CivieBlog

I love the power of images and their adaptability for teaching, so I can't say that I'm upset to be almost overwhelmed with really great tools for exploiting Flickr at the moment. The latest of these is Flickriver, an incredibly simple Flickr search tool that creates an endless webpage (just keep scrolling and the page keeps getting longer!) of Flickr images based around either a search term or whatever it finds interesting on the particular day you visit the site.

This is great because it provides you with and endless stream (or I should say river) of images as you scroll down the page. You can keep scrolling and pull in thousands of images to the page.

This is what it looks like. I started by just scrolling through the random images that appeared when I opened the page, then I went back and typed in 'sport' to see what images would appear.


How to use this with our EFL ESL students
This is a great tool to use with a projector or an interactive whiteboard as we can put it up in front of the whole class. Most of these suggestions would also work if we had students working in small groups or pairs around a computer too.

• Word association - Get your students to associate words with the images as you scroll through them. 1 student to each image. Once you have got through 20 or 30 words, get the students to work alone or in pairs and try to write down all the words they heard. You can scroll back through the images to help them remember.

• Brainstorming vocabulary - Type a tag word based on a theme you will be studying into the search field and scroll through images getting students to suggest words that the images evoke on the topic.
  

• Rapid sentences - You could do a similar activity to the word association one, by working round the class getting each student to produce a sentence about each image as they appear (one student for each image). This will enable you to push the students fluency, by getting them to think quickly as you scroll to the next image. Again you could consolidate this by getting them to write down or try to remember the sentence that was produced for each image. This will ensure that students do actually listen to each other.

• Stream of consciousness story - You could make the above exercise more challenging by telling the students that each sentences for each image had to become part of an ongoing story and then see if they can remember the story at the end.

• Picture grammar drills - You could use the pictures to create drills, by telling the students they have to make a sentence about each picture using a particular verb form. This could be present continuous (describing what is happening in the picture) 'going to' + infinitive (predicting what is about to happen in the picture) present perfect (describing what has just happened before the image was created). This makes drilling a much more engaging and creative activity. Each student could create a drill sentence per image and the other students could copy them or you could go round the class getting a different student to create a sentence individually for each picture.

• Memory game - Get your students to watch as you scroll through 10 - 20 images. Then stop and put them in pairs to try to remember what all of the images were and describe them. Then scroll back and see how many they got right.

• What's the association? - If you try more abstract words such as 'skinny' or 'vocabulary', the images produced can have only a very tangential connection to the search term. This is perhaps a good way to get students thinking more carefully about the way the words are used and what connotations they have as they try to explain the connection between the tag word and the image.

• New words dictionary - As new words come up during the class you can search these and find images which help students to understand the new word. This strong visual should aid their memory. They could even decide on which image best illustrates the word and copy it into a digital vocabulary record of some kind.

What I like about this site

• It's free and very easy to use
• The site gives you access to far more images / flashcards than you could possibly ever carry into class
  
• There is a constant stream of really high quality striking images
• One of the things I like is the unpredictability. The images change each time you return to the site and there seems to be a constant stream of new ones.
• Really nicely designed site

What I'm not so sure about

• You might find the odd inappropriate image depending on what your search term is and depending on the age and cultural background of your students.
• The site does sometimes produce some very curious results for some words!
• Sometimes you can get a sequence of very similar images, if someone has just uploaded a batch of images with the same tag to to flickr.

Well there it is. Flickriver, another really great image tool. I hope you enjoy it and are able to use some of these ideas with your students and of course do leave a comment if you want to suggest other ideas.
Related links:

• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage
• Great Time Line Tool
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Interactive presentations
• A Picture's worth
• Picture phrases
• Make Your EFL ESL Yearbook
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• Exploiting Image Sequences

Best

Nik Peachey

I've just found this very useful tool that allows you to compare words and phrases and how they are used online. It works very simply by taking the two words or phrases that you type in and searching through Google to give you the results for each word. It tells you which is the most popular and how many pages each one appears in.
There are a few other tools around which can do a similar thing, but I prefer Google Battle, (an alternative is Google Fight) because it shows you a nice graphic of a smiling face and a sad face for the winner and loser, and because it also supplies links to the Google results, which means you can have a look at the context in which each word or phrase appears. This can supply valuable information about the way we use words in different contexts and their lexical grammar.
Here's an example comparing 'operate on' with 'operate in'

The very first result for 'operate on' shows that it is being used in a medical context.
If you compare this with the first result for 'operate in' you can see the context is quite different and in this context it has a different meaning.
By extracting these 'real' examples of the way the language is used and helping students to analyse and make deductions about the language we can help students to develop valuable autonomous learning skills.

