Writing and Speaking : A Biography

19 Junio 2013 — Cristina Cabal

It’s with great pride that I  show you the work of two of my students;they are  twelve and thirteen-year-old students  who, with a lot of effort on their part,  have managed to overcome the difficulties of speaking and pronouncing a different language.  My Congratulations and Thanks  to Patricia Alonso and Juan Fernández for their effort and contribution to this blog. Keep up the good work!

Patricia has written and recorded  Marco Polo’s Biography  and Juan has done the same with  Fernando Alonso.Ladies first!

Posted in Create your own stuff, Speaking, Students' Corner, Writing. No Comments »

Useful Posts to Revise for Finals

11 Junio 2013 — Cristina Cabal

I have been meaning to give MentorMob a try for some time and I never got around to doing it but when my studets asked me where to revise for finals , MentorMob flashed in my mind and I saw the light. ;).

This little tool  allows you to organise your favourite posts or websites into a playlist  in a very easy way  and then you can always share it and embed it in a blog or website . In this way you can easily organise videos,pdfs, documents,websites, articles….. into playlists and then  assign them to your students in the computer room, as homework or  in a flipped classroom setting .

Create your own Playlist on MentorMob!
Posted in A word on Grammar, Create your own stuff, Grammar, Grammar and Exercises, In the Computer Room, Plain Grammar and Exercises, Resources, freeware. 2 Comments »

And the Winners of the I Recorded Short Story Contest Are….

9 Junio 2013 — Cristina Cabal

……(fanfare of trumpets) María López ,Montse López and Claudia Seivane in no special order. It has  been a tough decision to make and though my original intention was to give just one prize , I’ve been totally unable to make a fair decision. For this reason, I asked some of my colleagues to help me decide and they faced the same dilemmas as me as  the three of them deserved to win for different reasons . María and Claudia are hard-working  thirteen-year-old students with a promising future in languages  and Montse , though older, was up to her eyes  with exams and still found the time to write a long short story. My thanks to the three of them for trying so hard and to the rest of my students who have also participated with more or less fortune. Many thanks to them all.You all deserve your prize!

Here are the winners and their stories:

Claudia Seivane Otero : Falling in Love in 1955

María López Valdés: Surfer’s Paradise

Montse López Fernández: The yellow Flower

Below these lines are the rest of the participants with their short stories. They all deserve to be published !

Click on the icons to listen to their short stories and to see their names

And Last but not Least…

Lidia’s short story : Hello Ann

Ruben’s short story

Ainhoa’s Short story

Estela’s Short Story : The Small Pirate

Posted in Audio, Create your own stuff, Resources, Speaking, Students' Corner. 2 Comments »

Having Fun

30 Mayo 2013 — Cristina Cabal

I should be marking exams and then again preparing a new batch of them.Oh my Gosh It is that time of the year!!Instead I am playing with Classtools.net.

One of my students asked me to do some more practise on Reported Speech Questions and I thought this could be a nice way to revise this point of grammar.

Click on the numbers to see the questions ! Don’t you just love it??

Posted in Create your own stuff, Funny Stuff, Grammar and Exercises, freeware. No Comments »

I Recorded Short Story Contest

10 Mayo 2013 — Cristina Cabal

Welcome to our I Recorded Short Story Contest. Open to all my students until May 31st!
Are you willing to try your hand at writing a short story in English and then reading it? This could be your chance to be internationally known; who knows who might be visiting the blog and listening to your stories and , well, you might end up being a well-known writer !!!
Yeah! I know !, Probably too far-fetched ! But ,what is undeniable is that this activity can help you improve writing and pronunciation, and this  is what  really matters!
As in every single contest of some importance , there are RULES. These are mine:

♥Entries must be in English
♥They must be recorded using the online tool Sound Cloud (Tutorial in Spanish , here)
♥Recording should last up to three minutes
♥Stories must be entirely your own work and must be previously unpublished
♥Only one entry per person
♥There is no set theme
♥Closing submission date: 31st May 13
♥Top three prizes to be determined
♥Winner will be announced the first week of June ,online and in this blog
HOW TO SUBMIT A SHORT STORY
♥First, you need to record yourself using SoundCloud.
♥Then , go to the comments section in this post
♥Write your full name
♥Write the name of your short story
♥In the Share box of your recording Copy/paste the link provided by soundcloud (starts with https)

Good luck !! Some pictures that might inspire you ,below!!!

I got this fantastic idea from the wonderful blog -MCargobe’s Blog-Room- written by a colleague from the EOI Valencia, which I highly recommend if you are willing to practise your English. Click here to see her blog.

Posted in Audio, Create your own stuff, Students' Corner, Writing, freeware. 16 Comments »

SoundCloud: need to share a recording?

3 Mayo 2013 — Cristina Cabal

Are you running out of time to test your students’ speaking ability? Are you  a student and looking for an easy-to-use tool to send your teacher your speech? I’ve found the perfect tool for you! It is called SoundCloud and has been around for some time now ,so one can only assume that it is entirely reliable.
Sound Cloud is an amazing site which has a lot of potential for teaching and learning English. What can you do with SoundCloud? You can upload your own audio and you can record yourself. You are then given a unique url and the possibility to embed the audio in your own website or blog.
Why am I so enthusiastic about my students using SoundCloud? Because my students willl be able to send me their recordings and I will be able to correct them by inserting comments about their pronunciation, grammar…. directly into the recording and exactly at the exact second at which the mistake is made.

