Student Blogging: Appearance, Character, Relationships

Naturally, the blogging task my students considered to be one of the most compelling was the one related to the topic "Appearance. Character. Relationships". It didn't come as a surprise to me as young people are always eager to talk about their friends, roommates and dates. 

To help them make their stories full of great collocations, phrasal verbs and idioms, I offered them some online resources apart from the basic wordlist:

A lesson on PHRASAL VERBS related to relationships:
http://www.espressoenglish.net/phrasal-verbs-for-romantic-relationships/

Interactive vocabulary exercises:
http://www.expandyourvocabulary.com/personality/exercise5.swf
http://www.expandyourvocabulary.com/personality/exercise1.swf
http://www.expandyourvocabulary.com/friend/exercise2.swf
http://learningapps.org/269316

In order to practise active vocabulary in speaking, I offered them some role play situations:

1.  A married couple is talking to a therapist about their relationship.

2.  Two young people are discussing their dating experiences.

3.  Two friends are deciding who they want and do not want to invite for a party they throw.

4.  Old friends are recalling their college years, friendships and people who were special for them.

5.  Two young people are gossiping about their new roommate.

6.  A young person is trying to convince his/her friend who fell in love with a wrong person to let it go.

Finally, the very blogging task included creating a comic strip. That's where the most of the students had lots of fun!

THE TASK: 

You  have to write a story that meets the following requirements:
- description of characters
- some details of their relationship (friendship, romance, parent-child etc; date, falling out, argument etc)
- dialogs and conversations between characters

Conversations and dialogs will be presented in a form of comic strips created in http://www.wittycomics.com/ orhttp://bitstrips.com/create/comic. If you wish to present the whole story as a comic strip, you certainly can do this. Otherwise, include at least 3 comic strips in your story.

A rough example, as usual:

OR

Good Luck!

As always, here are some works by my students:
Rita
Yulia
Ruslana

Student Blogging: Travel, Tourism, Migration

Finally, I feel like getting down to blogging again. In this post, I'd like to continue sharing some ideas about a blogging project I did with my students. There have been several posts about it, so this time I'll write about the task my students particularly enjoyed.

The topic we were working on was related to travel, tourism and migration. In order to practice vocabulary in different ways, I offered them to do role play situations on travel and tourism and to do the blog task on migration issues. Prior to desinging this course, I managed to find some great resources to help my students learn more about this topic and explore the usage of vocabulary related to it. One of such resources is the interactive activity developed by the Tenement Museum. By doing this activity, students can learn more about immigrants to the USA in the early XX century and their everyday lives. They can take on a personality of an immigrant and explore the harsh realities of their journey and daily struggles. In this quest, they are accompanied by video stories of Victoria, an immigrant girl, who shows them all ins and outs of immigrant life in New York a century ago.

As my students were completing this quest, they had to accomplish the following task:

In this activity, you will get acquainted with the realities faced by immigrants in the USA around a century ago. As you enter the site, press "i" for instructions.

You will have to choose an immigrant character for yourself and follow further steps.  A girl called Victoria will be your guide in this adventure. After you have completed all the stages of this game you will be offered to send Victoria a postcard. This is the base for your blogpost (you don't have to do the task on the game site; you should write a letter in your blog):

Write a letter (200-250 words, 20-25 active words and expressions) to Victoria describing your imagined experience based on the choices you made throughout the game (mention as many details as possible) and your imagination. Make sure you include some facts from Victoria's stories too. Also, paste an image of your immigrant passport and any other pictures you  consider relevant. 

Some works by my students:

Alina
Maria
Alexander

Student Blogging: Fakebook Profiles

This is the task my students had to fulfil for the topic "Media, News and Celebrity". In the class, we had a discussion about freedom of speech. The questions I used can be found on the site ESL Discussions.

As far as the task for their blogs is concerned, they had to use Fakebook to create a profile of a celebrity they like.

THE TASK FOR THE BLOG

Imagine that a world celebrity (of your choice) paid a visit to your college/school (the reason and purpose are also up to you). You have to create a fake facebook profile of this celebrity with his/her updates concerning this visit (up to 250 words, 20-25 active words and expressions) and embed it in your blog. Remember to add pictures and/or videos, as well as his/her friends' comments to make it more interesting.

