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 »

The World of Games : ESL Games

16 Junio 2012 — Cristina Cabal

Yeahhh! Ok ! Sometimes students deserve a treat! It’s the end of the course and most of them have studied pretty hard for their exams and it’s only fair that you reward them with a class in the computer room playing games!

GAMES??? before you start thinking I’ve gone mad  allowing  teenegers to play games , iiiin the computer room and iiiiiiin the English class , let me tell you that the games are reasonably inside the scope of what even parents would agree with being academic stuff.

The site is called eslgamesworld.com and ,even I ,would be returning from time to time to play the games and have fun.

You can choose Grammar Games, Games for ESL Classroon Teaching ( you can play here The Wheel of Fortune, Who wants to be a  Millionaire …etc),Vocabulary Games and Pronunciation Games.take your pick!

Aren’t you dying to try these games?

Posted in Funny Stuff, Games, Grammar, In the Computer Room, Phonetics, Vocabulary. No Comments »

English Media Lab

13 Junio 2012 — Cristina Cabal

I’m sorry I haven’t posted for some days now but I’m up to my eyes .  Preparing and marking exams takes up most of my free time.June is chaos!

I imagine you have plenty of ideas  when half the class is taking an exam and the others ,sort of have already passed all the tests,but here’s another one in case you’re running short of them.

I have taken my students to the computer room and let them roam a bit about this website. English Media Lab offers Grammar, Vocabulary , Pronunciation  , Videos and Games for different levels , though I have only used the  Elementary Level. They have all loved the Memory Games revising Vocabulary and they’ve made me promise to take them to the computer room once again before the course ends.

The website is a bit confusing because it has a lot of things and it might sometime take you outside their own website. I don’t really mind as long as the new website has what I’m looking for. Anyway , have a look at it and tell me what you think!

Posted in Games, Grammar, In the Computer Room, Vocabulary. No Comments »

ELLLO : Practise.Listening.Comprehension

31 Mayo 2012 — Cristina Cabal

Are you looking for a site to do some Listening Practice? Then ,you have just found it!

ELLLO stands for English Listening Lesson Library Online and it’s an amazing site with tons of listening activities to help you improve your listening skills with audio, video,quizzes and vocabulary.  It is created by Todd Beuckens, an English teacher based in Japan.

The activities contain the tapescript and some  comprehension questions , vocabulary quizzes and  also images to help you understand.

Choose your level (beginner to advanced) and then choose the activity.

♥Interviews : natural conversations with various speakers of English that offer multiple listening options

 ♥ Listening Games : where students listen to audio about a topic and choose the picture that matches the audio.

♥Mixer: a survey that features six different speakers answering the same question. Students can easily follow the topic and compare the various responses. Each speaker’s segment comes with two questions that appear at the end of the audio segment to develop test taking skills

♥News Center :an animated newscast. Each newscast has six stories. For each story, students can try to answer questions about each news story

ELLLO is worth a visit!

Posted in In the Computer Room, Listening. No Comments »

A Glogster Project : My Favourite Sport!

8 Abril 2012 — Cristina Cabal

Every year I find a reason to use Glogster in the classroom(click here to see my first article about Glogster) I think most of my students , though camera-shy, like to see their work published. I find that Glogster is the ideal tool to use with twelve or thirteen- year- old students because it ’s very visual and students have a lot of fun deciding which frame to use for their photograph or text , which video they want to embed ( In English , of course) . Yes, they have fun but what they probably don’t realize is that they are using English from Step 1 of the project.
In fact, after finishing our Glogster, I wrote on the board  several of the words they had been using  (frame,text,wall,image,tools,gallery,upload,cartoon…etc) and they were happy when they recognised it.

Have you never tried Glogster? Give it a go! It’s a lot of fun!

Click here to see it better!

Posted in Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Students' Corner, Writing. No Comments »

5 students using MyBrainShark for their landmarks presentations

12 Marzo 2012 — Cristina Cabal

Did you think you have seen the last of MyBrainshark in this blog? Far from it!

Now I have engaged my students (level A2) into giving a presentation about a landmark of their choice. The fact that they did it at home and at their own pace , repeating as many times as they wished until they were completely satisfied and choosing their own photographs to illustrate it must have boosted up their confidence in using English because , with the exception of some students, most of them made a great effort and passed with flying colours.

