Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students

For a long time now I've really admired and been fascinated by the work of AmanitaDesign. They have a really unique approach and I love the way they blend photographic textures with cartoon images.I also find their games quite addictive and that's I quality I always look for when trying to find stimulating materials for students, so I've been looking at how these games could used for language development.The two games I've chosen for this posting...

Read More

Artificial Intelligence Chat bots and EFL ESL

Earlier this week I posted a short article to my Quick Shout blog about a new site called Virsona that enables teachers and students to develop their own AI ( Artificial Intelligence) chat bots.Since then I have been trying the site a bit more, developing tutorials and thinking about how we can use it with our EFL ESL students.To get an idea of what a 'chat bot' is, got to this page and start asking Abraham Lincoln some questions: http://www.virsona.com/ecchat.aspx?cvid=212The...

Read More

Naming My Sources: Part 2

In the first part of this series aimed at sharing the sources of the information I blog about, I focused on sites which spread the word about new technology or websites. In this second part I'd like to spread the word about some of the more ELT and Educationally orientated blogs which have provided me with a wealth of information and professional development.First of course has to be Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day……For Teaching ELL, ESL, &...

Read More

Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life

One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students.Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot.Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles.So...

Read More

Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL

I've just discovered Wordle, which is a really useful site for creating word clouds. The word clouds are created by entering either a text, URL or del.icio.us user name into a field. The site then generates a word cloud based on the frequency of key words in the text or webpage.Here's what a word cloud based on the URL of this blog looks like.The word clouds are really easy to create and can be printed up for classroom use or saved to a gallery on...

Read More