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Using video clips with teenagers can be enormously motivating for them, IF you get the right content. Getting the content right involves taking a look into the lives of our students and finding out what kind of things they are watching. One of the most high profile examples of this is LonelyGirl15 . LonelyGirl15, which became a Youtube phenomenon, depicted a young teenage girl talking to her camera and discussing some of the intimate, bizarre and often incredibly trivial issues of her life. The ‘show’, a series of 2 -4 minute clips, was soon attracting audiences of millions and it soon emerged that it was a ‘fake’ and that the LonelyGirl15 was an actress working with a small film crew and script writer. Since then the show has transformed into a sort of on going thriller. there is now both a UK version, KateModern as well as the original LonelyGirl15 series. For more information on the plot and background see: LG Pedia These two shows provide a huge potential source authentic langua...

Sound Transit is a really wonderful formulation of an idea. It's not just a huge collection of Mp3 sound files from all over the world, but the sounds have been tagged by country and described and a visitor to the site can take a sound journey around the world. You just choose your country of origin, your destination and how many stops you want to make. You then get offered a choice of itineraries with stops at various destinations and descriptions of what you will hear there. You choose the one you want and then the site edits together the individual sounds to create a unique sound journey for you. You can then download your mp3 sound journey, listen to it online or send it to a friend. To try this go to the Book a Transit part of the site. It's just like booking a flight on an airline website (except that it's free and a lot more user friendly!!) Alternatively you can search the database of individual files by country, keyword or creator and just download the sounds you...

This is a really handy little tool which is doing the rounds at the moment. It's called CuePrompter and it's an online Teleprompter. For those not in the know, a Teleprompter is a tool used by news readers, TV presenters etc to help them remember their lines. They read it from above the camera. This one is very simple to use and you simply cut and paste your text into the field, choose screen size, text size and colours and click a button and you are off. Once you have your text up on the screen you can then choose the speed that the text moves at and also do a few interesting things like having the text reverse or having the text as a mirror image! This video shows you how it is done How to use this with students This could be really useful to push your students reading speed and gist reading. Many students find it very difficult not to focus on every word of a text and get stuck when words come up that they don't know. With a tool like this, you can literally force the...

Celtx is a nice free project work tool that can help give real shape to your class projects and make for much greater involvement and collaboration between students. It's a fee piece of software designed for creating media type projects such as movies, advertisements, screen plays, theatre plays etc. Once you've downloaded and installed the software, you choose what kind of project you want to create and then complete a series of templates which help you to outline various scenes, describe characters and assign roles, create story boards, index the different scenes and move the around. You can even upload images and videos of various parts or the project. What's also really nice is that you can upload the work to the Celtx centre server and work collaboratively with a group of people online and when you have finished you can even publish your work for other users of the software / site to critique. How to use this with students When ever I've tried to do drama, video...