My new mobile phone - I have hardly used it as a phone yet!

I finally got my new mobile phone on Wednesday although I wish it had come a week earlier as the following day one of my sisters and her family came to stay for a few days, making it inappropriate to spend much time getting to see what I can now do that I couldn't with my old phone.

The advantages of a Samsung Galaxy SIII over an HTC Wildfire S are that I can seemingly install endless apps and start experimenting with them; it is very fast downloading and installing, the screen is twice the size and very high definition and it doesn't need recharging so often.

The disadvantages are: the price; it's more awkward to hold in landscape mode; I'm much more worried that someone might like to steal it.

The day after I got it I used it to video three of my students acting out a couple of scenes from the DVD accompanying our coursebook, while another student videoed another group. The students did it really well and the quality of the picture and sound was great and I'll probably never borrow the mini video cameras I pushed for the school to but three of - we can do it with our mobiles!

The following morning I left my phone at home while we went for a walk and when we came back the two videos were safely uploaded to YouTube using out home wi-fi. I then edited the titles and descriptions and sent the URL to the whole class in Edmodo.

It was done really spontaneously, when I thought "Why not?" and asked one group of students how they felt about filming themselves doing their improvised version and putting it on YouTube and when they said "No way.", I said it would be unlisted so the only people who could see it would be people who had the URL. They said "OK"and we took advantage of an empty adjacent room to split into two groups and I filmed one group while the other group, who had 4 students and 3 roles filmed themselves with a different student filming using their iphones.

One of the students said he had a YouTube account and would upload his recording and post the URL on Edmodo, although he hasn't done it yet, sadly, and the other said he would use his DropBox account to let me download it and upload it to YouTube. I'm afraid he hasn't done this yet either.

I enjoyed the whole thing and the students looked as if they enjoyed it, too. I look forward to getting their reactions to the videos when they watch them. Many of them use their mobiles to check Edmodo, so they may not have wanted to use their data plan to watch the videos.

eportfolios - posts I have made on Edmodo

https://plus.google.com/u/0/106967795011827696866/posts/9MVt14NgWbd 3 tools for eportfolios of mainly spoken English reworking of post below:

http://britishcouncilamigo.edmodo.com/post/101920742 My reply to Mrs. Monteiro Silva, who had posted about http://lingtlanguage.com/


http://britishcouncilamigo.edmodo.com/post/31690038 3 replies from me to Sue Hellman who was asking for ideas about portfolios

http://britishcouncilamigo.edmodo.com/post/22673899 (You must be one of my connections) me talking about how posterous can solve the problem of Edmodo only having a native player for .mp3 and .wav audio files

http://britishcouncilamigo.edmodo.com/post/100291332 my reply to Nira Dale, who wants to use Edmodo public pages for student eportfolios


http://britishcouncilamigo.edmodo.com/post/62958106 me about ipadio, posterous and chirbit all embedding or linking to produce audio players in Edmodo

http://electronicportfolios.org/ Dr. Helen Barrett's site

http://britishcouncilamigo.edmodo.com/post/25261181 (You must be one of my connections) me talking about retelling videos and recording this (site gone)

Testing embedding posts from posterous

How easy would it be for my students to use Blogger to create a display portfolio using artefacts from their posterous repositories?

http://portfolio-simulation.posterous.com/chris-fry-demonstrating-looking-looking-away http://portfolio-simulation.posterous.com/chris-fry-demonstrating-looking-looking-away

I can't see any way of them doing it without using HTML....

What about from Tumblr?

http://chris-fry-barcelona.tumblr.com/post/39519324940/as-it-didnt-work-with-an-amr-file-attached-im

http://chris-fry-barcelona.tumblr.com/post/39519324940/as-it-didnt-work-with-an-amr-file-attached-im

Maybe ipadio would work:


Let's see.

iPadio

iPadio (http://ipadio.com/)

You and your students can use your mobile phones (cell phones) to phone a free number and record messages and post them on the internet at no cost. I have tried this in Spain using my Movistar mobile and I was not charged for the calls.

So far I have used it to send a couple of short comments to my students and have experimented with embedding, attaching a link and using an RSS feed in Edmodo. Embedding works best. See examples

I want to experiment in class with my students recording themselves as they retell stories or interview each other, but I'm not sure yet how to do it.

Students could all sign up for their own accounts, which would mean their phones would be able to use the free phone number (here) and their own secret number and their recordings would go to their individual pages. If they used my secret number, their recordings would go to my page.

Or they could take it in turns to use my phone, but this would be slower by far.

I have discarded the other possibility which is for them to use their own phones without signing up for an account, type in my phone number when required and then type in the secret number to my page.

The work of adding the embed codes could be done by the students (or maybe by me initially)

Has anyone tried any of these methods?

How to make a vocabulary list for the first half of New English File Intermediate (or any other level of this course)

Getting an alphabetical list:

Download the word list (as a Word document) for the whole book from the OUP Teacher’s Club.

Copy and paste the words in the first three files into a new Word document.

Remove all the underscores by using Edit, Replace. Remove the tabs (^t) in the same way.

