sábado, 30 de agosto de 2014

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.

3 comentarios:

  1. Hi Lucila! I strongly agree with you. Everything can be found by using google and that's the reason why it is so useful for the EFL classroom. You can find infinite number of tools that can help you improve your teaching material making, therefore, your lessons much more engaging. Thanks for your recommendations! I will definitely try them!

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  2. Hi there, Lu! Team google here, too! There’s not a single day in which I don’t use it. I google to find pictures, lyrics, chords, information, videos, and even to check my grammar or spelling!
    By the way, the iphone text generator is great! I think is a new and interesting way to present conversations in a much more appealing way, especially when teaching adolescents. I will definitely try it with my future students :)

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  3. Hello, Lu! I love google too! You can really find EVERYTHING there... the problem for me was that I didn't know how to make a "creative" search and sometimes it took me ages to find what I reaaly wanted. I will definetelly follow your recomendations!

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