Use this tool: http://www.classtools.net/FB/home-page

Here's one of the existing profiles of Johnny Cash:

Some works of my students:

Dylan O'Brien by Hanna 

Audrey Hepburn by Alina

Mila Kunis by Sasha

More on student blogging:

Word formation
Vocabulary web-tools
Newsjack tutorial
Voki tutorial
Mind maps
Body Language
Houses and Buildings

Ideas for teaching vocabulary with web-tools:
Vocabulary course tips Part 1, Part 2
Creating content using web

Student Blogging: Houses and Buildings

This is the task I designed for my students' blogs to get them to recycle vocabulary on topic "Houses and Buildings". As you know, the wordlist usually includes the names of various types of houses, parts of a house etc. So I was thinking about a task that would somehow encompass using as many of those words as possible. Finally, I managed to come up with this one, which proved to by lots of fun for many students. As a little addition to their writing they had to paste a short video (up to 1 minute) they had to shoot themselves.

TASK FOR THE BLOG:

- imagine you're an alien who finds him/herself on earth and has to send a message to his/her friends about a place where they can find him/her;

- fortunately, you find yourself near a building (of your choice), so you need to make a video of it showing as many details as possible (outside and/or inside) (up to 1 minute);

- in your blogpost, you will describe a building, some details of the surrounding area and/or story related to it.

Image source: http://all-free-download.com/free-vector

Some works of my students:

Olesia

Nadia

Hanna

More on student blogging:

Word formation
Vocabulary web-tools
Newsjack tutorial
Voki tutorial
Mind maps
Body Language

Ideas for teaching vocabulary with web-tools:
Vocabulary course tips Part 1, Part 2
Creating content using web

Student Blogging: Body Language

The task for students' blogs on the topic "Body language" included taking pictures and pasting them in the blog. As long as it was one of the tasks in the first term some students still had to learn how to do it. However, they could go further and try the tool called phrase.it to add speech bubbles. It proved to be lots of fun for many, especially those who tried to take pictures of their groupmates or roommates. 

THE TASK FOR THE BLOG 

1. Your blogpost will be based on the observations of your groupmates as well as other students (and teachers too if you will) regarding body language they use in different situations. Be observant!

2. Take several pictures of people using their body language to include in your post (make sure you get their permission first). They may logically fit in your narration or you me provide them with additional comments. You may also add captions to your pictures using this site: http://phrase.it/

It might look like this:

Source: phrase.it

Sites to learn about body language:

http://changingminds.org/techniques/body/body_language.htm

http://www.wikihow.com/Read-Body-Language

3. Watch the video and write out the tips presented by the speaker and use this information in your post. Remember to use active vocabulary.

GOOD LUCK!

Some works of my students:

Olesia

Hanna

More on student blogging:

Word formation
Vocabulary web-tools
Newsjack tutorial
Voki tutorial
Mind maps

Ideas for teaching vocabulary with web-tools:
Vocabulary course tips Part 1, Part 2
Creating content using web

Student Blogging: Newsjack tutorial

This is the task I gave my students so that they could practice using vocabulary of several units we had covered. They had to produce one news item and several headlines based on college events. The task also encompassed a short tutorial to the site http://newsjack.in/.     

TASK FOR THE BLOG

This time you have a chance to feel like a journalist of one of the world's leading newspapers. Follow these steps to accomplish your task:

1) Go to site http://newsjack.in/

2) Enter the URL of the newspaper. You may want to choose out of these: http://www.nytimes.com/, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/, http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Press "Remix"

3) Now let the magic begin! You can edit any part of the newspaper by clicking it. You can even change pictures! Your task is to fill the front page with the news from our university using at least 20 words from the units mentioned in section 3. Change headlines and content of the news reports, articles and other entries. The main part of the task is to write one report based on a recent event (up to 150 words). TIP: Have your report typed in Word before pasting it onto the Newsjack site.

4) After you have made the changes and typed/pasted your report, press "Share Your Remix". You will see a link to your remix, which you have to copy and paste in your blog.