Remove any headings and select all the words.

Go to Table, Sort and get the words in alphabetical order.

Finding out which words are worth learning:

Select all the words and copy and paste into the box on http://www.oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com/oxford_3000_profiler.html

I added sth and sb to the box of words not to be checked.

Click on Submit and then carefully copy and paste the new list with difficult words coded in red and blue into yet another new Word document.

Making the difficult words disappear from the list:

Select one of the blue words and right click

Choose ‘Select Text with Similar Formatting’ (fig. 1)

Go to Format and tick ‘Hidden’ (fig. 2)

Do the same with a red word.

Now all the difficult words are marked with a dotted underline. (fig. 3) + (fig. 5)

These words are visible on screen, but not when you print the list. If I wanted to print them, I would make 3 or 4 columns. It would be a 3 or 4-page document.

I use an IWB, so I display the words using View, Reading Layout – 17 screenfuls for students to glance at and ask me about. (fig. 4)

Fig. 1:

Fig. 2:

Fig. 3: (also see Fig. 5)

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

1/2 in and 1/2 out - creating a communication gap

Setting up an information gap and getting students to bridge the gap by speaking English.

As a regular part of almost every day of class, I set up an information gap by sending half the students out of the class with a written task to do and providing the ones in the class with some kind of input usually something that they listen to. I find the final speaking and the preparation stages helping the ‘speakers’ get from input to output are a truly communicative aspect of the course. It puts the grammar presentation and practice in their place as merely one part of the course.

On the first day(s) of class I enjoy demonstrating the basic procedure with the input coming from a video:

As I said elsewhere: “I also like to do something that I really felt worked well last year. It's something I had used a lot some years ago, but had stopped using because of lack of space. The idea is that half the class goes out of the class and does something while the other half watches a video. They rehearse retelling the story of the video to each other and then the students outside come in and hear all about the video. Ideally, this should be done vice versa with a second video, but I never seem to have time to do that on the same day so I have do it on Day 2. During the rehearsals I am circulating to help them. Error monitoring can be done during the final retelling when it is truly communicative.”

Last Thursday was going to be a pretty standard day with both my classes: both were going to do a pair of retelling tasks involving first one half and later the other half going outside and doing a ‘grammar exercise’ while the other half would be listening to a text being read aloud to them or listening to a recording from the course book.

The exercises done outside are always done by both halves of the class and now I nearly always use photocopiable worksheets from the teacher’s books of New English File (Pre-) Intermediate. The major addition I have made this year is to have ready-made answer sheets for the exercises so the students can correct the exercises themselves before coming back into the classroom. It’s quite a lot of work making the answer sheets, but I’ll probably use them again at least once.

The Pre-Intermediate students listened to me reading aloud a long text from pages 44-45 of their book. They didn’t look at the book, and some of them took notes even though I had promised I would give them an outline to speak from. The students were put in pairs. One student in each pair was rather pushed into retelling the story after this first reading, but couldn’t remember everything they had understood and obviously there were things they hadn’t understood anyway. I then read the story aloud again, this time displaying the text using two-panel reading view in Word on the IWB. The projector was blanked out and the other student retold the story, presumably much better. In both rehearsals for the real communicative task, I was on hand to help with language where needed but rarely with content.

I also slipped out from time to time to see how the students outside were getting on with their task and handing them individual answer sheets when they were ready. I had asked them to work individually as I know from experience that they spend far longer if they do it in pairs. One of the problems with this technique is keeping the two halves of the class in sync.

Finally, the students came back in and I was able to assign them ‘at random’ to a partner who would tell them about what they had listened to. At this stage I usually either monitor for errors or assess their speaking.

But this time it was very different. I recorded them re-telling the story: all of them! We only lost one person’s recording. The secret is to have enough mp3 voice recorders that can simply be plugged into the computer and the mp3 files copied directly to the Library in Edmodo. OK I had to rename them first so that they had the name of the student speaking in the file name. It worked a treat!

In one class we were one recorder short and I asked students if they could record their voice on their mobile phone and one student volunteered and successfully recorder his contribution as an .amr file, which he sent to my email account. I converted it to an mp3 file here http://www.freefileconvert.com/ and attached it to my message to him and his partner.

Then it was the same thing vice-versa. The other half of the class listened to the shorter, but much harder listening exercise on page 45 of New English File Pre-Intermediate and in fact they listened to it three times and there were three practice re-tellings. The pairs for the final retelling to the students outside were the same as before.

I was really pleased with how well they took to the idea of recording their voices and this included some new students who had only joined the class 4 classes before. I recorded myself reading the first story aloud to get them used to the idea of the recorders and everyone overcame their initial nerves very quickly.

I then promised them that I would send the files to them and them only – not to the whole class. And this morning I send two files to each pair of students with this note “I hope you enjoy listening to your recordings. Listen to yours and listen to your neighbour's again. Send a reply with your comments. These are private: only you, your neighbour and I can read your comments.”

Subsequently, I have listened to each recording and noted 4 or five words or phrases that they mispronounced, but haven’t decided yet what to do with these personalised lists.

