YouTube

What the resource is, how it works, what you need to make it work

YouTube is a website where you can upload, watch and share videos. You can watch all kind of videos such as music videos, movies, TV series and educational videos. The website is free to use, however, YouTube is financed through advertising and video commercials. Users and companies that are uploading videos on YouTube provide the content and foundation of the website.

When entering YouTube you search for what you are looking for and receive a result containing a list of videos. Next to the presented result you will also see similar videos that may interest you depending on search words and previous activity on the website.

In order to use YouTube you need a device connected to Internet. The device can be a mobile phone, tablet or computer.

How the resource can be used by teachers

I’m working as a teacher in a British school in Madrid and we are using YouTube in our education. The children I teach are three years old and it can be a challenge for me to keep them focused and interested. YouTube is a good resource for me to use because it does have educational videos that I can show the children. I always start my lessons with a circle time when I show the children videos from YouTube. It can be everything from weather songs to videos about counting numbers.   

How the resource can be used by pupils

Since I have very young children its important that everything we do is fun so they don’t get tiered and bored.  My pupils like songs and music, and that’s why it’s convenient to use YouTube as an educational resource.

The children are singing a long with the video and by doing that they learn how to pronounce words in the song. Some of the songs we find on YouTube also include counting from one to ten, which is a fun way for the children to learn counting.

Other considerations when using this resource

I believe that using YouTube videos with audio is a good way of learning because you can watch and hear at the same time and it makes it easier to learn instead of only reading or listening. 

Beatrice Schelin 

The web site learnenglishkids is a site from the British Council who have worked with language and cultural relations for some 80 years, so it´s a trusted source and a well built web site packed with different language learning on-line tools. The site is made for three categories, kids, teachers and parents. The kids part of the site is for kids up to twelve years. I would say that it works best for kids age 9-12. But younger and older learners (I had fun trying it) can also use it.

The web site is, as it sounds, a site on the internet so in order to use it you will need a computer, an Ipad or a smartphone and an internet connection. The site is free and you can use it with or without becoming a member. Of course if you become a member, which is free, you will also be able to download more information and material.

What´s on it then? Well, it´s divided into the following areas: games, listen & watch, read & write, make, speak & spell and grammar. It also has a part called little kids which is for very small children. In the games part you will find lots of fun and cool games where you, for example, learn words and practice spelling. In listen & watch there are songs and stories that you can listen to. You can also download and print lyrics and texts as well as exercises that follows every story. In read & write you can communicate with other kids that uses the site by making comments on excercises or songs, like a blog. Make is a part where you can make stories or draw pictures. Here you can download material that you want to use or that you have made. Speak & spell is, as it sounds, a part where you practice speaking english, like pronounciation and spelling easy or tricky words. The grammar part I find the most interesting because I haven´t seen anything like it before. Grammar is mostly something you don´t teach kids in early years, unfortunately. But this site makes it easy and fun. They have grammar quizzes, grammar videos, grammar games and grammar tests.

Here are three more specific examples on what you can do on the site: Let the pupils listen to a story or watch a video. Either by themselves, in groups or the whole class. Then let them play the games that comes with the story, for example a wordsearch. Then they can continue with answering questions on the story to practice their understanding. After that they can work with a worksheet that you can download. Finally they can read the story from the text that you can download. Let the pupils practice spelling and how to pronounce words with Speak & spell-tricky words. First they listen to the words and look on pictures representing the words. Then they practice to pronounce the words by saying after a voice. After that they get some pictures but only one word which they listen to and then point to the right picture. Finally they listen to the word and try to spell it right. When practicing grammar you can let the pupils first watch a video explaining a grammar rule, then play a grammar game and do a grammar quizz on the same rule and finishing by doing a grammar test. It´s fun and they will learn grammar.

Of course there are more to this web site than I can fit into this blog post but I recommend you to try this useful ICT-resource and it also has a part for parents and teachers. In the teachers part you will be informed on how to use this site as a teacher and in the parents part you get a whole lot of good information on kids learning english. I can really recommend that part.

You can use this web site as a complement to your ordinary english learning material, but for the younger learners this ICT-resource could easily be their only english learning material at school. If all students can go on-line at home they can also practice english by their own or with a little help from their parents, or you can use it as a homework.

www.learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org

ICT resource: WordRead Plus

Hello!

Before doing this blog post I have considered for a while what resource I would write about. After narrowing the options down to two, I decided to write about a resource called WordRead Plus. Then what is WordRead Plus, it´s a speech synthesis program with some extra features.

