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How God made “the teacher”.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

It isn’t easy being a teacher, is it? So much we have to do and be capable of - almost takes super human ability.

However there is one quality that truly sets a great teacher apart. Watch this presentation and find out what I think that is…. it is an imaginary conversation between God and an Angel - discussing the new creation, the teacher..

Find more presentations like this on our new Inspiration page on EFL Classroom 2.0 . Enjoy and share, I put a lot of effort into this and others. Editing and creating.

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Tag Clouds for Ning and EFL Classroom 2.0

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

NEWSLETTER ARCADE TED TALKS VOCAB SOFTWARE PRACTICE INFO STORIES PEOPLE KARAOKE POP GAMESJOB UNIVERSE CHAT TEFList DIALOGUES STUDY TARHEEL EDITOR STORIES ETEACHING VOICETHREADS NFB SONGS RADIOCLICKNLEARN VOICE MEJUKEBOX COTEACHING LISTEN blog LESSONSBOOKS READERS/QUIZDAILY LESSON MINGOVILLE SPELL IT CURRENT EVENTSVIDEOS RESOURCES TEXTBOOKS SCRIBBLAR DOCSF & F LISTENING VIDEOS + PEACE BLOGS YAPPR EVENTS AUDIO TWITTER DISCUSSIONS PPTS PROF. DEV.TRANSLATIONCLASSIFIEDS CLASSROOMS 24/7 CHAT KARAOKE NING DISCIPLINE

I’m busy working on a tag cloud for all the tags here. But having troubles, the least the hundreds of hours of tagging that I’m doing. Consolidating them all. But I’ll keep you posted and soon we will have great search and click and go of categories for searching across the network quickly!

If you have any tips on how to get all the tags across a Ning network (videos/forums/photos etc..) into one call up - please let me know. I’m frustrated by how Ning doesn’t have this available and it would be so valuable for a content rich network such as our own. Also, it is just common sense for the possibilities which technology allows. I don’t want to drive a Porsche with a VW Beatle engine!

Thanks to all those who’ve contacted me and asked for this to be a priority! In the meantime, here’s a cool little tag cloud of EFL Classroom’s main pages.

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Our new English Tutor - self study is possible!

Monday, June 29, 2009


I’ve been investigating many new “chatterbots”, artificially intelligent characters that can help students practice and learn English online. Dave our wonderful chatterbot is under the knife but I think I’ve found a way to keep him on life support at least. You can still keep him company HERE.

However, I’ve designed the first prototype of a new bot. See our tutor above.

I spent many hours building and programming this using Verbots. It isn’t an easy process so I won’t bore you with the details but basically with their editor, I can program commands/rules so the chatterbot will randomly select sentences which the students can listen to and type in. Pretty basic but I’m going to come up with a vocabulary version shortly. TOEFL session to practice the hard vocabulary words. Students respond and after copying in the correct spelling, get the definition as a response. I’ll just input an excel file of the major vocabulary items and definitions and write the commands for the bot to respond…. stay tuned!

I’m interested in any thoughts about our tutor or even other unique ways it might be programmed. Let me know and even check out Verbots if interested! You can download their free chatterbot for use on your own website! Go to our Software page and scroll down to the Verbots section. You can talk and practice with a bot on our desktop!

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Michael Jackson - All his songs with lyrics for learning English!

Friday, June 26, 2009




Michael Jackson will never die! I truly believe that and when we commit to excellence, no matter what else our manner, a part of us will live forever. Michael Jackson touched eternity and we will enjoy his genius forever and anon.

I’ve traveled and taught English around the world. Wherever I was, I could count on one thing — being able to talk about the music of Michael Jackson. He truly was an idol, an icon everywhere and everyone, no matter their language knew a smattering of Michael’s songs. He brought us together and was truly an international “teacher” of English.

In his honor and to maybe get your students to “taste his music”, I’ve created a few nice Mix Tube playlists. If you missed it on “Websites of the Day” - here they are again.

Michael Jackson’s Music with Lyrics

Michael Jackson’s BEST Videos

This one is also a pretty awesome selection!

Further, don’t forget our HUGE Mix Tube collection of all the best songs with lyrics on youtube. Get them all and select in one place.

