Taming the IT beast!
Visi Alaminos gives us some useful tips and techniques to make the most of the World Wide Web and our computer lessons, and introduces us to her website.
Are your computer-based lessons frequently chaotic? Do you feel as though you spend more of your time dealing with problems than actually teaching a lesson? Don’t despair! The solutions may be simpler than you think. Usually they lie in three broad areas: classroom layout, the tasks students are set and the way we manage the class. Here are a few tips to turn your computer class from a ‘free for all’ to a ‘success for all’!
Preparing the class
Firstly, make sure your computer is at the back of the class. That way you have far more control over what’s happening; you can easily see if they’re on task or connecting to MSN Messenger. In the computer room, seeing their screens is more important than seeing their faces. If space is a problem, keep a spare table available for any students who are waiting to share a computer. This also serves to ground students who misbehave!
Creating a shared folder
A little technical preparation is also worthwhile. If you’re working on a network, ask your technology coordinator to set up a shared folder. Shortcuts to websites can be stored here, so that students can simply double click on the link and go straight to the site. It also serves as a place where students can save their work for you to check, and for you to store worksheets in case the Internet connection fails. An off-line Plan B is essential, and Microsoft Word has many features which are useful to language learners such as the translation tool. Its tendency to translate literally can be used to our advantage. For example, students can translate a song by right clicking on the lyrics and deciding if the translation provided is an adequate one. Very often it is not, but it’s a good way of drawing students’ attention to the strengths and limitations of dictionary translating and of sharpening up their dictionary skills.
Whatever the activity, I always print out a set of step-by-step instructions for each of the activities I want my students to do with space for them to write down their answers and their scores. At the end of the lesson I collect these in, but students must also save their work under their own names in our shared folder.
• Word activities
Other tasks involving Word can include highlighting words or finding and replacing letters. I usually paste a short text into a document, then using the Find and replace option in the Edit menu on the tool bar (or Ctrl + L) I create gaps for specific consonants and vowels for my students to fill in. I also ask them to highlight parts of speech in different colours. You can find tutorials for all of these at www.visi.es/tutorials.html . Another good idea is to have a few pictures and photographs of celebrities saved in a folder. Students can insert these into a Word document and create a description. You can encourage them to use the grammar and spell check, but again, wisely.
• Games
If the Internet connection’s down, games can be an engaging alternative. Again, it’s a good idea to download these first, check how they work and save them in your class’ shared folder. Word by Word is my adaptation of the famous TV show Pasapalabra. In this game two students take turns to guess a word beginning with each letter of the alphabet from a given definition, as in the example on the previous page.
Many teachers have kindly contributed new definitions. You can find this and many more games with instructions at www.visi.es/competition_games.html .
The typical computer class usually consists of students working individually or in pairs, but if you have a beamer and a large screen, a whole-class focus is sometimes preferable. The above game and the other competition games listed on my site (such as Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy) can work well in this way.
• PowerPoints
PowerPoint presentations also lend themselves to this kind of focus. Students watch a slide with a picture and they must respond by describing the action they see. You can find these plus accompanying worksheets at www.visi.es/powerpoint_presentations.html . All of these alternatives require a little preparation, but once you have everything you need in your shared folder you will never again need to worry what to do when technology lets you down!
The Internet connection’s working!
But what if the Internet does work, which is obviously what should happen? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of resources available for language practice on the Internet. Therefore on my site I have included a carefully organized list of links to other sites, with short descriptions of the contents that these sites offer. On the www.visi.es homepage, click on the ESL Teachers option and then on ESL practice in the Contents section on the right. A list of the options will appear:
For each category you will find a list of useful websites. For example, in Practice while creating you can find sites where your students can create their own comic story, postcard, letter or personalized description of a celebrity. In Practice with reference you will find links to various dictionaries, encyclopaedias and grammar reference sites. Lessons ready to go contains ready-made worksheets, plus recommended websites to practise a specific grammar point.
• Grammar practice
The British Council has a very good website for grammar and word games: http://www.britishcouncil.org/central.htm . These are presented in alphabetical order and are easy to use. Activities include dragging words into the correct category, matching pictures to words or reordering sentences. Students are given clues to help them.
• Writing practice
For writing practice, I’d particularly recommend http://www.readwritethink.org/student_mat/index.asp . This site offers a collection of online interactive tools that students can use to generate their own letters, poems and comics. Click on Student Materials to choose the tool you plan to use. The Comic Creator invites students to compose their own comic strips for a variety of contexts and the Letter Generator is a useful tool for students to learn the parts of a business or friendly letter and then compose and print letters containing these elements.
• Listening practice
A great site for listening practice is Takako’s great adventure http://international.ouc.bc.ca/takako/index.html where you can follow a boy’s journey into Canada in ten episodes. For each of these you have vocabulary, grammar and listening exercises that come with the transcript.
• Music and video
In the Practice with music section there is a link to http://www.efl.net/ where students can listen to songs, poems, stories, articles (and read the text at the same time) or watch funny videos. Cloze activities are included too. ESL Videos http://eslvideo.com/ offers short videos at different levels with multiple choice exercises online and if students want to create their own short movies, they can do so at http://www.dfilm.com in just a few minutes. They can select from a menu of different plot types, characters, backgrounds and soundtracks and create their own screenplays.
• Vocabulary practice
The website http://www.infovisual.info/ is an original online dictionary that offers you detailed descriptions of different items. Your students can look into the different parts of a cell, or find the names of different traditional musical instruments.
In the microchip age, computers are central to our teenagers’ lives, so it seems logical to try and integrate the world of IT into our students’ language learning. Just as we expect our students to learn a new language, we too must be prepared to explore new forms of communication. Take a few moments to visit some of the sites in this article and see what a difference they can make to your English classes.
Visi Alaminos teaches at IES Lliça and gives training sessions on the use of IT for ELT at the Col.legi de Llicenciats in Barcelona. She is the creator and webmaster of www.visi.es .
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