BGRS - Engaging Students

Video lessons In this video we will be showing you why we like How It Should Have Ended For Kids. We're focusing on two playlists: Silly Songs and Fixed Fairy Tales, with some practical ideas about how we use them in teaching young learners. Here's a link to an interactive video quiz at our site for one of the videos from the channel, and here's a link to the channel itself. Enjoy! Anna Csíky iSLCollective Teacher Trainer

101 Web 2.0 Teaching Tools Online tools and resources have made it easier for teachers to instruct students, and for students to collaborate with those teachers and with other students and parents. These “Web 2.0” teaching tools aren’t magical, but they may seem to defy definition at times since they save time, help you to stay organized, and often take up little space on a computer. Some of these applications are Web-based, which means that they can be accessed from any computer. The following list is filled with tools that will make a teacher’s, or those enrolled in the best online education programs, life easier. The categories are listed in alphabetical order and the links to each tool are also listed alphabetically within those categories.

How to learn English for free: 50 websites for free English lessons – Espress... Videos & YouTube channels: EngVid.com – More than 1000 videos from various teachers. Sort by level or topicTED talks – Good for more advanced learners; use the captions or transcripts.Rachel’s English – Great videos on pronunciation, slang, & moreJenniferESL – More than 10 years of English-teaching videosGo Natural English – Fun and energetic American English teacherEnglish Anyone – Conversations, advanced listening, beginners’ course & moremmmEnglish – Australian English teacherEnglish with Lucy – British English teacherSpeak English with Vanessa – Natural expressions, pronunciation, phrasal verbsFluency MC – Teaches English through rhythm and rapPapa Teach Me – British English pronunciation, prepositions, vocabularyEnglishClass101 – 400+ videos on many different topics

6 Excellent Free Sites to Practise Reading Comprehension It’s been too long since I’ve written about improving reading skills. Last time I posted about sites to help you practise reading comprehension was in May last year. Way too long. The truth is that doing reading comprehension activities in class takes time, especially if we are talking about long texts with an amount of difficulty, and very often this is one of the tasks we give students as homework. The Amazing Race: English Edition – The Canswedian English Teacher I teach a class where the students don’t receive a grade… It is for students who don’t take Spanish, French or German and have extra English/Swedish instead. At times I am left banging my head against the wall – or grumbling a few choice words – because the class lacks the structure and drive I so crave in my regular English classes. My co-teacher and I work fantastic together, and have tried to do what we can with them. However, I am constantly asking myself – how am I supposed to encourage the students and make them realize that they should give a hooey about these oh-so-important-lessons?! This summer, I had a little thought bubble float up one day.

25 ideas for using WhatsApp with English language students Philip Haines is the Senior Consultant for Oxford University Press, Mexico. As well as being a teacher and teacher trainer, he is also the co-author of several series, many of which are published by OUP. Today he joins us to provide 25 engaging and useful classroom activities for language learners using WhatsApp. There are three main obstacles to the use of technology in ELT.

Caves Question time! Why have the girl and her companion entered the caves? Who do you think the girl is? Who is her companion? Can you see anything strange in the background? Love Stories for Learners in Simple English (Stories, Glossary, Exercises, Answer Key) Here you can find beautiful stories in simple English for you to read, download and practice. Read interesting stories and improve your English at the same time. Click Here for Step-by-Step Rules, Stories and Exercises to Practice All English Tenses

14 Song-Based Lesson Plans and Activities Although I know I like using music in my teaching, I never thought there would be so much of it on this blog when I started it over a year ago. Songs are fun, authentic sources with multiple possibilities in the classroom, but the main reason for having published 14 lesson plans and activities based on songs here is to a large extent due to copyright issues: while lyrics and songs are easily available for everyone online, access to other types of authentic texts is more limited because of copyright constraints. I also think the key to a successful song-based lesson is to deal with the text as you would with any other type of short text, whether written or oral, to practise a variety of comprehension skills, work on specific grammar and vocabulary, or introduce a topic for discussion. Choosing a song that meets the students’ needs is not always easy, though.

Smartphones & Learning possibilities in the EFL class Some data on mobile usage growth 21st century classroom infographic Six hours a day. That’s how much time the average teenager spends online, according to a June 2013 study by McAfee.