Below are some of my students and their MyBrainsharks. They are: Victor Areces, Sara Días, Paula Fdez, Jesus Fdez and Paula García.

And here are their landmarks.
Grand Arch by Victor Areces

Petra by Sara Días

Ellis Island by Paula Fdez

Petronas Towers by Jesús Fdez

The Arch of Triumph by Paula Garcia

If you’re interested in using MyBrainshark  , click here to see my tutorial in Spanish ,

Posted in Audio, Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Slides, Speaking, Students' Corner. No Comments »

Teaching teens: Present Simple and continuous

1 Diciembre 2011 — Cristina Cabal

The first video is very easy to understand and though grammar is not explained as such  students, at the end of this short video ,are perfectly aware of  how to use these two tenses.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

 

The next video is a bit longer and it has different sketches , so if I’m running short of time I might decide not to use all of them.

Questions for the different sketches , click here

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

 

Posted in A word on Grammar, In the Computer Room, Listening. No Comments »

Lesson Plan : Personality adjectives

5 Octubre 2011 — Cristina Cabal

Step 1.Look at the mosaic below with the faces of some well-known celebrities and, bearing in mind what you know about them ,write a description based on their personalities. Make sure you use personality adjectives. Do not mention the name of the celebrity you are describing as your classmates aim will be to find out who you are describing.Please, don’t be too flattering or too hard on people. Remember that “not all that glitters is  gold”

Important: the description should be written in the way of a comment to this post.How to do it? at the end of the post, click No Comments (or 9 Comments  if hopefully I have already published nine comments)  , leave the comments in the right field, repeat the required anti-spam word and click Submit Comment.

 

Step 2. Let’s have some fun. How would you fancy converting text to music? This funny programme allows you to type any words and it sings them back to you. Try typing some personality adjectives and listen to them sung by different people. The site is called Text to sing.

 Step 3. Exercises. Do the following online exercises .

Exercise 1                             Exercise 2

Step 4: Writing. How do you see yourself and how others see you? This task, as you can imagine,  requires mature students as it involves writing and reading about you. First, students  find a classmate they know pretty well. Secondly, students write about their own personality and then, about their friend’s personality. Encourage students to explain and exemplify why they have chosen a certain adjective to describe them and also to describe a negative trait in their personalities as well as in their friend’s . Students pair themselves and compare what they have written.

Step 5. Singing  Hand in my pocket by Alanis Morisette

Posted in Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Music. 20 Comments »

Lesson Plan : Retelling an article using Word Clouds

26 Septiembre 2011 — Cristina Cabal

This is a lesson I did with my upper-intermediate students in the computer room and I thought it might be useful to some teachers. The main idea is to retell a text you have previously worked with in class. This is important as  otherwise the task of retelling might be a bit  difficult for weaker students. This is how I did it.

♣ First, for homework, I asked students to reread the text several times .

♣ Then , in the computer room, I asked students to form groups of 3 or 4  and divided the text according to the number of students in each group .

♣ Now,individually and  using the website Word it Out, which is a word cloud generator, I asked them to select the key words in their texts , type them in Word It Out and generate the word cloud.If two words need to be together, it is easy with this generator. Imagine “suffer from” , you only need to insert _ between the two words and they’ll be kept together in the cloud.

♣ Students in groups again, retell the story with the help of the generated  word clouds.

I especially liked this exercise as students get a lot of fun out of it and they collaborate every step of the way. Here are the word clouds generated by a group.I hope you find it useful!

 

Posted in Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Speaking. No Comments »

Saying my goodbyes or see you laters

21 Junio 2011 — Cristina Cabal

And there we are again! The school year has finished and we are again saying our goodbyes . This year has been very special for me , professionally speaking. I don’t know whether I’ll be given the chance to ever work here again but it’ been really nice and this is my big thank you to everybody who’s made this year a really pleasant experience. I’ll be leaving for Malta  in a week’s time to do a course to Spice Up my Teaching so this blog is going on holidays until September. Hope to virtually see you then.

GoAnimate.com: Saying my goodbyes by cristina.cabal

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!

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Posted in Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Resources, Writing skill. 2 Comments »
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