The English Blog

The Gadget Lesson

I used this great little Yahoo! News video as part of a lesson about gadgets with my EM Normandie students. After working on the video, and doing a questionnaire, I got them to work in pairs to come up with an idea for a new household gadget and present it to the class. You can find a Word version of the transcript along with a glossary, the questionnaire, and details of the presentation activity here. I also did a PowerPoint, which you can download here.

TRANSCRIPT
I’m not lazy, just selective. I’m not willing to make something unless it’s easy, cheap, and super-useful. So in this episode of Upgrade Your Life, handy gizmos you can make for under a buck. Starting with — eeuuww —toothpaste mess in the bathroom. Cheap and easy solution — clean out a pump bottle. Fill it with toothpaste. It holds multiple tubes, which is nice, and now no caps to deal with, no dribble from the tubes … neat and tidy. One note — make sure you clean out that pump bottle well.

Staying with cleanliness, the back of your desk is a mess. Sure, you can buy fancy organizers for cords, but the cheapest way to do this: binder clips. Clip on the desk, thread the cords, you can even flip the handle to lock them in place. Genius!

Next, listening to music on your phone, but the speakers just aren’t loud enough. Solution — keg cup. Classy, right? Cut a slice out, place the device inside and it’s louder. How much louder? Well, as a tech reporter, I always have my decibel meter on hand. And the keg cup makes it ten to twelve decibels louder. This is great for music, speakerphone calls, and it also works with your iPad if you’re watching video.

Now the whole touchscreen thing is great, but sometimes you just want a stylus, the feel of a pen. Of course, you can go out and buy one but you can also make one using just a pencil, some cotton, tape, and a candy bar wrapper. Cut the candy wrapper, wrap the pencil, put the tape up high so your fingers will directly touch the wrapper. This totally works in a pinch, but if you’re gonna be doing a lot of fine work on a touch screen, spending eleven dollars for a real stylus is probably a good idea.

If you’ve ever had kids, or a geeky boyfriend, you got a tub of this stuff lying around. How about making a key-holder system? Drill hole, insert key-ring, attach to base, and voilà. Also cool, adding personalized little figures to watch over your keys.

Finally, every once in a while, you have a half a bag of chocolate chips left over. Solution — take a plastic bottle with a wide mouth, cut it, thread the bag through the neck, and now you’ve got a screw top for the occasional chocolate chip indiscretion. Thanks for watching. For Yahoo! News, I’m Becky Worley.

The Movember Song

This is the song I used in my lesson about the Movember moustache growing charity event (see previous post). I transcribed the lyrics myself, and you can download them here as a Word file.

The song is by South African comedy-pop duo Derick Watts & The Sunday Blues and is, of course, a parody of Carly Rae Jepsen's mega-hit, "Call Me Maybe" (watch original here).

COMMENT
Some parodies are better than other, but I thought this one was really hilarious—both the film and lyrics (see below) are spot on. 

LYRICS
Last year I tried but I failed
Halfway through the month I bailed
Watched the hair wash down the drain
And I felt so ashamed
My upper lip felt so bare
People would stop and they’d stare
An upper lip without hair
What would our parents say?
But it wasn’t growing
Bum fluff skin was showing
Taking shape very slowly
But this year it’s ours for the taking
Hey, we can do this
It should be easy
This Movember, we won’t be shaving
It’s hard to look back in the mirror lately
With your moustaches, so thin and patchy
Hey, it’s only Day Two, so don’t be lazy
This is Movember, the days are plenty
But all the other boys with mos a’blazing
Don’t let them throw you, you must be patient
What style do you think we’ll grow?
Handlebar, pencil or ‘fro
We could look like a Mario Bros
There’s just no way to tell
Day Twelve and things don’t look good
Starting to think that we should
Seek out professional help
Doctor, is there no hope?
Wait, don’t get disheartened
Have you tried Bob Martin’s?
My dog eats them daily
And his moustache covers his body
OK! Time for phase two, Bob Martin’s daily
It’s doctor’s orders, they’re not that tasty
But think of all the chicks, they’ll want us daily
Let’s up our dosage, soon we’ll be hairy
OK! It’s been a week now and not much progress
I’m no Tom Selleck, I’m feeling depressed
There’s two more days left, we’re cutting things fine
Let’s call this number, Movember helpline
From the first day of the month, things have gone so bad
Our growth is so bad
Our mos are so, so bad
Everyone’s making fun of us, we need this so bad, we want this so bad
We need this so, so bad
Hey, what’s that feeling?
My lip is tingling
Did someone pinch me?
I must be dreaming
Can you believe it?
This is amazing
Woke up this morning
Moustaches blazing
Filled with testosterone
I feel so manly
Let’s chop some firewood
And drink some gravy
Before the hair grew on our lips our lives were so sad
Our lives were so sad
Now they are so, so rad
With the moustache here on my face, I am a real man, feel like a real man
Now we are real, real men

