Intonation to express feelings

While doing my researh for my final portfolio of my Phonology module at the UNAM, I found this interesting online test.

Could you say what feelings are they expressing?

Good Luck and have fun ;)

http://www.englishmedialab.com/pronunciation/upper-intermediate%20intonation%20exercise.htm

Phonics alphabet ABC songs

Sometimes it's difficult for beginner students, to understand the difference between the letter "name" and it's phonetic correct pronunciation.

Found two videos wich I think may be useful as a tool with the little ones to show them the difference...

Don't you really need subtitles???

And what about this funny video?

Do you need subtitles????  :)

Need to improve your english comprehension???

This is funny!
Hope we teach with good pronunciation so this never happens to our students ;)

Minimal Pairs

A useful tool to practice pronunciation is using Minimal Pairs...

I think this video can help us, and also students, to practice.

Improving Pronunciation

Learning how to pronounce properly is always a challenge for all ESL teachers.

Here is an interesting video on learning how to pronounce some words that look the same but are pronounced differently ;)

MAD LIBS

Enjoy playing Mad Libs funny histories with your students!

http://www.wordlibs.com/

SILENT LETTERS

Find this interesting article than can be usefull for our teaching plans!

http://www.brighthub.com/education/languages/articles/102714.aspx?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Hope you find it interesting too :)

WANT TO SING TONGUE TWISTERS?

Find some cute songs...

Want to try them?

LET'S TRY PRACTICE PRONUNCIATION :)

Here are some Tongue Twisters to practice. Have fun!

NEW VOICE TECHNOLOGIES AND PRONUNCIATION

Have you think about how your pronunciation or accent will help you or not to use new voice technologies?
Here is a funny example!
Enjoy watching it :)

"IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO SPEAK WITHOUT AN ACCENT..."

TELL ME HOW YOU SPEAK AND I WILL TELL YOU WHERE ARE YOU FROM

By Ileana Ayala Mendez

Where are you from? Let me hear how you speak!

If we pay attention to the different places where English language is spoken as a first language, we will realize the regional accents of English speakers are very different and vary depending on the different areas where the language is spoken.  And what happen with non-native English speakers? They mainly tend to carry over the intonation from their mother language (tongue) into English speech, so you can tell if the people talking with you come from France, Canada, India, Japan…  But not only this, you can also get more information about people’s background by listening them talking such as: their education level, their social status, their friend’s social status as well, etc. 

 

We, as teachers, have the opportunity and the challenge to expose our students to different English accents in order to improve their language comprehension. They deserve to learn as “real English” as it can gets when they are out from the classroom. We need to help our students to successfully interact in any English native society.
  

What I did while I was teaching 5^th and 6^th grade was to host invited speakers to the classroom (any English native speaker) and give the students the opportunity to talk with the invited person about different topics of interest. It was a great experience to see the students talk and interact naturally with the invited speaker! After the activity students told they where surprised being able to understand all the conversation and their confidence speaking English was up-grated!

Remember: “It’s impossible to speak without an accent and that there is not such thing as unaccented English”. 

LANGUAGE GARDEN - FUN WAY TO LEARN A LANGUAGE

Here you can check this awesome web site to use for your students to learn and practice language skills with fun.
Colorful dynamic graphic presentation!!! :)

http://www.languagegarden.org/

PLAY AND LEARN ADDING -ING SUFFIX

Since their first years learning English, ESL students need to adquire the hability to form new words by adding -ing suffix.

Yes, there are some rules we teachers explain at the classroom, but hard practice is needed.

Check this game for younger ESL learners. You may want to use it some day.

Students can practice and get fun at the same time!!!
http://www.firstschoolyears.com/literacy/word/other/prefixes/interactive/-ing.swf

Tablets at the ESL classroom?

One of the ESL teachers I'm following on Twitter, post this interesting article about tablets eventually facilitating more personalized and interactive lerning at schools. What do you think?
 https://edutechdebate.org/tablet-computers-in-education/eventually-tablets-will-facilitate-more-personalized-and-interactive-learning/

Using Skype in the classroom

Found in twitter this interesting video about how Skype is been used more frecuently with teachers worldwhide.


USA to Chile: a classroom exchange on earthquakes from Skype in the classroom on Vimeo.

It's amazing how this 21st. century technologies bring us the world in the palm of our hands! What do you think?

How to engaged Digital Natives students?

Are we teachers ready for blended education challenge?
Watch this amazing video I received in a tweet today, I'm sure you'll be engaged as I do!

StickStuckStuck: Learn this ESL English Irregular Verbs Grammar Rap Song...

Creating a new page in my blog!

Finally I could do it!
An extra page for students (students to be...) to keep track on extra class activities...
It will be nice to have the option to post comments on each extra page created and not only on the home page!

New USA Mexico Embassy webinar video

Today I had the opportunity to watch this video:  https://statedept.connectsolutions.com/p46275281/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal
It's about Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) a teaching practice focus on production, get students talking! I think CLT represents a challange and teachers need to use some classroom management techniques to have good results!

