Tag Archives: onlinetools

Creating visual content for my classes with two awesome free online tools

Create your own stuff, freeware, Grammar and Exercises, Lesson Plan: Advanced, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Slides, Speaking, , , , , , , ,

Let’s go visual!

If you have been following my blog for a while you probably know how much I like exploring new tools to spice up my lessons. We all know students prefer looking at a screen than at a book so, for this lesson I have decided to explore two new free online tools, which have a lot of potential for language teaching.

 

Perhaps  you have never considered creating your own content because you think you aren’t tech-savvy and you don’t really know how to go about  these  modern things, but I can assure you that creating these two videos has been as easy as falling off a log.

In class, we are studying how to express preference with the structure would rather and (would)pefer  and this is just the perfect excuse to “play” with these two little tools.

1. For a revision of the grammar for Would Rather and Prefer, I have used biteable.com. This is how this tool works:

  • Login for free.
  • Click “create a new video”.
  • Choose your scenes one by one and enter the text. You can choose between animation scenes, footage scenes and image scenes where you can upload your own pictures. Click + to add a new scene.
  • Choose the colours for your presentation and then the music track or upload your own.
  • Click Preview and the video will be sent to your email address once it’s created.
  • At this point, you can download it, share it on facebook and twitter, or post to youtube.

(presentation created with biteable)

2. For a speaking activity using Would Rather, I have used emaze.com. This is how this amazing free online tool works:

  • Log in for free.
  • You can create a new presentation form scratch or upload a power point presentation.
  • Choose a template.
  • Share it or embed it on your blog.

(presentation created with emaze)

Powered by emaze

Give them a go! You won’t regret it!

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Six Amazing Websites that Make Your Writing Stronger

Dictionaries, Resources, Writing, Writing skill, , , ,

Long writing activities are not very frequently done in class. I tend to think that my students are like me; I need the right kind of atmosphere. Writing requires time, silence and lots of inspiration. Ideally, at this time of the year, I would probably wish to be sitting next to a fireplace with the most perfect instagrammable snow falling outside my window while drinking a nice cup of coffee waiting for inspiration to strike. Unfortunately, there isn’t any snow where I live so I’ll have to make do with a bit of rain and some reddish trees. Note: you won’t find “instagrammable” in the dictionary 🙂

Inspiration, the most important word when writing and something my students claim to lack. Inspiration won’t come from your computer screen, but Internet can certainly help you a lot when struggling to find the right word. 

These are some great sites that can help you make your writing stronger.

Photo by Tekke

1. Skell (Sketch Engine for Language Learning) explores the English language in more than one billion words from news, scientific papers, Wikipedia articles, fiction books, web pages, and blogs.

Skell is easy to use.

  • Search for a word or a phrase.
  • Click on Examples to get the most presentable sentences containing this word.
  • Click on Word sketch to get a list of words which occur frequently together with the searched word.
  • Click on Similar words (not only synonyms) where you’ll find words used in similar contexts visualized with a word cloud.

 

2.Netspeak is a really helpful site to help you write better. It helps you find the word or phrase you’re looking for by suggesting common combinations organised by frequency.

You can find the word(s) you’re looking for by typing signs as seen in the picture below.

  • Type ? in your query before, after or in the middle to find a missing word. Type ?? or ??? if you want to find two or three words.
  • Use dots (…) to find one, two, or more words at the same time.
  • Use square brackets to check which of two or more words is most common, or if none applies. For example: think [ of in ]
  • Use curly brackets to check in which order two or more words are commonly written { only for members }
  • To find the best synonym, use the hash sign in front of a word to check which of its synonyms are commonly written.

If you want to read some sample sentences, you only need to click the + sign

 

3. Just the word is a simple quick collocation finder you are going to love.

  • Enter the word or phrase you want to search
  • Click on “combinations” to see the most common words it collocates with and after each combination, you’ll find its frequency in their corpus (about 80,000,000 words of the BNC).
  • In the right-hand frame, you’ll find the part (s) of speech and the types of relation that the word is found in. For example, if you’re looking for the right adjective to modify a noun you’ve chosen, click on the ‘ADJ mod <word>’ link.

 

4. Words to Use is a nice neat site, which unlike a thesaurus groups theme-related words by parts of speech. Each theme, from “animals” to “vehicles” is divided by parts of the speech- adjectives, nouns, verbs, types of…, phrases, etc.

Are you looking for adjectives that collocate with “movies”? The site lists over 200 adjectives listed in alphabetical order.

