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.
