flynn089

For a long time now I've really admired and been fascinated by the work of Amanita Design . They have a really unique approach and I love the way they blend photographic textures with cartoon images. I also find their games quite addictive and that's I quality I always look for when trying to find stimulating materials for students, so I've been looking at how these games could used for language development. The two games I've chosen for this posting are Samorost 1 and Samorost 2 Samorost 1 is based on the scenario of an asteroid heading towards a planet. The player has to click various elements of the screen and find out how to help Samorost change the direction of the asteroid and save his planet. In Samorost 2, Somorost's dog is stolen by aliens and the player has to help Samorost rescue the dog. So why use these games with EFL ESL students These games are fascinating and very engaging. They are quite mentally challenging and help students to develop analytical...

Earlier this week I posted a short article to my Quick Shout blog about a new site called Virsona that enables teachers and students to develop their own AI ( Artificial Intelligence) chat bots. Since then I have been trying the site a bit more, developing tutorials and thinking about how we can use it with our EFL ESL students. To get an idea of what a 'chat bot' is, got to this page and start asking Abraham Lincoln some questions: http://www.virsona.com/ecchat.aspx?cvid=212 The chat bot has beeen programmed with lots of information about Abrham Lincoln and each time you enter a question the bot searches it's log and tries to match key words from your question with its log information. This all sounds very compicated, but the site actually makes it quite simple to create your own bot which can either be yourself, a fictional character or a historical or real person. The students can add information to their chat bot in a number of ways: Write diary log entries Email in...

In the first part of this series aimed at sharing the sources of the information I blog about, I focused on sites which spread the word about new technology or websites. In this second part I'd like to spread the word about some of the more ELT and Educationally orientated blogs which have provided me with a wealth of information and professional development. First of course has to be Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day ……For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL This site is a huge and constant source of information and new sites and resources. Larry also produces categorised lists of resources so it's well worth searching through his archives. The blog is up dated a number of times each day, so to really get the best of it and to stay informed you should sign up to his RSS feed. http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/ Free Technology for Teachers This is another great blog. It's aimed more at general education than at EL teachers, but a lot of the sites and activities it mentions cou...

One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students. Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot. Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles. So how do we use this with EFL ESL students? We can use this in a number of ways to enhance writing activities. Send a postcard activity - One of the options on the snapshot interface is to email the images we take to other people. When we do this we can add an email text telling them about the image or what we have found at that place etc. We can ask our students to imagine that this is a postcard to the class and to write about an imaginary holiday they are having. Photo journalist - We can send our students on photojournalism as...

I've just discovered Wordle , which is a really useful site for creating word clouds. The word clouds are created by entering either a text, URL or del.icio.us user name into a field. The site then generates a word cloud based on the frequency of key words in the text or webpage. Here's what a word cloud based on the URL of this blog looks like. The word clouds are really easy to create and can be printed up for classroom use or saved to a gallery on line. To see how this is done watch the tutorial movie below. How to create a Wordle word cloud You can download a higher quality Quicktime version here (Right click and the 'Save as') Or download for i-pod / i-Tunes here How to use this with EFL ESL students This is a wonderful flexible tool to use with students. Revision of texts - You can paste in short texts that your students have studied recently. Show them the word cloud and see if they can remember what the text was about and how the words were used within the tex...