Russell Stannard finds some funny films to feature in his classes.
I keep reading about Myspace, just one of the many websites where people can upload videos, blogs and pictures for free and allow the world to access them. In previous issues we have talked about getting students to make their own videos and blogs to put on websites. However, here I want to look at ways of making use of the material that is already on the site. The only downside is that it can take a long time to find things that are suitable for use in class. However, there is a search feature to help you and I think it is well worth the effort and time it takes to locate good materials on the site. I keyed in the words funny and travel to find the videos described here.
Idea 1
This is a really simple idea but it worked well with my students. I divided the class into groups of four and gave each a video to watch on My Space. I chose quite funny videos and I must admit it took a long time to find the right ones! Each group was told to watch their video as many times as they needed, take notes and then prepare to tell the rest of the class about it. I told the students they must really try to convince the rest of the class that their video was the best, but the others were not allowed to see it. We then voted at the end and decided which video sounded the most interesting and then we all watched it. One rule, of course, was that you could not vote for your own video. The first time I did this, it worked OK, but most of the students didn’t prepare their presentations very well. So the second time, I gave them a small worksheet to help them prepare their presentations and try to ‘sell’ the video they had watched to the others.
Worksheet
- What is the title of the video?
- Who is in the video?
- Where is the video filmed?
- What is the video about?
- What things happen in the video?
- Why should people vote for this video?
This activity took a while simply because I had to watch lots of videos myself before choosing the ones I wanted the students to watch in class. The trouble is that lots of the videos are too crazy, contain sexual images or really don’t have much of a storyline. Here are links to the videos I chose. They are all quite funny and caused some laughs in the class.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids. individual&videoid=1552015131
This is a crazy video about Chad and Charles. It doesn’t matter if the students can’t understand it all, there are enough visuals for them to explain the story.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids. individual&videoid=1372596954
This video is about ‘shoe golf’. It is completely mad but has interesting content for the students to explain.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids. individual&videoID=1551983628
This is an amusing video about a revolutionary new product.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids. individual&videoid=1585570032
The video tells the story of a skeleton’s trip to Rome.
Idea 2
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids. individual&videoid=1548386807
This is quite simply a great video. It is about a man called Chris. He goes to India and while he is travelling, he is aware that he is creating lots of CO2 gases. So he decides to plant some trees while he is there. The video is all about his travels and his tree planting. I started the lesson by putting the following words on the board: Chris, India, CO2, pollution, help from locals, boat, plane, ten trees, tree nursery, telegraph pole, landlady. I then put the students into groups and told them we were going to watch a video and that they had to guess from the words what the video might be about. I next got the various groups to explain to the class what they thought it was about. A couple of the groups did this well. We then watched the video. Since I am lucky and have computers for all my students, I allowed each group to sit at a separate computer and watch the video, but you only really need to show it at the front of the class if you don’t have the luxury of multiple computers. The video surprised everyone and quite a few students began to say how interesting the idea was. I then told each group to produce a set of comprehension questions about the video. This meant that they had to watch it several times in order to make up questions. Finally, I swapped the questions over so that each group had to answer the questions of another group. This forced the students to pay close attention to the video again. As a follow-up, you could get the students to click on Chris’s profile and send him a message. If Chris had kept a blog, it would have been interesting to have read that and maybe got the students to do something with it for homework. Sadly, though the video is excellent, there is little more information about Chris.
Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer in ICT and Multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK. He is currently working on the Teacher’s Books for Hello English, published by Balberry.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 49, 2007
