To be honest, the tool was suggested to me by one of the teachers (Marga Valdés) attending a talk I gave last year. It was a talk about creating activities for the classroom using free online tools, and when I finished the presentation, this teacher came up to me and said she was surprised I hadn’t mentioned Genial.ly. I confessed to her I didn’t know the tool and promised I would give it a go.
It was almost the end of the course and although I gave it a quick try, my mind was in holiday mode, and I didn’t put my heart into it. Now, after trying the tool, I run the risk of becoming addicted to it!.
Genial.ly works like Thinglink but, in my opinion, it’s a lot better. Genial.ly is a web tool to create engaging interactive visual content. You can make interactive pictures, infographics, presentations, posters and questionnaires or guides. And, for me, the best thing about this tool is that you can choose from a wide variety of free templates to create very professional interactive content or you can upload your own pictures and start from scratch. It also gives you the ability to integrate videos, audio, and any embeddable code among other things.
THREE ACTIVITIES I HAVE CREATED USING GENIAL.LY
Using how long+present perfect in combination with simple past
Aim: To orally practise asking and answering questions using Present Perfect and Simple Past.
Competition: revising irregular Verbs.
Click on “instructions” to see how to play
Indirect questions + questions about money.
A speaking activity revising the grammar for indirect questions and questions about money.
Ten entertaining ways to practise personality adjectives with activities for all ages and levels. In this post, you’ll find listening,writing, speaking activities and games to help students master this vocabulary.
Ask students to work in pairs and write down as many personality adjectives as they can in two minutes.
On the board write three columns: positive, negative and neutral adjectives and ask students to provide adjectives for the three columns. Have students choose one adjective from each column to describe their personality and in pairs talk about how these adjectives they have chosen are representative of their personality. Ask students to elaborate on their answers and provide examples to support their choice of adjectives.
Roleplays
Prepare cards with a personality trait written on it (talkative, cheerful, arrogant, stubborn, immature, possessive…etc). Give students a card telling them this is their personality. Pair up students and ask them to start a conversation and act the way the card says until their partner guesses what adjective they were given. Ask students for example to talk about buying a present for the teacher or deciding on what do at the weekend.
Reading your signature.
What does your signature say about you? According to handwriting analysts, signatures reveal a lot about your personality.
Ask students to write the sentence Write soon on a piece of paper and then sign under the sentence.
Ask them to work in pairs and look at their partner’s signature and explain what it means. See interpretation here
Ask them to discuss whether they agree with their partner’s interpretation and why or why not.
What’s your job?
Research has shown that different personality traits tend to have distinct preferences in their choice of careers. On the board write the jobs below. Ask students in pairs to choose five and discuss what personality types the jobs would attract and why. Then discuss their choices with another pair:
Actor fashion model psychologist entrepreneur judge
Acting out
Prepare cards with personality adjectives. Divide the class into 2 teams. For each team’s turn, set a time (1 minute).
On the board write the sentence: I want to go to the cinema tomorrow.
Team 1 begins and choose a player to sit at the front of the class. The player draws a card and acts out the phrase according to the adjective on the card. When the team guesses correctly, he can draw another card. He continues until the time is up. The timer is set again for the other team, and turns continue until all the slips are gone. Count the slips and give those points to their teams.
Quotes.
On the walls of the class stick the following quotes. Students in threes stand up and discuss what the quote means and whether they agree or disagree with them.
Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it. Bruce Lee.
It is better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for someone you are not. André Gide.
If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am
Beauty attracts the eye but personality captures the heart.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
It’d never too late for what you might have been. George Elliot.
Guess who. A speaking or writing activity.
Speaking. Before the class, prepare a set of pictures of famous people with very clear personality traits. For this activity the students are sitting in pairs, one student (A) facing the board and the other (B) with his back to the board. Display the photo of a celebrity and ask student A to describe this person in general terms focusing on his personality.
Writing. Before the class, prepare a collage with pictures of famous people with very clear personality traits. Ask students to write a description of one of them focusing on their personality without saying their names. Descriptions are read aloud and students will need to determine the identity of the person being described.
