Breaking News English!

What is Breaking News English?

Breaking News? English? What it is all about? It is all about learning English in a fun and informative way! This is because Breaking News English is a website where you are able to learn something interesting and recent on a daily basis. It makes use of breaking news as the contents of a lesson and offers you various activities about the news on the same day the news break. What is more interesting and attractive for your students other than a lesson on something current and up-to-date? Breaking News English! All lessons offered by this website cover pre-intermediate and intermediate levels which can be done in classroom or independently. And it is free!

How it works?

It is very easy! First of all, go to the website Breaking News English and choose a topic (news title) on the list! For example "World's children care most about education" and select any activity that you want to do! Have fun and gain knowledge about current news and issues! You can also listen to the news recording if you choose to do the listening activities.

This website also offers complete lesson plans and activities that can be carried out in classrooms for example warm- up, pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading activities.

Breaking News English in ELT:

Advantages:

1) This website is specially designed for English language teaching and learning. It offers 26 pages printable activities and handouts for each of the lesson plan and they are free. Besides, there is a new lesson for every two days. So, this website is ideal for a very busy teacher! You can just take the ideas, print the activities, adapt if it is needed and teach your students!

2) Although the lessons offered by this website only cover pre-intermediate and intermediate level, you can always modify the lesson to meet the level of your students. 

3) This website promotes learners autonomy as your students can do all the activities provided at their own free times. Perhaps, you can do one or two activities together with your students in class to familiarize them with the website. 

4) The fact that this lesson is based on the breaking news which is current and up-to-date, it allows your students to enhance their knowledge with recent issues. This in turn, may help them to develop useful points for their writing course.

5) Most of the online activities helps students to improve their listening skill as some activities require them to listen to a recording before answering the questions.

6) Students may also improve their spelling skills and enrich their vocabulary through the activities provided in this websites. 

Disadvantages:

1) Students might cheat while doing the online activities as they can listen to the recording more than one in each activity that required listening.

2) No internet connection.

Wordle and Wordsift

What are Wordle and WordSift?

Wordle and WordSift are two online tools (or toy as they say) that used to generate word clouds. They are usually used to summarize texts or writing and make the most frequent words used in the text appear to be bigger. With these tools, it is easier for people to view the key points in the texts and save times. Each of these tools has their own features that can be adapted into English language lessons to make them more interesting and exciting! Lets meet both of these fun tools!

Wordle: Beautiful word clouds.

"You can tweak you clouds with different fonts, layouts and colour schemes. The images you created with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out or save them to the Wordle gallery to share them with your friends"

So, lets get started! It is easy to use this tool. Just go to the website Wordle and  start to create your own word clouds of any text you want to. You can either copy and paste your text into the box provided or just copy the URL of the sources of your text.  And send them for processing!

Within few seconds, you have your own word clouds. You can personalize the word clouds according to your interest and need and share it with your friends! Below is an example of a word cloud produced using Wordle:

WordSift: Visualizing words.

"WordSift was created to help teachers manage the demands of vocabulary and academic language in their text materials. We especially hope that this tool is helpful in supporting English Language Learners. We want WordSift to be a useful tool, but we also want it to be fun and visually pleasing. We would be happy if you think of it playful  as a toy in a linguistics playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts, and to help create opportunity to talk and explore the richness and wonder of language!"

How it works? Same as Wordle! Click this website WordSift and all you need is to copy and paste your texts and obtain an instant visualization of you text. The most frequent vocabulary will appear bigger.

WordSift is a bit different from Wordle as also provide some information that are related to the most frequent words in the text. For example, the sentences of the most frequent words and synonym.

                             
Wordle an WordSift in ELT:

Advantages:

1) Students can preview text using both of these tools. As the most frequent words appear bigger in word clouds, it helps students to identify  the key vocabulary and predict the content of the text they are going to read. This is important as research suggests that previewing text is a useful strategy for improving comprehension. Besides, the example source sentence in the WordSift, helps students to skim the text and make a complex text become more accessible. Students can also use these tools to preview any text that they want to read at their own times (promotes learner autonomy)

2) You can also develop speaking activity using these tools. Have your students to write their own short stories and ask them to create word clouds of the stories. In pairs, ask your students to show their word clouds to their partners and predict each other's stories. This is a fun an creative way to get your students talking and practice speaking. Their own produced word clouds may also be a motivation for them to talk about.

3) Your students can also use both of these tools to summarize their own writing in order to check them. Identifying redundant words or sentence structure would be easier if they use these tools.

Disadvantages:

1) Some students might prefer something more challenging as Wordle and WordSift might be less attractive and perhaps too easy for them (this is however depending on he level of the students you teach).

2) No internet connection at home might demotivate students to do word clouds on their own at their own times.  

Storybird (Artfull Storytelling)

What is Storybird?

Storybird is another interesting tool shared by Russell recently. It is a tool that allows you to express your imagination through a very creative way. From your Storybirds, you can turn them into short story books, play cards or greeting cards. They can be printed and shared among your friends. It is a great tool to encourage storytelling among students because it is colourful and full of pictures! Furthermore, it is free!

How it works?

First of all you need to sign up to this website. Having an account of your own allows you to save and publish your master piece. Storybird reverse the process of story telling by starting with the image and "unlocking" the story inside. You can choose you artist or a theme, get inspired and start to write your imagination into the canvas! 