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Mix Tube - An easy way to “gather” your Youtube videos

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

MIX TUBE

Mixtube is a really simple way for teachers to make a list of their favorite Youtube videos You simply put in the url/address of the video and it will be added to your list. You can “borrow” a list of others and use it as the foundation to build your own. (just go to the bottom of the list and select - “create your own playlist based on this”. It is really simple! VeeWow is another option but Mixtube is even more user friendly.

The music industry is making it VERY hard for teachers to use music in their classrooms. They are the “Nazi’s ” of the Net. Mix Tube came about as a solution to the trials of Muxtape - a great site that now is limited and on Vimeo (a great place to find new artists/bands). Also, we know well what happened to our beloved MixWit! (see an example here - our past contest winner Justinnoxxi , we preserved this one!)

Here’s a huge one of great songs for the EFL classroom that have subtitles. No need to scour youtube for this anymore. Just go there and practice. You can also just use it for background music and shuffle it……. (Also see our Dizzler or Jukebox for the same thing!) If you want to add subtitled music videos, please do so and submit the new url to me! I’ll update for us! Can you help us build this great playlist? Let’s go!

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A People’s Dictionary? Words Web 2.0 style

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

I’ve long been one who “protests” the dictionary as a form of enslavement! It is a traffic cop, a false prophet saying and prescribing what words are “right” and which are “wrong”. BAAAAAAHHHHH

This delightful TED Talk is really entertaining and in her quirky way, this “lexicographer” pleads for technology to liberate words and give us a beautiful dictionary where words , ALL words are equal and beautiful and loved. It’s a great watch and you’ll pick up a few beautiful words. I love her wrapping up — “The internet like the dictionary is only words and enthusiasm!”. So true.

Recently there was a brouhah and huzza about the 1,000,000th English word. One was even plucked from the pantheon-Web 2.0 (I wonder who got the check/prize?). However, who cares how many? It is how they are used and most importantly, how words are sucked upon and LOVED! Dictionaries are just books written by people! Samuel Johnson’s collosus “A Dictionary of the English Language” comes foremost to mind - but whatever the effort, they are still human and just OPINION. I feel in love with his book and moreso his mind but the end result was I also began to see the dictionary for what it was - a fiction, a work of art (or trash).

If you are interested in challenging your own notion of “the dictionary” and thinking about how it really has harmed our language, the organic bloodwell of English - I’d recommend looking at a few of the earliest alternative dictionaries that challenged the institutionalized and imprisoned view of what is a word and how we should use it…. (and we still should challenge the OED - god! you even have to pay to look up one of the words they “own” - how can one own a word???) If I get the time, I’ll hunt up my own thrice almost published “Idiot’s Dictionary” and post an excerpt. Been awhile since I looked at this collosus I compiled during my poetic days……

A Philosophical Dictionary - Voltaire

The Devil’s Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce

A History of Lexicography and the Dictionary

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Using Lies in the EFL Classroom

Thursday, June 18, 2009

I’ve been thinking recently about how good teachers foster “noticing” in their students. Good teachers somehow get students to notice the “deeper” stuff about language - the nuance and information that just isn’t on the surface and easily translatable or apparent.

This really can’t be done directly. One might think so and I’ll respect that opinion but explicitly teaching grammar rules and morphological analysis or even being overt with error correction may work in some instances but overall, the research reports it is a pretty poor use of class time unless students have a very specific problem to address (ie. They don’t hear themselves pronouncing “r” as “l”, for example).

One good way to be implicit but still get students noticing is to use lies! Yes, LIES! (maybe I’m thinking about this because of my recent blog post - “The 7 Deadly Sins of Great Teachers“Have students tell lies and students guess which isn’t true. The most common example is the 3 Truths , 1 lie game. Students write 4 sentences about themselves. One must be a lie. For beginners the prompts can be something like:

A) I have ………………

B) I can ……………… very well

C) I like ____________ing

D) I don’t have _____________.

But you can make up your own to practice what you’ve been doing in your own classroom. Students must speak slowly and clearly and after, the other students guess which one is the lie. Even “debate” which one is the lie.

