Russell Stannard recommends some entertaining sites for adults and children.
In this article I want to concentrate on some of the best fun sites that are around on the web. There is a mixture of sites here for teaching both children and adults. Most are based around web 2.0 technologies, which are really beginning to come into their own now and massively influence the types of activities and games we can use on the internet.
This site features an interesting interactive story suitable for high-level adult students, who read the narrative subtitles under the animated scenes and, at certain points, have to make choices. This involves reading and considering the options, and then making a decision. Activities like this are often termed ‘maze games’ and I used this particular game in a one-to-one lesson. The story has great animation, and there is actually quite a lot of reading to do so it really makes for a good activity. You could put your students in groups and get each group to work around one computer. They can follow the story together and then discuss their choices. Tell the students to take a note of the story as it unfolds, and then afterwards you can re-group them and they can tell another group what happened in their version of the story. Since it is like a maze, there are different options, though both times I played it we eventually got to the same outcome. Nevertheless, it is a lot of fun.
www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/index.php
This is without doubt the best site I have found for ages, and I have been sending everyone mad with it over the last few weeks! It has short clips from old Bollywood movies and the idea is that you can choose one and add your own subtitles in English or whatever language you choose. There is a completed example at www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/index.php?module= see&lang=uk&code=ba68e7972bbf7d3e02a6960f5dcfebfc. The site is very easy to use and is a great chance to get your students (perhaps working in pairs or groups) to create their own dialogues. Don’t worry about the space available for keying in the subtitles – it expands as you write to allow for quite a lot of text, though some of the videos have space for a five-part exchange and others only space for a three-part exchange. Once they are ready, the students can write in the names of the people who wrote the dialogue, add an email address and then add addresses of people they want to send the movie clip to. When they click the ‘Send’ button, a link will be sent to their friends, family or even the teacher. They can also view the finished product. My students really love this site and we have had a lot of fun making the dialogues. In fact once it went down so well we spent most of the lesson doing it!
Sadly, this site doesn’t have sound, but it features a simple game which is a great way of getting the students to learn locations in English. First, choose a geographical region, such as Europe. The website will then name different cities around Europe and you have to do your best to click on the precise position on a map where you think that city is located. The site will then calculate how near you were and will award points depending on how many kilometres out you were. This is very entertaining, really simple and the students learn about geography as well as learning city names and countries. There are some different games on the site, too, including ones involving flags, UNESCO sites and photos of different locations around the world.
Using this site, students can design their own chipmunk character, choosing a gender, a head, a body and a background, and then create monologues for the character to say. It is best if the students have microphones, as they can then record their monologues and play them back. If they don’t have microphones, they can write the monologue.
More …
I have added a training video to my own website that shows you how to use some of the sites I have highlighted in this article, and there are also a few more sites on the video that are not included here. To see this video, go to www.teachertrainingvideos.com/fun/index.html.
I have demonstrated this site at a couple of recent talks and it has gone down extremely well. It is great for students, who can use it to practise spelling words they have difficulty with. You simply key in five words you want to practise spelling in the spaces on the left-hand side (you can load many more words by using the buttons at the bottom to add more spaces to the list) and then click on either ‘Play a game’ or ‘Test’. Try ‘Test’ first because I think you will be really surprised. You will be able to click on the ‘Say it’ button and hear the words being read out; you can also click on ‘Sound sentence’ to hear your words used in sentences. The great thing is that the speech engine is good and very clear. You then type the words into the boxes and check your score. I particularly like the fact that you put in the content so it is completely flexible. You can also enter your words, click on ‘Play a game’ and you will then have a choice of different games that you can play which use them. This website is simple, straight to the point and well worth showing your students. If you want to learn more about the site, then watch the help video on my website: www.teachertrainingvideos.com/spell/ index.html.
Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer in ICT and Multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK. He is currently working on the CD-ROMs and Teacher’s Books for Hello English, published by Balberry.
This article first appeared in English Teaching professional, Issue 56, 2008