You need to register but it is completely free up to two hours ; then, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan or delete some of your recordings.

Below I’ve embedded a SoundCloud Recording to tempt you to try this useful tool!

Snow Patrol - You Could Be Happy [HD] by Cristina Cabal
 

 Here’s a tutorial I found on the Internet which clearly explains how to upload and share your recording.

 

and now, for teachers, here’s a chopped tutorial from Princippia Innovación Educativa, about how to insert comments on a Souncloud Recording.

Posted in Audio, Create your own stuff, Resources, Speaking, Tutorial, freeware. 2 Comments »

Acapela.tv: converting text to speech in a funny way

27 Marzo 2013 — Cristina Cabal

This site is plain fun ! Acapela .tv is a new site that has a lot of potential for the language class.
Choose a real character or a cute cartoon and make him speak. Choose from a range of voices that interpret and read content with meaning and emotion. This text to speech tool is great to do dictations or revise vocabulary among other things.

HOW I’M PLANNING TO USE IT

♥I think it might be funny to divide the class into two groups -the class I have in mind, right now , is a small class of nine students; with larger classes I might need to divide it into three or four groups.

My aim with this activity will be to make sure students revise some vocabulary related to money for their next test. So, the class is divided into two groups. They need to listen to their cartoon speaking, write down the words the character asks them to revise and be able to explain them to the other group. Each character will say the same number of words and you know the rest… don’t you?? A competition , as usual, something that I , a very competitive person, just love.

A nice memory of a former student from Denmark , Patrick, who helped me teach English . Hope you like it, Patrick!

♥My next step will be asking selected students from different courses to do the job. The volunteers will need to go home , register and create a character to revise vocabulary . Obviously, they’ll need to copy the link provided and send it to me so that I can display it when playing the game in class.

What do you think? Will they like it?

Posted in Audio, Create your own stuff, Funny Stuff, Games, In the Computer Room, Resources, Students' Corner, Vocabulary, freeware. No Comments »

Creating Word Clouds with Tagul

4 Marzo 2013 — Cristina Cabal

And again it’s this time of the year when all my free time goes to preparing and marking exams so I don’t have much time left to dedicate to the blog. To tell you the truth , I don’t feel inspired! I start a sentence , I know I want to say something … but inspiration never comes. So I’ve given up! maybe , next week, I’ll be back to my usual self. Meanwhile , enjoy this site for creating Word Clouds. It is called Tagul .



Get Adobe Flash player


Posted in Create your own stuff, Resources, freeware. No Comments »

Tag Galaxy: Flikr Images to create a 3D photo-sphere

21 Febrero 2013 — Cristina Cabal

 Do you know anyone , especially students, who would not rather have a lesson spiced up with pictures?    Now , this  is  an amazing tool to work  with and  just plain fun!Tag Galaxy    appeals to all visual students and it helps spice up a boring lesson. Have I  just said” boring lessons”??? Sorry! a slip of the tongue!!

How does it work? easy peasy! You enter a tag  - I wrote Hobbies-  and as soon as you click GO , you will see a 3D galaxy with lots of planets of different sizes. The biggest one is for my Tag ( in this case Hobbies) and the smaller  planets will be words related to the keyword orbiting around my keyword 

At this point you might click on another planet to combine words ( Hobbies+ books) and form a new galaxy.

 

Click on the big planet and see your picture collection , straight from Flikr  assembling.

Spin the globe  with the mouse  . Click to select a picture and get a close -up.Cool!

Tag Galaxy in the classroom: I’m sure my students will be delighted to watch the whole process but leaving aside the cool part , I think using this wonderful tool can be highly motivating for my students.

♥At the moment I’m teaching  Simple Past tense to my Elementary students and  I’m planning to use it  to do some speaking with the structure: When did you last….?  (play football) I last( played football )( three weeks ago) +  the follow up questions.

♥It could also work  for Picture Description

♥Writing Skills : Students are given the beginning of a story such as: it was a stormy night … .   Students write “storm” as the keyword and the picures will help them spark their creativity.

Posted in Create your own stuff, Pictures, Speaking. No Comments »

Retelling a text using Wordle

4 Febrero 2013 — Cristina Cabal

This is not the first time I have used this strategy to invite my students to do some speaking but it is the first time I have used it with absolute beginners. It has taken me sometime to bring myself to do this kind of activity with my 12-year-old  absolute beginners. I am always afraid the task may seem to them like a high mountain to climb, but they have been studying with me for four months now and I feel they are up to the challenge.

I really feel that I can insist ,until the cows come home ,English  is not only about learning grammar ,but if students are not actively taking a role in their education , there is little I can do.

So I have used a text ,they had previously worked  with, to ask them to retell the story. The text was about Education and it told the story of two children Eduardo from Angola and Nabyrye from Uganda. Easy text and all about present simple ,which is what they have been studying. Two texts , so great to do pair work!

I have used a tool I have used other times, Wordle ,to create Word Clouds to help students remember the story and retell it.

Two useful tricks when using Wordle

♥ If you want a word to be bigger than the rest, just type it twice.

♥Insert (~ ) between the words you want to keep together.

I have posted about Wordle to revise vocabulary here and to do  a Writing Activity here

Have a nice week!!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
Posted in Create your own stuff, Speaking. No Comments »
« Older posts