating online exercises.

 www.loudlit.org/ 

This brilliant site offers a collection of books and poems and is especially good for high-level classes. The texts all come with an audio version, so you can read and listen to them being read aloud at the same time. This is a wonderful resource if you want to get your students to read a book over a term, as they don’t need to buy it and can access it from the internet and even download the sound file and the text. There are only a small number of texts online at the moment, but new ones are being added all the time and they include such things as short stories, poems, children’s stories and classics such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Emperor’s New Clothes. One great thing about using this site is that the students can download and listen to the story, or read it themselves, or both, so they have the choice. If they say they are too busy to read the text, then get them to put the sound file on their phones and to listen to it from there.

I use books a lot in class. I get my students to read one or two chapters of a book and I start a lesson by putting the students into groups and writing eight to ten basic questions on the board for them to discuss. If I find that one or two students in the class have not read the required chapters, then I get the students who have read them to update the others on the story.

www.digitaldialects.com/ 

This site offers vocabulary exercises in a whole array of languages. Each language has a certain number of topics, such as numbers, colours, fruit and vegetables, animals, etc. You can first learn the words by hearing them and being shown illustrations, and then you can check your understanding by doing some simple ‘click on’ type exercises. I really like the site because the images are extremely clear, the sound files of excellent quality and the activities are simple but effective. This is a site that is well worth recommending to your students.

www.rhymes.net/
It is not always easy to think of words with similar sounds, especially when you are trying to make worksheets or activities for your students. This tool does all the hard work for you. You simply type in a word and then click on the ‘Search’ button and the site will find words that have similar sounds. Not only that, but it will organise them by the number of syllables in the word, too.

This website is growing all the time. It now offers lots of other sections, including lists of synonyms and antonyms, lyricsand definitions, but it is the rhymes section that I particularly like.

www.time.com/time/video/search/0,32112,,00.html?cmd=tags&q=10+Questions 

I love using video in class and this site has an amazing collection of video interviews with famous people. The format is always the same: they are asked ten questions. It is great because it is up-to-date and includes people that the students will already have heard of. I like to start a lesson by telling my students to imagine that they are going to interview a certain famous person and getting them to think of ten questions they would ask them. They can then watch the video and compare their lists of questions to the actual questions that were asked. Then the second time they watch the video, the students can focus on the actual answers.

www.soundboard.com/
What a site this is! It has an enormous collection of extracts from films, TV and historical events, which provides excellent listening material for a lesson or useful content for discussions. The material is organised into categories, such as Celebrities, Historical, Political, Television, Media and Science/Nature. You can find speeches by J F Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Winston Churchill. There are even collections of clips of sporting events. It would be great for project work.

A word of warning, though. You have to be a bit careful with this site and I wouldn’t recommend it for children to use alone,as there are extracts from adult films like Pulp Fiction.

One thing you can do with an extract from a film is to start by showing a picture from a film that the students have seen and getting them to go through the story briefly. You can give them some basic questions to discuss, such as:

  1. Who starred in the film?
  2. In which location or locations did the film take place?
  3. What happens in the story?
  4. Did you like or dislike the film and why?

You can then play an extract and the students can contextualise it and talk about what part of the film it is from, what happened before and what happened after. Of course, you could then go on to analyse the text, the vocabulary or even the grammar.

You can find out about these sites in more detail (and a few extra ones, too) by watching the help videos at the following site: www.teachertrainingvideos.com/10jan/index.html


Russell Stannard is a Principal Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. He won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and Communications Technology in 2008, TEFLnet Site of the Year in 2009 and a 2010 British Council ELTons award, all for his website www.teachertrainingvideos.com.


This article first appeared in issue 73 of English Teaching professional, March 2011


 

More articles

spot_img

Recent articles