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For a long time now I've been fascinated with viral marketing campaigns and the way advertisers use these to promote their products. What's really interesting about them is the advertisers ability to come up with really novel and original ideas to capture our attention and make us want to share with others. My Fame Star is a great example of this and one that we can use to create lesson materials. What it does, is enable you to upload a photograph and then create a story around it. It then converts this story into a small video report. Here's an example I created called 'How my past caught up with me.' (You'll have to watch a short advertisement first) Example: Click here if the video doesn't play How to use it with students Create a video about yourself or a fictional character and ask your students to watch it and make notes about your life story. Get your students to create their own stories then put them in pairs to listen to each others' story ...

Here's something that's fun for the weekend and beyond. A site with a collection of image and gif generators that you can customise with your EFL ESL students and add their texts to. This is an example one I created with talking flowers giving a warning about the environment. The site also offers talking squirrels Talking cats And a few other things like tomatoes , owls and a wizard . There's also a generator that helps you add a text to a packet of cigarettes and also a newspaper which I really like. It's really easy to do, you just add your text to a field and click the generate button. You can then either download your image or get an embed code to add it to a blog or website. So how do we use this with EFL ESL students? We can use the animal and vegetable animations to get students to express opinions about different topics we discuss. It can often be hard to motive students to do this and using a tool like this reduces their 'exposure'. We could get stud...

Flashcards have always been one of my favourite teaching tools and with the FaceinHole website I've found a place where I can quickly create my own personalised ones. The site is easy to use. You just need either an image of yourself that you can upload or a webcam that you can take a picture with. Then you choose the picture you want to put yourself into and upload your image. With a bit of resizing and colour adjustment you can have a set of your own personal flashcards in just minutes. Then you can either embed them in a webpage like these ones, have a link to them on the site or print them up to use them in class as flashcards. How to use these with students These kinds of flashcards can be used for a multitude of purposes. They are great for generating stories / personal anecdotes ( The time I met Paris Hilton etc). You can use them to practice a range of grammar structures. The ones below could all be used for 'used to' and students could either ask about the exp...

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...

Phrasr is an interesting new website that allows users to input sentences, phrases or even entire paragraphs and then turn them into illustrated slide shows using Flickr images. All you have to do is type in your phrase and click, you then get an image for each word. If you don't like the image you get then you can change them and when you are ready you just give your work a name and title a click to publish. What you then get is like a slide show of images with words. Here's an example of what it produces. This one is based on the old expression; "You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink" Here's another based on the first verse of a Shakespeare sonnet (130) Sonnet 130 Once you have created your picture phrase you can either send it to a friend by email or go to the archive and find it to copy the URL. If you want to see just how quick and easy it is to create these then watch this short Flash tutorial movie (800k) How to use this with students...

This is something that caught my eye last week. I just couldn't resist adding a feature about it here, though I think this does come with some warnings and reservations. Pictogame.com is a website which enables you to create your own games very easily with just a few easy steps. All you need to do is: upload a picture, select the part of it you want to show choose a game type add in a title and description. Then you simply click to see the completed game. You need to register to upload and save the game, but it's free and very quick to do. There are quite a few different game types to choose from, but there are lots of examples on the site that other people have made, so you can look at those to help you decide which type to make. Here's a rather annoying game that I created in less than 5 minutes Make a game | Share | Free games | Pictogame So how do you use this with students You could just create a game using a picture of yourself and use it; as a filler for those s...

Flipz TV is a really useful piece of free software for creating entertaining audio-visual materials. The software enables you to record your own audio monologues and lip-sync them with a choice of animated talking heads. It then turns them into small Flash files which can be run in a web browser. These can be put on the Internet, run form your computer desktop, or the Flash files can even be delivered to mobile phones. Here’s an example that I created using a Sonnet (130) by William Shakespeare. (You’ll need to have the sound o your computer turned up) Click here to see an example Use the small controls on the right to stop and replay the audio. What I like about this software, apart from the novelty value, is Flipz creates quite small files. You could easily email the file to students with some instructions so they could listen at home or in a self access lab. Or put them on their phone or mobile device. You could make some really useful homework tasks for them. The students could eve...

D- film is a really useful website that has been around for a few years now. The site makes it very easy to create short animated movies with colourful characters and cartoon style dialogue in bubbles. (Be careful though, some of the characters may be unsuitable for younger learners less mature students.) The site is really easy to use and you just click your way through various screens selecting backgrounds, characters, scenarios, soundtrack and credits. You also type in your own short dialogues. Then when you are ready a single click turns the whole thing into a Flash movie. You can make short single screen animated movies or longer ones by adding more scenes. You can then email the link to your movie either to yourself or to your students etc. How do I create movies? If you watch this tutorial you can see just how easy it is to make a film. Tutorial movie (458k flash) Here’s an example of a film that took about 2 minutes to produce. Example movie This link takes you straight to t...