5) As you can see there are quite many headlines and reports on the front page. You don't have to change everything, of course (however, you can do it if you wish). Make sure you have ONE extended report (up to 150 words) and change the content on the part of the newspaper that is available on your screen without scrolling down, i.e. this much:

Here are some tips:

How to replace the text:

1. Click on the text you want to replace.

2. Delete existing information.

3. Type or paste the text you want to add.

4. Save Changes.

5. Enjoy the result!

How to replace pictures

1. Click on the picture you want to replace.

2. Delete the URL of the picture.

3. Paste the URL of the picture you want to add.

4. Save the changes

5. Enjoy the result!

GOOD LUCK!

Some examples of my students' work:
Alla

Christina

A class with vocabulary web-tools

In my previous post, I shared a task I had designed for my students to have them use web-tools for exploring and learning vocabulary. However, I believe it would be incomplete without sharing the outline of the class I'd had with them prior to giving them the assignment. This outline was published in our class blog, so at the beginning of the class my students would open it to follow the instructions.

THE CLASS ON USING VOCABULARY WEB-TOOLS

Online dictionaries

Open these links to online dictionaries and look up the meaning of the same word using both of them:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/

http://www.yourdictionary.com/

–        What do these dictionaries have in common?

–        What are distinguishing features of each of them?

–        Which dictionary do you think you are more likely to use? Why?

Visualising vocabulary

Open the site http://graphwords.com/

–        pick up a word from the list: access, challenge, address, language (or any other from your vocabulary notebook)

–        paste it on the given page

–        observe the wordmap:

o       How many related concepts are there?

o       How many verbs/nouns/adjective are there?

o       How many different meaning fields can you see?

o       Click on one of the related words. What happens?

What is your impression of this site?

In which situations are you likely to use it?

Collocations Quest

1. Go to http://www.netspeak.org/

–        What are some opportunities does this site give?

–        Try each of the options.

–        What feedback would you give after using this site?

–        How useful may it be to you as a language learner?

2. Go to http://www.just-the-word.com/

–        Choose a word to input from the list: language, speak, contact.

–        What types of collocations can you see?

–        How many of them are familiar to you?

–        What happens when you click on a collocation?

–        What happens when you click on “View as a wordle” button?

–        What is your opinion of this tool? Would you use it regularly

It’s all about context

Go to http://fraze.it/

–        Choose a collocation from the previous exercise and enter it on this page

–        What opportunities does this site give you?

–        What additional options can you find in the left side menu?

–        Go to the source of one of the sentences. What is the article about?

–        What is your impression of this tool? How may it be useful for a language learner?

Practice makes perfect

Click on this link:

http://quizlet.com/13494618/multilingual-internet-flash-cards/

–        What method of learning and revising vocabulary is this site based on?

–        What options for studying vocabulary can you find on this site?

Student Blogging: Vocabulary Sci-Fi

When I was to design a vocabulary course I decided I would take advantage of web-technologies and the opportunities they provide for language learning. In some of my posts (here and here), I was trying to put together a list of approaches and tools that appealed to me. Now, that I've covered half of the way, I feel like sharing some practices I've applied, especially that they proved to be working for my students. Therefore, I'm going to present the tasks they had to accomplish in their blogs. 

Blog Assignment:

In your post “Vocabulary Sci-Fi”, you will be addressing your peers from the past (20-30 years ago) explaining to them what opportunities you have today to learn English. 

Apart from that you will have to incorporate these elements in your story:

- choose a word (from Unit 1 in Upstream) to make a word map (graphwords.com) and insert the picture in your blogpost.

- Use another word to look up the collocations in “just the word”, create a word cloud (wordle.net) and insert the picture in your blogpost.

- Choose one expression to find example sentences in fraze.it, limit your search to the topic of “Education”. Choose one sentence to see the source article and copy one paragraph. In this paragraph, highlight several collocations that you found interesting. 

- Choose 10 words/expressions from the text “The theatre for the deaf” (p. 14-15.) to create a flashcard set in Quizlet (quizlet.com). Paste the link in your post.


Here are some posts by my students with the task described above:

Alla    
Ruslana
Maria