US Mexico Embassy webinar March 24 video

This is the video about "Assessing the needs of your students" hope you enjoy it: https://statedept.connectsolutions.com/p39898517/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal

Students talk about improving english using blogs

This is an interesting video, hope you like it:

Midterm Task

Theaching English and Technology module has finished and I need to have my hands-on the last task.
So next days will be twitting, blogging, bookmarking and enjoying technology :D

Social Media in classroom

Find a very interesting article about "Twitter-friendly classroom at Purdue University" and how social media has been used in some places for real-time interaction on education with good results on students participation. Follow the link http://mashable.com/2009/11/03/hotseat/

Twitting

I've been experimenting with twitter and following some people I've found links to interesting web sites with teaching strategies material and teaching resourses. Now for my midterm project, will need to follow 20 people and tweet more... let's see what happen!!!

Twitter Project

OK, for this week the asignment is to create a twitter account, so I just did a moment ago...
@iligam
Will be working these days on spending time learning how it works for my teaching practice.
Will see what happens!!!!

My Blog's teaching possibilities...

Hello all!!!!
These are my thoughts for the week :)
Blogging gives us teachers an excellent tool to teach students with different learning styles because is an interactive platform that uses all kind of elements (images, audio, writing...) so it engache students and encourage them to create a friendly lerner community as they share, participate, comment, and also allows them to be active throughout the cource period.
The way I think my blog can be useful as a teaching tool is to use it as a communication space with students, helping them improve different competencies and skills such as:
Reading and Writing:
As homework I can ask students to post in the blog all kind of written asignments to complete their learning process after teaching some topic at the classroom like
-Write 10 sentences using and specific tense.
-Read the following sentences and change them to questions.
-Write a short(long) compositions about the story read today in the classroom...
-Post your comments or reflexions about the lessons, etc.
Speaking/Listening and comprehension:
I still don't know how to do it, but I think it's possible to upload podcast and videos to a blog, so I could ask students to reach these resources to watch and/or listen to them so they improve both Auditory and visual competencies....
Then I also can ask them to finish the video and/or audio activity with any writing task.
I could also ask students to present some homework creating videos and/or audios (podcast)posting them on the blog.
Advantages:
-Students can learn at any time and place (distant learning) and as a teacher I can check and correct students homework same way (distant working)
-Helps students to perceive learning process more interesting in an informal environment
-Allows other people to participate making more valuable the lerning process by sharing this others ideas
-Helps people to enrich their vocabulary
Disadvantages:
The only one I can think of is that teachers we may need enough time to keep our blogs frecuently updated...
Well, that's all for now, see you soon!!!

USA Embassy in Mexico webinars

Just watched the recorded webinar "Assessing the needs of your students" that teacher Ana Cristina recommend us.
Excellent presentation! Among the different Personal Learning Network options, I think this is an easy way to keep yourself updated on different and easy strategies to help students learn and understand english in an easier way.
It presents "the basic aspects" to consider even before planning your class: Who are your students?, What are they interested in? What learning Styles they have?, and the one I consider more important: What LEARNING STYLE DO I HAVE???..
At the end of the presentation it was possible to downlowd a document to test yourself and find out your learning style, so I'll found out soon mine...

Homework

To blog or not to blog…

I read this phrase among the web sites I visited these past days on my research about the blog concept and blogging project for the UNAM Diplomado, it captured my attention because I think It’s the daily dilemma we all have to face in the new “just try it culture”. (Do I try this new teaching concept and see what happens? Or: why should I try new things if the traditional way I’m teaching seems to work fine for me?...

And trying out is what I’ve been doing since last Friday at blogger.com in order to create my blog, after my first try failed with a Spanish blog, I finally could create one in English!!!! (Thanks to my teacher Erik!).

And my homework for this week and Diplomado's new project is called: Ileana Says…Title suggested by my oldest son Juan José (17), “because you are going to say stuff to others, aren’t you?”, he said to me, and I think I will do… but more than only saying (posting) my ideas, I expect more that others (friends, former colleagues, actual colleagues, teachers, my “foreign daughters”…) also say (post) stuff (comments, ideas, links, related topics…) because with this interaction of opinions and comments, all of us can get ideas, tips and tools that help us all to improve our teaching skills (specially me, a total “digital immigrant”!).

I’m still doing a lot of web-research and checking other teachers blogs to learn all the possibilities this resource can offer for the teaching practice, so hopefully in my next post, I’ll come out with some practical ideas to make my blog a useful teaching-learning tool for me, my friends and students.

By the way, another nice reflection I found searching blogging concepts says something like this: One on the wonderful aspects about teaching is that you are also always learning new ways better teaching your students… What do you say about this?...

I did it!

Finally, my Diplomado Blog hands-on proyect is on track.....
I hope this "real life practice" will help me to improve my skills and learn new ways to make learning ESL more interesting for students and teaching more easy for me!
For this I'll need others help, because a blogg needs to be interactive... So I'm pretty sure when my actual colleagues and former colleagues post their comments, suggestions and points of view on the blog, I'll have the oportunity to learn how it works.