Here is a video of a complete tutorial on how to use Storybird:

   

And below is an example of a finished Storybird:

Storybird in ELT:Advantages:1) A fun and exciting way to encourage storytelling among your students because they can express their creativity and imagination like a professional story book author.2) Storybird also offers a different approach to get your students engage in creating their own story by choosing a theme or pictures to get them started. It promotes a reversed process of story telling by starting with the image and "unlocking" the story inside. 3) This tool also promotes the sense of ownership and motivation. As your students create their own story, publish and share them, they may feel like a real author and feel motivated.4) You can also get the students to narrate their stories after they finished and share with the whole classroom. through this, speaking and pronunciation skills can be practiced.Disadvantages:1) Students may get carried away and fails to finish their Storybird (if assigned by teacher)2) No internet connection.

Intervue

What is Intervue?

Intervue is another tool that shared by Russell recently. Basically, Intervue is a tool where you can use to make a quick video response to anyone or to gather short video interview from anyone online. A webcam is an essential equipment that you need to have in order to operate this tool. Intervue enable you to make the process of gathering opinions from students easier as you no longer need paper or worksheets. All you have to do is set the questions you wish to ask and post it online on you Intervue account and obtain the responses via webcam. Interview for a lesson purpose can also be done through this tool and the most important thing is, it is free! 

How it works?

So how to use Intervue? It is easy and quick and free too! All you need to do is click Intervue and sign up for your own account. You need to provide your email and create a password. The same procedure applies to your students. 

Now you have your own Intevue account and you can start making your own short interview video or set up you own  questions to be answered by your students. You can also view and commet on your students' video responses and interview. 

Intervue in ELT:

Advantages:

1) The main advantage for using Intervue in your language classroom is that it allows your students to practice speaking privately because the recording can only be listened by you and your students. This will encourage your students to practice speaking with confidence especially those who are lack of self confidence to speak in front of their classmates. This in turn will motivate them to practice speaking more.

2) Intervue also allows you to keep record of the video responses that you gathered from you students. You can monitor the progress of your students in any lesson especially speaking lesson by using this tool.

Disadvantages:

1) Intervue has limited recording time which is only 60 seconds. It is a disdvantage for low level students where more time is needed for them to speak promptly.

In conlusion, Intervue provides you a useful way to encourage your students to speak. Guidlines and practice should be prepared by teachers to allows students to speak in Intervue especially for the low level students to speak within the time limit.

Dvolver

What is Dvolver?

Today I'm going to share a new tool that can be used in English Language Teaching (ELT). This tool is introduced by our lecturer Russell and it is called Dvolver movie maker. Dvolver is an online movie making tool that enable you to become a movie maker within minutes! It allows you to direct your own animated movie up to three scenes. You can also choose you own characters, your own scenes and create your own dialogues. All this can be done in a few easy steps and you can send your newly created movies to everyone! And the best part is, it is free!

How it works?

As I mentioned above, it only take a few easy steps to become a movie maker by using Dvolver! Follow me!

Step 1: Go to Dvolver website and be ready with your story line ideas! Now choose your movie background.

Step 2: Now you can choose your plot based on your idea of story line.

Step 3: Now you can choose your characters! Dvolver provides many characters that will definitely suits your story line. For example, I chose Ben and Nic for my movie!

Step 4: Now you can type in the characters' lines according to your own ideas. Here you can choose to add more scenes to make your movie more interesting!

Step 5: Now you can choose a background music to your movie or you can just simply add NO MUSIC if you decided to make a silent movie!

Step 6: Now it's the time to put a title to your movie and choose a design for it!

Step 7: At the end of movie making, you are able to preview your movie and send it to someone. You are a movie maker now!

Here is the example of a final product that I produced from this cool website! Check it out!

Dvolver in ELT:

Advantages:

1) The first advantage of using Dvolver in your English classroom is that it is fun! Your students will be able to enjoy learning English language using this tool because it is different from the usual classes where only papers and pencil involved. Once they found it enjoyable, this will encourage more participation from your students! More participation means more exciting your class will be!

2) Next, Dvolver provides context for the students. Contextualization in language learning is very important as it will enable the students to use language accordingly. Dvolver allows your students to choose their own context and create their own dialogue and expression based on the scenes and the characters they preferred.  Thus, it enable them to use language appropriately similar to real-life situations.

3) Dvolver may also enable your students to improve their communication skill especially when they work in pairs or groups. The discussion about making their own dialogues and movies with their friends will indirectly help them to practice and enhance their communication skill.

4) This tool also encourage creativity among your students. They are able to develop their creativity during the process of selecting the scenes, the characters and creating their own dialogues.

Disadvantages:

1) The first disadvantage of this tool is that it has limited characters, limited scenes and limited number of utterance in each dialogue's box for the characters. Therefore, it would be a bit difficult for the beginner to compress their dialogues in one box. Besides, the limitation of characters may discourage your students if the characters provided does not match theirs in mind.

2) The movies that your students produced cannot be saved for editing at a later time for a correction purpose.

3) Your students might get carried away by the technology and ignore the important instructions or information that you gives during the lesson.

Regardless all the disadvantages that you may find with Dvolver, it is still very useful tool to be used in ELT or in other classrooms. The idea of engaging students with this lively movie making tool is very much more exciting compared to the normal language class. For more information about Dvolver, just click on Russel Stannard 's website! Thank you!