POSTSCRIPT
Hey everyone, thanks for watching our video. At the end of the day, Movember’s not just about growing a kickass mo, but it’s about raising funds and awareness for cancer.

Visit Movember.com, or read the descriptions below this video to find out how you can get involved and donate money to help us punch cancer in the face.

Movember Lesson Slideshow

Movember is a moustache growing charity event held during the month of November each year that raises funds and awareness for men's health. This is a slide presentation I produced for a lesson about Movember with my EM Normandie students. 

In the presentation, you'll find some screenshots from the Movember website, a 'moustache quiz', and some pictures of media coverage of Movember. There's also a role play activity at the end, which you can download here as a Word file. I also used the wonderfully funny Movember Song. 

This is a great topic for business students since it covers topics such as public awareness campaigns, buzz marketing and word-of-mouth marketing, event marketing, merchandising, and so on.

Movember from Jeffrey Hill

Lingle: Automatic Lesson Creation Service

I use a lot of authentic articles with my students, but it takes a long time to create a lesson with exercises and a glossary from scratch. So I was intrigued to hear about Lingle, which claims to be able to do that automatically.

WHAT IS LINGLE?
Lingle is a web based service designed for teachers and learners of English language. It is ideally suited for English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL), English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) and advanced English literacy programs. Lingle helps teachers automatically find and build complete lesson plans and materials from authentic real news sources. It uses proprietary technology to automatically highlight grammar in use and vocabulary. From this exercises, and teaching materials can be automatically created, dramatically reducing the time to build a lesson plan that uses content relevant, real and motivating to your learners (source: Lingle web site).

WHAT EXERCISES DOES LINGLE HAVE?
• Free text, where you can write any question you like.
• Vocab gap-fill. Using either a single article or a list of examples from multiple sources. You can choose from a variety of automatically selected difficult words, topical words or add you own words.
• Grammar gap-fill. Using either a single article or a list of examples from multiple sources. You can choose from over 30 most common grammar points.
• Discussion words. Automatically selects discussion words based on a single article or takes examples from multiple sources. You can also add your own words.

A full set of videos showing how to use all of the Lingle features is available on Lingle's YouTube channel.

WHAT I THINK
I signed up for the 30-day free trial and created a lesson based on this article about the French election. You can see the lesson here. So what do I think? Well, the good news is that it was very easy to find an interesting article and create the lesson. This took just a couple of minutes. However, there are several problems with the lesson itself. Firstly, there's no way you can edit it. You are presented with a web page to print out. A lot of the words in my glossary were listed as "No definition available for this word". Moreover, some of the definitions were inappropriate (e.g., firebrand n. - a piece of wood that has been burned or is burning). So it would have been useful to be able to fix that. And gap-fill exercises are not exactly at the cutting edge of ELT methodology (although I have to admit to using them occasionally). Finally, a yearly subscription is €40. You can get a subscription to onestopenglish for €53, and I know which I'd rather have.

MORE LESSON CREATION TOOLS
• LessonWriter (free lesson creation service)
• Learnclick (create interactive online gap-fill exercises)

ALSO SEE
• Lingle Review (Nik's QuickShout)
• Learnclick Review (Nik's QuickShout)

Titanic Teaching and Learning Resources

April 15th marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, so I thought it would be a good idea to list some of the resources available for teaching or learning about this tragic event (and I'm not talking about the release of James Cameron's 3D version of his 1997 tearjerker).

• Ultimate Titanic - history and facts about the RMS Titanic
• Titanic Infographic - amazing 3D animated views of Titanic
• Titanic (The Teacher's Guide) - lesson plans, ideas and internet resources
• Titanic Worksheets (Historyonthenet.com) - crosswords, wordsearch puzzles
• Titanic (History Channel) - 13 videos, articles, interactives, photo galleries
• Titanic Quiz (Discovery Channel)
• 100 Years Later: Ways to Teach About the Titanic With The Times (NYT)
• The Best Sites For Learning About The Titanic (Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day)
• The Titanic (The Guardian)
• Titanic! (Penguin Reader Teacher's Notes)
• Titanic: Master of disaster for 100 years (Cartoons for the Classroom)
• Titanic Centennial iPad Apps (iPad English)
• Sample IELTS Reading Text  (Holmesglen Institute)

Let me know if you come across any other interesting resources, and I'll add them to the list.

