On autonomous learning

At the beginning of this month, from 4th to 6th October, the 11th Nordic Conference on Autonomous Learning was held in Donostia. Furthermore, a session addressed to teachers interested in getting to know more about the issue of learners' autonomy was organised on 3rd October.

Two well-known experts in this pedagogical approach, Leni Dam and David Little took part in the event. A selection of video and slide presentations by these two lectures can be accessed from the links below:

Leni Dam´s slides on types of activities and basic tools

David Little's slides on the principles of autonomous learning and the use of portfolios

An interview with Leni Dam

Parts of a lecture by Leni Dam: on the use of coursebooks 1 and 2

Parts of a lecture by David Little: on students' motivation and engagement 1 and 2

Story Monster

ACMI Story Monster website allows students to design monsters by choosing different features (eyes, wings, body size and colour...). Once the monster is created, the student uses arrow keys and the space bar of the keyboard in order to choose a verb and a noun. A short sentence is generated and uttered.

  

The activity can be useful to work on definitions, pronunciation, or as a start for creative writing.

Use of pictures in the English classroom

This article presents some ideas about the use of photos in the EFL classroom.

Some websites to find copyleft photos:

Flickrcc
10 banques d'images libres
INTEF: Banco de imágenes y sonidos

Pronunciation dictionaries

Howjsay website provides the sound of English words in quite a quick way. Users write the word they want to listen to into a box, click on 'submit' and choose it from a list.

Dictionarist also provides a good list of English words with their corresponding pronunciation and translations to other languages.

Macmillan Dictionary (monolingual) includes audio clips showing the British English spoken pronunciation of the requested word.

Questionnaire for seminar participants

You can access the form about your teaching situation and interests from this link.

Online program for creating activities based on texts

Textivate is an online tool that allows to create exercised based on text reconstruction. An explanation on its use can be read in this blog post.

This is a simple example:

Click below to access the activity. (Opens in a new window on touch devices.)

Click here to open the above activity in a new window.

Reading: All About Me

It's Fun to Read: All About Me activity allows children to choose the features of a character that would represent them, a pet, a bedroom, and a toy. They can also work on vocabulary related to the house.

Reading about art

It's Fun to Read: Starfall Art Gallery web site presents six texts about different painters accompanied by pictures showing their artwork. Children can listen to the pronunciation of each word by clicking on them.

Story Starters

Story Starters generates sentences at random to begin a story.

PicLits

PicLits website allows users to write on a set of pictures. It can be useful to create short stories, haikus, picture labelling...

An example:

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

Short stories for children to teach values

Bedtime Stories website presents a set of stories aimed at working on values. Most of them can be listened to in different varieties of English and Spanish. Audio recordings are accompanied by the corresponding text and pictures.

A couple of websites to learn and revise vocabulary

Learning Chocolate

Language Guide