This is a great exercise because students begin to notice the emotional aspect of language and how we change our voices when speaking a lie. This is a high pragmatic skill that students should become aware of. One better way to practice this is by you the teacher telling a story. The students write down and guess the lies which are in your story. Can be really fun! Or tell a common story like the 3 pigs and tell a few lies/errors. Get them to figure it out!

BELOW - Here is a nice 3 wishes game with a warm up “LIE” game….

I also highly recommend Mario Rinvolucri’s recent article in The English Teaching Professional on this subject! A good read and he offers (as he so often does), really practical activities you can do with students (although many are for higher levels and you’ll have to adapt).

So- get lying! and stop Lying down!

3wishesGame.doc

Lying activities Mario Rinvolucri.pdf

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Teaching Struggles - Some Medicine.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

I have the honor and privilege of quite often giving end of year, end of course, graduation and other speeches to teachers. I take it seriously and usually end with a story. Stories work well and inspire. One of the ones I’ve used most often is this one - MAKE A DIFFERENCE. But I have a number of personal anecdotes and also folktales. You can read many others in the thread I’ve been keeping - Stories to Inspire and Teach….

However, last week I was confronted with the task of giving a speech to a group that had heard many of my stories before….. so I pulled a story that has been around the internet - out of my hat. Today, It is originally a self-help story about life but it applies to teaching. So I remixed and made it teacher friendly. I hope it inspires someone!

Here’s the Flash full screen version.

David

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Can you tell WHO is WHO?

Saturday, June 6, 2009

To me - Peace is about seeing the similarities within us all. We humans are hardwired for “difference”. Our egos dominate and our identity over powers. But really 99.9% of us are similar, the same, part of all life. We need this wisdom of seeing the similarities - if we are ever to achieve peace. Teach your students to see “same” and how in our yearnings, our desires, our emotions, our bodies, we all equally participate in the drama of being human.

To this end, there was a recent experiment undertaken by a Swiss artist Olivier Suter. Read about it below. Amazing! Which one of these children are a boy , a girl? Which one is Palestinian, which one Israeli?

– Thanks to Iqbal at Palestinian Mothers for bringing this to my attention. Please visit Project Peace for lots of great classrooms sharing songs of peace!

Can you tell the difference between an Israeli and a Palestinian?
By Dalia Karpel, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: Palestinians, Olivier Suter

The advertisement published in Haaretz in March read “Wanted: people who look alike,” and promised NIS 8,000 to anyone that could locate someone who looked like one of the eight people featured in the advertisement.

What the advertisement didn’t say, was that the eight people pictured were Palestinians.

The ad was made by Swiss artist Olivier Suter, as part of his project ‘Enemies’, which focused on the absurd ways people identify “the other”.
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The advertisement is similar to a project Suter performed in Belgium, which asked viewers if they could dfferentiate between Flemish and French speakers.

Out of the dozens of photos he received, Suter picked a photo of an Israeli girl and a Palestinian boy who looked alike. The girl is one Hadas Maor, whose photo was sent in by her father, geography professor Yehuda Keidar.

Keidar, a long-time supporter of a two-state solution said “[David] Ben-Gurion was right when he said ‘The Palestinians are not our cousins, they’re our brothers. Turns out, they could be twins.”

The Palestinian boy is named Adam Shurati and he was none too pleased about his likeness to a girl, according to his mother Nancy. Adam was further dismayed when his mother took him to have his hair cut to look like Hadas’.

Nancy, who lives in Bet Hanina, called the project “amazing” and said that her son’s resemblance to an Israel girl surprised her.

“The project is a work of art meant for all of us, not just for the sake of art,” Suter said.

Suter’s next “Enemies” project will take place in Rwanda and the Congo.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1089016.html

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ClassTools.net - A great place to make games/presentations.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Click here for full screen version

I’ve been back again to Russel Tarr’s marvellous ClassTools site. On the site, you can very easily make all sorts of presentations and games. Just click and check out the games on the side of the site. The one above I made in 2 minutes! Just get an embed code. No need to store on your computer, they’ll stay there safe and sound. Or just copy the address in the embed code to get an html page…(right up to .htm ).

If you want to edit this game, use the pw - efl20. Many types of games which can be made quickly!

Check out these great and FREE tools! Thank you Russel !

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