OMG!The things you can find on the Internet. We are talking Halloween here and setting the right mood before a Halloween activity with some engaging digital decor.
If you have a digital board or a computer, you can easily transform your space into a Halloween environment using YouTube.Yes, YouTube!
How?
Head over to YouTube
Search for “Halloween window projection.” You’ll find a wide variety of options, from eerie landscapes to fun, animated scenes.
Choose the one that fits your classroom vibe best, and set the mood for your students!
I’m still thinking how to do it but I might turn off the lights before my students enter the classroom or I might dim the lights before doing the Halloween activity to enhance the experience.
I have recorded small clips with some examples of what you can find online. It’s a simple way to add a little magic to your Halloween lessons!
Before I start, let me tell you that I’ve officially dubbed myself “The Free App Teacher” because every tool I share with you is either 100% free or comes with a super generous free version—perfect for teachers like us.
And you know how we’re always on the lookout for the next tool that can make our teaching lives easier and more dynamic, right? Well, this is Challenge 3, but hold on… it’s got a little twist. We’ve got two challenges using the SAME tool! Yes, that’s right. We’re about to take on two challenges with one amazing Chrome extension: Brisk Teaching.
Brisk Teaching is about to blow your mind with how easy it makes creating resources from just a YouTube video. In the quick and easy video (yes, it’s in Spanish, but trust me, you’ll follow along with no problem), I walk you through how in under 1 minute, you can generate either
1. A fully editable presentation in Google Slides
or
2. A fully editable quiz in Google Forms
And it’s all with just one click—seriously. It’s like magic!
How It Works
The first thing you need to do is install the Brisk Teaching Chrome extension. Don’t worry, I’ll show you how in the video. It’s super simple!
1. Open the YouTube video of your choice (find something that’s relevant to your lesson).
2. Open up the Brisk Teaching Chrome extension.
3. Now comes the fun part—choose what you want to create:
– If you need a presentation, click the “Presentation” button.
– If you’re in quiz-mode, hit Quiz instead.
And BOOM! In seconds, you’ll have either an editable Google Slides presentation or a Google Forms quiz ready to give your students
Unit 1 of my textbook is dedicated to questions. All sorts of questions: indirect, with prepositions at the end, negative interrogative questions, echo questions, question tags… etc. Yeah, I know. Lots of teaching here. On the bright side, teaching questions offers such a variety of activities you can do with your students that sometimes it is hard to find the time to do all the amazing stuff published all around the web.
This year, for my first lessons dealing with questions, I have decided to choose one of the hundreds of interviews to celebrities available online. It is still the beginning of the course and I wanted something quick and not too difficult to understand. And, I found this interview with Selena Gomez who, to be honest with you, I didn’t know much about just perfect as it is all about questions and, more specifically, get-to-know-you questions.
Anyway, I wanted a short simple listening exercise and I wanted to post it on the blog so that my students could do it again at home. To do the whole activity, I needed to solve a few technical issues regarding YouTube which I’ll detail below, in case you find them helpful.
YOUTUBE VIDEOS: SOME TRICKS YOU MIGHT WANT TO KNOW
Sharing a youtube video with a specific start time
You probably know how to share a video starting at a specific point. You don’t? Well, that’ s pretty easy to do.
Sharing a youtube video with a specific start and end time
That’s a bit more complicated. Keywords “ a bit”. The first thing you need to know is the specific time you want your video to start and to finish. For example, if you need your video to run from 1:20 to 2:15, you need to convert it into seconds.
Getting the transcript. Call me lazy but if technology can save me some time….
You can easily get the transcript from a youtube video clicking on the three dots next to the save button.
VIDEO-BASED LISTENING ACTIVITY: 18/73 QUESTIONS WITH SELENA GOMEZ
(Follow -up activity: I am looking for one or two EOI teachers, teaching the B2.2 level, to work with me on a simple single get-to-know-you project using the free online tool Flipgrid. If anybody is interested, please send me an email)
Level: B2
Skills: listening and speaking
As I have mentioned above, I wanted a short listening activity which could serve as a springboard for a speaking get-to-know-you activity among my students.
LISTENING COMPREHENSION
Procedure:
Play the video once and ask students to just listen. At the end of the video (the video is set to stop at 2:08) students will probably complain that it goes too fast. My advice? Smile and say “You can do it! “, because they actually can.
Give them the handout with the questions and play the video twice more.
Before you play it a third time, ask students to share their answers in pairs and, needless to say, in English.
Play the video once more, pausing after each answer. Ask students to provide the answer and repeat procedure for question 2.
Hereare the questions. To get the answers, just display the transcript as indicated above.
SPEAKING ACTIVITY: 15 minutes
Play the video again, this time and depending on the number of students, play a couple more minutes or if necessary the whole video.
Tell students, they will need to listen very attentively to the questions asked to Selena and choose one they would like to ask their classmates.
Ask them to write it down and check with you that it’s Ok. When they are ready, ask them to stand up in a mingling activity and interview as many classmates as possible.
ListenToYouTube.com is an online application for converting YouTube flash video to MP3 audio. The service is fast, free, and requires no signup. All you need to do is copy-paste the YouTube URL, and the application will extract the MP3, and give you a link to download the audio file.
Surprisingly , a publishing company has given the English Department an overhead projector and given that we have to almost beg for our own children’s books I can only describe it as an act of utter generosity. I should maybe have to explain that although education is compulsory in Spain until you’re 16 ,books are not free; not even kept at the school and handed from student to student . So you can only guess at how much publishing companies earn out of textbooks.
Right , so now I have an overhead projector but… I don’t have an Internet connection. The thing is that I have a funny video that fits like a glove with my next lesson and I want to display it using the OHP.
That’s where this little tool comes very handy. It’s called Savevidand it allows you to download videos from Youtube, Vimeo, Metacafe and some other popular sites to your computer or USB . The only thing you need to do is paste the url of the video you want to download, choose from 5 formats the one that suits you best and play it on your computer.
I should maybe have to explain that although education is compulsory in Spain until you’re 16 ,books are not free; not even kept at the school and handed from student to student . So you can only guess at how much publishing companies earn out of textbooks.