So how can we use this with our students?

• This is a great way for students to search and compare the use of prepositions when they aren't sure which is the correct one to use.

• Likewise it can be really useful for checking collocations and the way they the different words and phrase are used, as in the 'operate' example I gave above.
• You could also use it to check word forms when checking the different parts of speech of a word. With word like 'economic' and 'economical' which are both adjectives, students can check to see how the different forms are used and when to use the correct one.
• Students could also use this to check different spellings of words to find out which is correct.
• When learning or teaching new vocabulary we could use this tool to extract examples of similar words being used in context. We could use these to create gap-fil sentences, cloze texts and other learning materials for students.
• We could get students to find real examples sentences which use the new words they are learning especially words with synonyms (slim, skinny) or words that have gradients, to see how the different words are used and when to use each one.
• We can get students to compare British and American words to see which is most popular.
• Students can compare the popularity of idomatic expressions like 'Raining cats and dogs' vs 'Storm in a tea cup'.
  
• Students can search the results for two different words to find out which one has the most uses / different meanings.
  
• We can also use this tool for discussion warmers comparing popularity of things. Which of these do you think is most popular?
  Dogs or cats?
  Madonna or Britney Spears?
  Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings?
  cook or chef?
  Students can vote on which they think will win and why they think it will be most popular.
  

What I like about it?

• Simplicity.
• This is a free and easy tool to use which gives you much of the power of a concordancer.
• Because it links in to Google it gives you access to vast amounts of information about the words.

What I'm not so sure about?

• Because it links into Google to search examples from the internet, you can't control what your students see in the results, so some of the results may link to inappropriate materials.
• It searches words within text, so it gives youy limited information about how the words are used in spoken language.

Well I hope you enjoy Google Battle and find it useful and if you have any other ideas for using it please do post a comment.

Related links:

• Creating Word Lists
• List Your Favourite Words
• Learn Some Cliches
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Video Dictionary 2.0
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Picture phrases

Best

Nik Peachey

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 text. You can build up a bank of word clouds over a semester and pull them out at random to get students to recall the texts they have studied and the key vocabulary in them. You could also see if they could rewrite or reconstruct the text based on the word cloud.

• Prediction - You can create word clouds of texts before the students read or listen and ask them to make predictions about the content of the text based on the word cloud. They could also check any new words from the word cloud that they are unsure of before they read or listen.

• Dialogue reconstruction - You can create a word cloud of a dialogue students are studying and use it as a prompt to remember or reconstruct the dialogue.

• Short poems / Haiku - You can generate a word cloud from a short poem or Haiku, then ask students to create their own work based on the word cloud. They could then see how close they came to the original.
  
  

• Text comparison - You can create word clouds from a number text genres (news article, poem, story, advertisement, dialogue etc.) and then see if the students can decide which genre each is from and why. You could also do this with a small collection of poems short stories or articles. Then students could read the complete texts and match them to the word clouds. Here are two poems. One is from Shakespeare and the other is from Robert Frost. Try to decide which one is from Shakespeare. How did you know?
  
  
  

• Personal information - You could get your students to each create a text about themselves and then turn it into a word cloud. You could them put the clouds up around the class and see if the students could identify each other from the cloud. They could exchange clouds and use them to introduce each other.

• Topic research tasks - You can create a word cloud based around a topic you want students to research. You could use a page from Wikipedia to do this, then use it to find out what students already know about the topic by asking what they think the relevance of each of the word is to the overall topic. They could then go to Wikipedia and find out more. Then report back on their findings using the key words as prompts. Here's an example I created by cutting and pasting the intro text on Cairo
  
  

• Learner training - This is a good tool for students to use regularly to help themselves. They can regularly make copies of the texts they study and pin them up to revise them or keep them in their gallery on the site. They could even create word clouds of their study notes to help them revise.

