Babbling on

This is fun. Add photos and then talk over them. Greaat for student homework / projects. It can be used to practise any language point. You do have to sign in however, but you can use your facebook account. Well worth investigating if you don’t know it already. http://www.fotobabble.com/

Imaging this

We use images all the time in our classrooms and technology makes it increasingly easy to find pictures / flashcards etc. and also to manipulate them and create customized material. You and your students may be familiar with http://www.flickr.com/ where you can store your photo sets online. I have just found, however, http://bighugelabs.com/ which offers a series of tools for manipulating photos, creating a jigsaw for example or a mosaic or poster from files you can upload or import directly from facebook or flickr. Great fun and very useful for creating stimulating images for use in class: try getting students to do their own and bring them in for discussion.

If you want to use pre-selected photos there is nowhere better to start than with http://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/sets/ the great ELT picture project. Have a look at the photos already available and well done to those involved! As a continuation follow the great new blog with ideas on how to creatively use photos in your classes http://takeaphotoand.wordpress.com/

Great work by all involved!

It’s English Jim, but not as we know it …

You may have seen this before but it is new to me: gibberish … how to speak English without making a sound, or rather, without making sense.

And more on the theme from this great blog post:

http://amog.com/offbeat/english-sounds-nonenglish-speakers/

I speak, you speak, we all speak for free

Nearly on holidays but one final link to an article in El Pais (in Spanish) on a new website aimed at giving Spanish speakers more opportunities to speak in English with native speakers via videoconferencing software. It is free but of course you have to pay something in return. In the fashion of good old face to face “intercambios” or exchanges, the person who speaks English to you will expect the opportunity to practise Spanish in return. The site is at: http://verbling.com/ and the article which continues to discuss the necessity but also lack of English in Spain is at: http://tinyurl.com/3r43cxk