Tag Archives: onlinetools

Making Suggestions

Create your own stuff, freeware, Grammar and Exercises, Lesson Plan: Elementary, Slides, Speaking, Vocabulary, , , ,

Once again I have used some online free tools to spice up my lessons; believe me, something vey much needed at this time of year when students, and shall I say teachers too? begin to feel the necessity of giving English a break. Good weather and a sun-oriented classroom doesn’t help much either.
So this time the structures I need to teach are those to Make Suggestions. Very useful structures to learn, don’t you agree?

To revise the structures I have worked with  a tool I have  already used several times. I like it and I highly recommended.It’s called Goconqr
por cristina.cabal

Fancy a bit of practice?

Both, None, Either and Neither

A word on Grammar, Grammar and Exercises, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Slides, Writing skill, , , , , , , ,

You know how it is. Once I start surfing the net I need to remind myself that I need to get some sleep. So, just last night I was about to call it a night when blog hopping, I “bumped into” this new tool which, though still in their beta version, has a lot of potential. Slidebean is a cloud-based platform that lets you create presentations for free, you only need to register and explore a bit.

EDITED* Slidebean is no longer free. The presentation is now displayed with Genial.ly

And as I was preparing a lesson for the Intermediate level about Conjunctions I decided to give it a go and  I don’t regret it. I think it has created a beautiful presentation out of a boring point of grammar. What do you think?

 

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The memorable life of….

Students' Corner, Writing, , , , ,

There is little that gives more satisfaction than publishing students’ work; they are  the reason behind all the hard work that means keeping  this blog going.

Today, I want to show you some essays written by students in the Elementary level under the heading “The memorable life of… . I would have wanted to include all of them but the truth is that they were too many so I have just published half the ones I was sent. I hope nobody is disappointed!

As I have often done in the past, to publish the content I have used the free digital publishing platform Issuu.

Click to enlarge .

Carmen Menéndez’s presentation of The Memorable life of Amelia Earhart is also worth  publishing . I hope you enjoy it!!

PhraseUp: A Useful Online Tool

freeware, Writing skill, ,

Sometimes we know what we want to write, the sentence is phrased in our mind, but we can’t figure out some of the words we need. This is where phraseup* comes in. It assists you with writing, by suggesting possible combinations to fill-in the words you can’t remember. Each suggestion is accompanied by definitions, synonyms and translations to other languages.
Imagine you want to use the verb+preposition combination “cope with” but you are just not sure which words it collocates with, just type it in PhraseUp and options will be provided.

Or maybe you know there is an expression containing the words ” take” and “granted” but you have forgotten what goes in the middle, PhraseUp can help you here, too. Just type the words that you remember and put an asterisk * where you want the application to insert something. Very useful, isn’t it?


Give it a go, it is free and you don’t even need to register.