First and foremost WordRead Plus is a speech synthesis program that can be used in several different forms. To name a few examples of the speech synthesis functions the program can be used to read from a website or a document. This can help the reader with pronunciation and to read a whole text with words that the reader have heard but never read. The program can also be on during the time when the writer writes a document. When used in this form the program constantly read each word for the writer, which can support the writer to connect the written word with it´s pronunciation.

Other features that the program has are for example the ScreenRuler. In this feature the user can make three different settings to help the user read from the computer screen.  The first setting is that a ruler will appear on the screen that can highlight a specific part of the screen. The user can make his or hers own settings on colour, size of the ruler and transparency. The second setting is an underline that will appear on the screen. In the settings the user can change colour, size and transparency of the underline. The last setting is similar to the ClaroView, so the description of this feature will be described below.

The last feature that I will talk about in the WordRead Plus program is ClaroView. With this feature the user can easily change colour and brightness on the screen. So instead of just having a white and bright screen to read from, the user can use ClaroView to change the settings of the colour and brightness after his or her liking. Which in turn can aid the reader.

When I decided to make my Blog Post about WordRead Plus I struggled to find reasons on how the resource could and can be used by teachers. The more I thought about the use of the program for the teacher, the more reasons I found why the program is useful for the pupils. And this is probably the real answer why I think that a teacher can and should use an ICT resource in the education.

Two important reasons that I found on why the teacher should use this resource, is that the school shall be both including and individualised. With this program the teacher can include students that have harder to read in the classroom. For an example: if the class is working on a project and is searching for information about a specific object, all of the students (more or less) are reading information to contribute to the project. If there are one or several students that may have some problems with reading, this program can be of assistant to the teacher. How you ask? Well if the problem is reading, reading new words etc. the reader can use this program to assist the reader with the reading. The program can read the whole Internet page, while the pupil follows the sentences. Another way the student can use the program is to mark the word that the reader can´t read and let the program read that word. By doing this the reader will learn how to pronounce new words.

In the same way the teacher can use WordRead Plus to individualise the lessons when the students shall read or write. I have above written about how the teacher can use the program when pupils shall read, therefore in this paragraph I shall only discuss how the program can be used when pupils shall write.

Even if the writer don´t know how to spell every word right, the program can assist the writer in a whole different way than for example Microsoft Words spell feature. Instead of just having the program autocorrect the spelling, WordRead Plus can help the writer to connect the spelling with the pronunciation. This by trying to spell a word that the writer can´t spell and then let the program read the word out loud and try to think what in the written word that makes the pronunciation correct/incorrect. This is a time consuming and a quite advanced exercise. Otherwise the pupil can just use the program to read the word out loud to get feedback on how the written words sounds.

I, myself, think it´s pretty difficult to read a longer text from the screen of my computer. A way to aid the reader when reading longer texts is the use the ScreenRuler. By using this program the reader constantly will have a mark where he or she is in the text, no matter what setting the user uses.

I thought about ending this blog post with a Youtube video, but I haven´t found a video in English nor did I find a video that displayed several features of the program. Therefore I will end this blog post with a bye and a thank you.

/Andreas Johansson

Puppet Pals

Puppet Pals is an app where students have the opportunity to create their own stories and animation. Many children (and adults for that matter) may find it hard to be in a movie themselves or to stand in front of the class and present their work, but with Puppet Pals this might feel easier. In this app, anything can happen - you can be a space monster on Mars, a prince/princess in a far away country, a pirate on the seven seas, and much more. The sky is the limit!

 

There are two versions of Puppet Pals: a free version and the Director's Cut. In the free version you get a few characters and backgrounds. I recommend buying the Director's Cut where you get many different characters and a lot more backgrounds. You also get the opportunity to take your own pictures that you can use when making your story/animation.

 

When we were working with this app the students were divided into smaller groups. The task was to first write a story together with a focus on having a cohesive storyline framed by a beginning, middle, and an end. When the students were finished writing the story they were to plan and organize a presentation of their work by making a movie in Puppet Pals.

 

What abilities are we training? If we read the syllabus for English the students should be able to communicate both orally and in writing, and they should be able to understand and interpret the content of spoken English. We also get into other subjects such as art, where students should be able to communicate with images to express different messages as well as be able to create images with digital techniques.

 

The above mentioned work with Puppet Pals was implemented during a lesson in Swedish, but you can of course do a similar task while teaching English. With good use of your imagination you can do anything you want to do!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYUx7QVXXX4