I followed the same procedure with the Intermediate class I had half an hour later. Each half listened to me reading aloud one of the stories on page 47 of New English File Intermediate about two women who didn’t give up when they lost a limb and excelled in the sports they had excelled at before their accidents.

Two students have responded so far saying that it made them realise how much work they needed to do on their speaking. I have suggested this:

“One thing you could do, ____, is to read the text on page 47 again. Close the book and practice retelling the four stories again and again without writing anything. If you want to record your voice you can do it here http://vocaroo.com/ You can then send me a link to your recording”

1/2 in and 1/2 out - creating a communication gap

Setting up an information gap and getting students to bridge the gap by speaking English.

As a regular part of almost every day of class, I set up an information gap by sending half the students out of the class with a written task to do and providing the ones in the class with some kind of input usually something that they listen to. I find the final speaking and the preparation stages helping the ‘speakers’ get from input to output are a truly communicative aspect of the course. It puts the grammar presentation and practice in their place as merely one part of the course.

On the first day(s) of class I enjoy demonstrating the basic procedure with the input coming from a video:

As I said elsewhere: “I also like to do something that I really felt worked well last year. It's something I had used a lot some years ago, but had stopped using because of lack of space. The idea is that half the class goes out of the class and does something while the other half watches a video. They rehearse retelling the story of the video to each other and then the students outside come in and hear all about the video. Ideally, this should be done vice versa with a second video, but I never seem to have time to do that on the same day so I have do it on Day 2. During the rehearsals I am circulating to help them. Error monitoring can be done during the final retelling when it is truly communicative.”

Last Thursday was going to be a pretty standard day with both my classes: both were going to do a pair of retelling tasks involving first one half and later the other half going outside and doing a ‘grammar exercise’ while the other half would be listening to a text being read aloud to them or listening to a recording from the course book.

The exercises done outside are always done by both halves of the class and now I nearly always use photocopiable worksheets from the teacher’s books of New English File (Pre-) Intermediate. The major addition I have made this year is to have ready-made answer sheets for the exercises so the students can correct the exercises themselves before coming back into the classroom. It’s quite a lot of work making the answer sheets, but I’ll probably use them again at least once.

The Pre-Intermediate students listened to me reading aloud a long text from pages 44-45 of their book. They didn’t look at the book, and some of them took notes even though I had promised I would give them an outline to speak from. The students were put in pairs. One student in each pair was rather pushed into retelling the story after this first reading, but couldn’t remember everything they had understood and obviously there were things they hadn’t understood anyway. I then read the story aloud again, this time displaying the text using two-panel reading view in Word on the IWB. The projector was blanked out and the other student retold the story, presumably much better. In both rehearsals for the real communicative task, I was on hand to help with language where needed but rarely with content.

I also slipped out from time to time to see how the students outside were getting on with their task and handing them individual answer sheets when they were ready. I had asked them to work individually as I know from experience that they spend far longer if they do it in pairs. One of the problems with this technique is keeping the two halves of the class in sync.

Finally, the students came back in and I was able to assign them ‘at random’ to a partner who would tell them about what they had listened to. At this stage I usually either monitor for errors or assess their speaking.

But this time it was very different. I recorded them re-telling the story: all of them! We only lost one person’s recording. The secret is to have enough mp3 voice recorders that can simply be plugged into the computer and the mp3 files copied directly to the Library in Edmodo. OK I had to rename them first so that they had the name of the student speaking in the file name. It worked a treat!

In one class we were one recorder short and I asked students if they could record their voice on their mobile phone and one student volunteered and successfully recorder his contribution as an .amr file, which he sent to my email account. I converted it to an mp3 file here http://www.freefileconvert.com/ and attached it to my message to him and his partner.

Then it was the same thing vice-versa. The other half of the class listened to the shorter, but much harder listening exercise on page 45 of New English File Pre-Intermediate and in fact they listened to it three times and there were three practice re-tellings. The pairs for the final retelling to the students outside were the same as before.

I was really pleased with how well they took to the idea of recording their voices and this included some new students who had only joined the class 4 classes before. I recorded myself reading the first story aloud to get them used to the idea of the recorders and everyone overcame their initial nerves very quickly.

I then promised them that I would send the files to them and them only – not to the whole class. And this morning I send two files to each pair of students with this note “I hope you enjoy listening to your recordings. Listen to yours and listen to your neighbour's again. Send a reply with your comments. These are private: only you, your neighbour and I can read your comments.”

Subsequently, I have listened to each recording and noted 4 or five words or phrases that they mispronounced, but haven’t decided yet what to do with these personalised lists.

I followed the same procedure with the Intermediate class I had half an hour later. Each half listened to me reading aloud one of the stories on page 47 of New English File Intermediate about two women who didn’t give up when they lost a limb and excelled in the sports they had excelled at before their accidents.

Two students have responded so far saying that it made them realise how much work they needed to do on their speaking. I have suggested this:

“One thing you could do, ____, is to read the text on page 47 again. Close the book and practice retelling the four stories again and again without writing anything. If you want to record your voice you can do it here http://vocaroo.com/ You can then send me a link to your recording”