Do you want to use a negative word that collocates with “friends”? Or maybe a verb frequently used to refer to friendship? Then, you might want to give this site a try!

 

5. Collins English Thesaurus

There are some very good thesauruses /θɪˈsɔːrʌɪ/  online, but this one is my favourite.

But, what is a thesaurus and what is the difference between a dictionary and a thesaurus?

A “thesaurus” /θɪˈsɔːrəs/  is a reference work that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning (containing synonyms and sometimes antonyms ), in contrast to a dictionary, which provides definitions for words, and generally lists them in alphabetical order. The main purpose of such reference works is to help the user “to find the word, or words, by which an idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed. (source Wikipedia). Unlike a dictionary, a thesaurus does not give you the meaning or the pronunciation of a word.

 

6. Pro Writing Aid is a fantastic free site that will help you with the final stage of the writing process. This is a tool you want to use after you have written something, to improve it.

Paste the text you want to edit by pressing Ctrl+V. There is a maximum of 3,000 words.

Press the ‘Analyze’ button. A window will appear while the analysis is being run.

Once the analysis is complete the processing window will disappear and the summary screen for your analysis will be displayed. This will give you an overview of any issues and suggestions found in your writing.

 

You might want to have a look at this post “Six Wonderful Sites to Help you Write, Speak and Sound Better” I published last year.

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Thanks for reading! 🙂

A Word on Grammar: The Tricky “Want”

A word on Grammar, , ,

In case you haven’t figured it out by now , I am  kind of a  very-much-into-games teacher, but this doesn’t mean  that everything in my classes  is fun. I would be lying to you. I wouldn’t  dare say a large part, but  a significant part of my classes, is dedicated to teaching “boring” stuff, which might be dull, but necessary; and I think my students would agree here.

One of these boring, yet interesting, parts of the lesson today will be dedicated to fixing mistakes from their written assignments.

One of the most common mistakes students make and that can be easily fixed is with the verb “want”.

The verb “want” is probably one of the first verbs we learn in English and  the simple structure  “I want to go” or “she wants to buy” poses no problem. But as become more fluent in the language ,we risk trying more complex sentences and this is where “want” becomes tricky.

THE TRICKY “WANT”

Read the sentence below  and decide whether it’s right or wrong.

Do you want that I give you a lift home?

If you think it’s wrong, then you’re right 🙂 and you might want to stop reading this post now. Hey! I wouldn’t blame you!  But, if you  can’t see why the sentence above is incorrect, then dear reader, this post is right for you and here’s the explanation

  • “want” is not followed by a “that clause”. Instead we use an object+ infinitive structure. So,

  • Look at how we introduce the subject after the verb ” to want”:

  • Some other common verbs that can be followed by object+infinitve are: advise, allow, ask, encourage, forbid, intend, invite, need, persuade, recommend, teach,  warn, tell, cause…etc.
  • “Want” can also mean ” need” in informal English. We can say that a thing “wants” (meaning “needs”) something, in particular with reference to actions.In this case, “want” is followed by an -ing form.

                 ♥ Those windows need cleaning (= needs to be cleaned)

                 ♥ This floor needs sweeping (= needs to be swept)

You can also say :

                ♥ Those windows need to be cleaned

               ♥  This floor needs to be swept

Test your knowledge with this translation exercise (sentences in Spanish, sorry!)

Conjunto de Fichas creado con GoConqr por cristina.cabal

Lingro: a Cool Way to Read and Increase your Vocabulary

Dictionaries, Reading, , ,

Everybody knows  that one of the best ways to acquire new vocabulary is by reading, but what do you normally do? Do you look up new words as you come across them while you’re reading, do you write them down to look them up later  when you put down your book,or do you just skip them and try to infer their meanings?

If you should ask me, most of the times I try to  work out the meaning of words. I try to figure out what the words mean by looking at the context. However, I have to admit, that when I am reading on my iPad I find myself looking up words much more often  than when I am reading a book or something on the Internet, and this is thanks to the built in dictionary that makes things easier and even fun; I sometimes play against myself trying to guess the meaning of a word and then checking in the dictionary.

We could say that Lingro works like a built in dictionary, too. Lingro is an amazing free website that can facilitate a lot the reading process.

How does it work?

  • Enter the website address to make all the words on the page clickable
  • Click on any word to see its definition in English or in any other 11 languages
  • Register if you want create and categorize word lists and play  flashcard games
  • It’s free. Registering is optional