The Scramblinator

Comedy in classroom-bring laughter into lessons During a recent class session, my students stared at me with blank expressions, glassy eyes, pasty and pale skin, and jowls drooping. I think I even saw a string of saliva hanging from the corner of one student’s mouth. I was reviewing plot structure. Suddenly, the students sporadically kicked and jumped and held their stomachs while laughing. We spent the rest of the class learning plot structure while laughing about episodes of The Walking Dead. Inside a classroom, the air thickens with time and words and problems and thoughts, lots of thoughts. Humor in a virtual classroom enhances students’ interest and participation, according to a study conducted by Ohio State University professors of psychology, Mark Shatz and Frank LoSchiavo. There’s no better way to gain the upper hand than with a twist in words, a light-hearted joke, or an outright laugh. The difficulty always lies in the delivery and the willingness of the teacher to seriously bomb. 1. So, I decided to deal with it. 2. 3. 4.

Cut-Up Machine The CutUp Machine mixes up the words you enter in a form, a la William S. Burroughs and the Dadaists. This creates new and often surprising juxtapositions of words that can inspire creativity. 1. Type or paste some text into the field below.2. Click "Cut It Up". Your cut up text will appear below. Download the CutUp Machine WordPress Plugin! The Cut Up Technique Cut-up is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The History of Cut Ups A precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. Burroughs cited T. Gil J. Also in the 1950s, painter and writer Brion Gysin more fully developed the cut-up method after accidentally re-discovering it. Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel. Argentine writer Julio Cortazar often used cut ups in his 1963 novel Hopscotch. Musical influence

Grammar teaching: Exploiting texts | Article | Onestopenglish Introduction It has long been the practice for graded texts in coursebooks to contain numerous examples of the same grammatical structure in order to highlight the use of that structure in context. For example, a graded text might contain several examples of the construction used to to illustrate a past habit. Unless the text is skilfully written, this will often have the effect of making the style of the text rather stilted and unrealistic, but the aim of highlighting the structure is nonetheless generally achieved with this type of presentation. Typically, the text is then followed by comprehension questions, which again highlight the structure, and finally by various grammar-based practice exercises to reinforce its use in some kind of context. In the case of authentic reading texts, however, it is rarely the case that a particular text will have numerous examples of the same grammatical structure. Highlighting particular grammatical structures Further practice Advantages

Scrambled Text Generator - Free Online Text Conversion ToggleCase cuts out all the hassle of manually figuring out what words to scramble or shuffle to create Scrambled Text. Simply type or paste any words you want to convert into the form below, hit the magic Scrambled Text button and that's it. Then just copy and paste your Scrambled Text to use elsewhere! Have fun with ToggleCase and create crazy and wacky Readable Scrambled Text messages online for your Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace posts (or anything else for that matter). Transform from this chunk of text in sentence case: ToggleCase is the coolest website ever! To this chunk of text in Readable Scrambled Text: TogCelgase is the coelost weisbte erev!

Word Fun - alphaDictionary We have a variety of word games and other entertainments for you to enjoy while learning new words and their meanings. We are just beginning to build our wordplay menu, so keep an eye on it. Paraprosdokians Enjoy this peculiar type of humor in our speech—sentences that lead us down the garden path. Persiflage: Intelligent Insults We weren't always awash in crudity even though insults have always been with us. Doctopus - New Visions CloudLab Doctopus allows you to easily set and control access levels for individuals and for the whole class on assignments. Create student assignments templates in Google Drive, and then distribute them based on individual student level and need. Doctopus allows the teacher to set student access permissions to assignments on a whole class level(student to student) as well as an individual level. Create assignments that grant view-only or comment-only privileges to the rest of the class for peer review protocols. Celebrate student work by enabling view-only access to all student assignments where students can view without editing their classmates work. When assigning a due date, use Doctopus to set it and forget it! Teachers can now use Doctopus with Google Classroom distributed assignments.

Short story (A2-B1-B2): DON'T GO THERE with audio, Modal Verbs, the Imperative Form and much more - Learn English With Africa Don’t go there “ Don’t go there.” “ But you’ve been there.” “ You can’t go.” “ Why?” “ It’s not worth it.” “ Sister, I don’t understand. The middle-aged woman stands up from the reed mat. “ I will tell you.” She starts walking with rickety steps, her shadow trailing her as she advances, slowly, and then a little faster, a little faster for she must reach her destination. “ Do you want something Sister? “ Don’t worry Sister. She lifts her feet. This windowless room is the place where she spends most of her time. When she comes out, she is carrying an old metal tray. “ Oh Sister, you shouldn’t have done that. The younger woman relieves her of the load. “ Thank you,” she says. She follows behind, rubbing her red eyes and wiping away the black tears. “ Thank you Sister,’ the younger woman says. “ You really shouldn’t have done that. “ Don’t worry, what are sisters for?” There is silence. The younger woman breaks it after some minutes. “ You really want to go there, do you?” “ Of course, I do.” “ Lose?

Story Dice - a creative storytelling tool from Dave Birss Menu There are lots of practical creative tools and techniques in How To Get To Great Ideas. But I want to help you even more. So here’s a selection of free web-tools and templates I’ve created to help you out. Feel free to use these for yourself or with groups. If you find them useful, bookmark them and share them with your colleagues and friends. This page is continually growing as I add more stuff. And buy the book, if you don't have it already Story Dice – Your Handy Story Idea Generator Now the classic story ideas generator is available for free in your browser. As a creative exercise, it’s a brilliant way of giving your imagination a workout. How To Use Story Dice There are five story dice (or nine dice, if you prefer), each with a random image on it. I recommend you try to work with the order they appear on the screen but if you’re finding it tough, you can do some swapsies. You also don’t need to take the image literally. Open the 5 Dice Story Generator Open the 9 Dice Story Generator