The four big questions.
Tell students you’re going to analyse their personality by asking them four key questions to which they should answer using three adjectives for each question. Adjectives cannot be repeated.
1. Choose a colour, the first colour that comes to mind.
Once you have that colour, list three adjectives that describe it.
2. Choose an animal, the first animal that comes to mind.
Once you have selected an animal, list three adjectives that describe it.
3. Choose a body of water like a river, ocean, sea, or lake. Once you have chosen a body of water, list three adjectives that describe it.
4. Let’s say you are in a white room with no windows no doors, list three emotions that you are feeling.
When you are done answering those questions, highlight the following to get your results: your colour represents what you think of yourself, the animal represents what you think of other people, the body of water represents your love life, and the white room represents what you will feel like when you are about to die.
Birth order
Do you think birth order has any influence on our personality?
Ask students to work in groups of 4. Tell them they are going to see a video where personality is related to birth order. Assign each person in the group the task of writing down information they can gather from the video about either first borns, middle children, last borns or only children.
Whole class discussion. Starting with “first-borns”, write on the board all the information the students learnt from the video. Start a class discussion where first borns in the class will say whether they agree or disagree with the content in the video. Repeat procedure for middle children, last borns and only children.
Tic Tac Toe
Tic Tac Toe. also known as noughts and crosses or Xs and Os is a game for two players, X and O, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 (3×4 in this game) grid. The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row wins the game.
In this game, to place their mark they’ll need to talk for about two minutes about the question in the box.
This is a very simple communicative activity that works wonders because it is highly engaging, students love it and it is very productive. It takes 2 minutes to create and it is adaptable to any topic of discussion and suitable for all levels.
Aim: activating new vocabulary through discussion questions.
Levels: all
PROCEDURE.
Easy peasy! Just go to wheeldecide.comand fill in one wheel with the target vocabulary and another one with the questions you want your students to discuss.
Students in pairs
Spin the wheel containing the questions and then, the wheel containing the word/ expression you want your students to use when answering the question.
Student A has 2 minutes to talk about the question and use the target vocabulary. If he does, he scores a point.
Spin the wheels again. It’s student B’s turn.
NOTE: When creating the wheel, go to the advanced section to choose colour and whether you want the option to be removed after it is landed on or not.
If you are a student and you’re preparing for exams or studying on your own, you probably have your own studying strategies, but I invite you to try this new one. I’m sure you’ll find it engaging and productive.
I ‘d like to thank Cristina Serafim for bringing wheeldecide to my attention.
Can we still be friends if today’s post is on phrasal verbs?
I know, I know, I’ve been a student, too. I know what you’re thinking. How, for goodness sake, one is supposed to learn that a car pulls in/off/over/out/up/away and into something and be expected not to make a mistake?
When I was a student at university, they made us learn like two thousand phrasal verbs or maybe more. I cannot remember exactly how many, but what I do remember is that I had them sellotaped -sticky notes hadn’t been invented yet- on the walls of every single room in the flat I was sharing. I am pretty sure my flatmates entertained the idea of asking me to leave, especially when they heard me enter a room, point at the wall and recite the list, but I am pretty sure they learned a phrasal verb or two.
Anyway, I am not planning to ask my students to memorise long lists of phrasal verbs out of context. There are more pleasant ways to learn them, aren’t there?
This quiz below is a good example of that. According to Roy Norris, author of Ready for First, Ready for Advanced and Straightforward (advanced) among others, these are the 30 most common phrasal verbs in English.
Do you have any others to add to the list?
This is how I suggest you work with the quiz:
Do the quiz
Once you have finished doing it, try to remember which phrasal verbs were tested and write them down on a piece of paper together with their meaning.
Do the quiz once again and compare your written answers with the ones given in the quiz.
Write down the ones you didn’t know. Look them up in a good dictionary and read the example sentences to see how they are used in context.
Try the quiz again some other day to consolidate knowledge.