What I like about it

• It's free, quick and very easy.
• You don't need to register or part with an email address so it's a low risk site to get students using.
• The word clouds are very attractive and will stimulate more visual learners.
• Having key word prompts is a great way to support more fluent language production, but avoids having students just reading texts.
• It's nice that the students or you can customise the design and choose colours and fonts that they like.
  

What I'm not so sure about

• Would be nice to have a more effective embed code for blogs (There is one, but it's not very effective) I've used a work around to embed these ones.
• Saving the word clouds as PDF is possible, but again a bit tricky unless you have a MAC (That's another good reason for getting one)

I've really enjoyed trying out this site and creating word clouds. Hope you do to. I'm sure the list of suggestions above is by no means exhaustive, so if you have any ideas for how to use this with your EFL ESL or other students, by all means post a comment and share your ideas.

Related links:

• Prompting reading speeds
• Animating vocabulary
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Picture phrases

Activities for students:

• Learn Some Cliches
• Using Word Clouds to Remember Words
• Improve Your Vocabulary and Make Friends

Best

Nik Peachey

This is a really nice tool that I have just discovered. It's called PhotoSoup and it generates wordsearch activities based on any topic in just seconds.

It's very simple and works on images from flickr. You simply type in your topic and the site automatically generates a word grid and image clues. You then have 90 seconds to find all the words. You can get hints and even get it to show you the answers.

Watch a short video to see how it's done. (499k swf)

How to use it with students

• This is great for vocabulary revision, especially with higher levels. Students could even learn some new vocabulary from it.
• It would look great on an interactive whiteboard (IWB) or you could give students a collection of vocabulary themes and get them to work on their own.
• Good to use as a filler for students who finish early
  

What I like about it

• It's free
• Each wordsearch it generates is pretty much unique
  
• The timing adds an element of motivation and competition to it
• It's just so simple
• I tried a random selection of very unsuitable words that students might put in and it seems that those words are censored, so you don't have to worry so much about badly behaved students looking at unsuitable images
• It's actually quite tricky

What I'm not so sure about

• Because it's based on the tags that images are given the words can sometimes seem a bit tangential
• It's actually quite tricky
• You can't save your wordsearches (Actually I've just discovered that you can. If you look at the top of the page you can click 'embed puzzle' and this will generate a code that will enable you to embed the wordsearch into a webpage or blog)
  

This is the kind of site that might have been custom made for language teaching.
Hope you find it useful and your students enjoy it.

Best

Nik

This is the third part in a series that I’m writing on how to use word processors to create computer-based materials. This one looks at how we can create interactive multiple choice activities using 'dropdown' menus.

Multiple choice must be one of the most common question types in the history of education. I’m sure we all answered them when we were at school and we have all given these question types to our students.

When I was at school, we used to call them ‘multiple guess’ questions, because we knew that even if we didn’t have any idea what the correct answer was, it had to be one of the choices, so we had a 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 chance of guessing the answer correctly.

In the movie tutorial you will see how to insert the dropdown menu, add your choices and also add a ‘help text’ which can be used to give clues or the correct answer.

• Dropdown tutorial movie
  

Students access the ‘help text’ by clicking on the dropdown field and pressing F1 on the computer keyboard.

Here’s document with some interactive fields in. Click on them and then push F1 on your keyboard to see how they work.

• Dropdown examples

There are a range of ways you can give clues

• Direct students to a part of the text
• Remind them about time relationships (for verb tense exercises)
• Remind them of context
• Remind them about part of speech or word morphology
• Give them pronunciation clues (it sounds like)
• Give a translation
• Remind them of the unit of the coursebook / lesson when you covered the topic

Adding clues, rather than correct answers, will help to make the exercises developmental rather than a test of knowledge / memory.

You also need to be careful in your choice of words both when you select the word that you want to use from the dropdown activity and when you add your choices.

If you are selecting words from a text, then look for clues within the context which will help the students to deduce which word is correct.

When you add the ‘distractor’ words, try to make them reasonable alternatives. You could use this exercise to focus students on common problems, by using errors from their own written texts and the correct version as alternatives. If you do this, don’t focus only on their negative aspects, but also try to include some of their positive aspects of their work, like good use of vocabulary.

Anyway, hope you find this useful and by all means leave a comment if you have used this feature in other ways.

Best

Nik