Being creative with your Google search

Lately, I’ve been thinking that people are not very creative when they google stuff. Most of people don’t realise the potential an internet searcher such as Google has got. I mean, you can find literally anything just by googling it. And by anything, I really mean it! There are tutorials, facts, books, videos, jokes, people asking and answering the same things I want to know, recipes, maps and many others, no matter how silly, strange or badly-spelled the search is. If Google doesn’t find it… it probably doesn’t exist.

Thanks to this searcher I found many of the tools I used when doing my teaching practices recently. I just typed ‘how to…’ and hundreds of entries appeared. Among the tools I found, there were an IPhoneconversation generator and a video that taught me to design a leaflet in Microsoft Word. I didn’t even know the latter had so many templates ready to use! I also downloaded two free books on the task-based approach and found a list of tongue twisters to practice food items’ pronunciation, which my students loved.

Apart from being an internet searcher, Google also offers many other different services and apps, which could be very useful for the ELT teacher. Among them, there are Google books (which allows people to search and preview thousands of books freely), Scholar Google (which shows university articles on hundreds of different topics), Google Drive (a cloud storage site) and Google for Education (which offers tools and materials for both students and teachers).

To conclude, there are an infinite number of useful tools to use in the ELT classroom and they are all just a Google search away! 

Picture retrieved from this link.

Working with selfies in the ELT classroom

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk called ‘Selfies: a fast track to boost students’ motivation’ delivered by Mathilde Verillaud. The talk was, as the title says, using ‘selfies’ in the ELT classroom, which is something I couldn’t imagine until I went to listen to Mathilde.

Personally, I am very into photography. However, I’d never thought of using these kind of self-portraits in the classroom… mainly because I didn’t consider them to be real photography. I changed my mind a bit after the talk, though.

Mathilde talked about her work with Chinese students and her project with selfies. First, she taught them some basic rules of photography such as the rule of thirds, perspectives, taking into account the background, among others. Then, the students took their own selfies, and finally they used those pictures to carry out many different activities like writing poetry and stories, creating a gallery, eliciting ideas and many more.

Selfies are a way of showing your life and presenting yourself to the world. A project with selfies is not only fun, but also opens up the opportunity for an infinite number of subsequent activities.

The selfies, so fashionable nowadays, are a way of engaging our students. By using them, we can show them that they can mix English with things they do every day – taking pictures of themselves and their lives. We can also help them realise all the things a picture tells about someone and, of course, make the English lesson a lot more enjoyable and updated with practically no more materials than a smartphone. 

A famous selfie to close! This selfie was taken by Ellen Degeneres at the 2014 Academy Awards Ceremony and it was one of the most retweeted photos ever.

And also, the most perfectly-timed selfie I've ever seen. This one was taken during a Chelsea match.

There is an example of Mathilde's project in this link.