Benrik Pitch: Riot Weekend Breaks

Source: The Guardian

LESSON IDEA
Get students to come up with their own ideas for weekend breaks and present them to the class.

Dish of the Day: The Pizza Burger

The Daily Mail reports that Burger King has come up with a new product:

For the indecisive fast food fan, it's the ultimate in convenience.

A 'pizza-burger' has been launched by Burger King for the days when you just can't make up your mind which takeaway to have.

But with the number of calories it packs you may as well go ahead and just eat a burger followed by a pizza - because the nine-and-a-half-inch monstrosity contains 2,500 of them. That's more than a whole day's recommended calories for the average woman. Read more >>

 

COMMENT
I'll have double fries with that.

LESSON IDEA
Get your students to come up with new food combinations. For instance, you could have a lasagne sandwich. Wait, Tesco has already thought of that!

Newsy Video: BP Oil Spill—Has Damage Been Overblown?

In a recent article for TIME Magazine, writer Michael Grunwald claimed the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico wasn't as harmful as the media was making it out to be. View transcript >>

Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

VOCABULARY
The Newsy report contains two examples of the use of the prefix over- to indicate that something is done to too great an extent. Something that is overblown is made to seem larger, more important, or more significant than it really is. Overhyped is similar in meaning, but tends to refer to excessive publicity or promotion: "Salt" is a big, dumb, over-hyped popcorn movie starring Angelina Jolie as a CIA spy. See here for more on prefixes, and here for a photocopiable lesson on under- and over-.

Video: McDonald's "Weather" Ad

As well as sourcing the majority of its ingredients from the UK and Ireland, McDonald's has committed to raising awareness of the vital role of British farms. This commercial delivers on this promise with a quirky celebration of British weather and its importance to our farmers. Filmed on location in Derbyshire, Cumbria and Staffordshire at farms supplying McDonald's with organic milk, free-range eggs and potatoes respectively, it celebrates the role of the British farms which supply many of the quality ingredients for McDonald's food. [SOURCE: Leo Burnett YouTube Channel]

COMMENT
This would be a great video for teaching about the weather. For more resources on the weather see here, here, here and here.

Cost of Living Survey

Consulting company Mercer have ranked the world's most expensive places for expats to live in their annual cost of living survey. The Guardian's Data Blog has used the data to produce this graphic.

LESSON IDEA
Use the graphic and the data to practice comparatives and superlatives. E.g., Luanda is the world's most expensive city. A cup of coffee is more expensive in Paris than in London.

Newsy Video: California Looks to Ban Plastic Bags

The California Assembly has passed a bill that would ban the use of plastic bag in grocery stores throughout the state. Read transcript >>

Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

LESSON IDEA
Here's a role play I created a while ago about banning plastic bags.

Video: iPad + Velcro = ♥

It's iPad day today in the UK (and France), when the device officially launches. To mark the occasion, here's a video showing what you can do with an iPad, some Velcro, and a bit of imagination.

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

COMMENT
I'm not sure all of those uses were strictly legal! And using an iPad in the kitchen doesn't seem like a great idea either.

LESSON IDEAS
1. Show students the video and then see how many of the different uses they can remember.
2. Get your students to imagine other possible uses for the iPad.

PS
I actually got my hands on an iPad for the first time this lunchtime at the FNAC. The English Blog looks very nice on that big screen! And the demo photo album was wonderful. I don't think I'll be buying one yet, however—I'm not really sure what I would use it for. I can play Scrabble on my iPod Touch, and the iPod won't fit into your pocket. A sort of intermediate device—the size of a paperback—might be more useful.

John Lewis 'She's Always a Woman' TV Ad

This ad for UK retailer John Lewis cost £6m to make. Nine actresses were used for the central female character in the shoot. The music is a reinterpretation of Billy Joel's 'She's Always A Woman', performed by Fyfe Dangerfield, of the band Guillemots. Read more >>

LYRICS
She can kill with a smile
She can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child
But she's always a woman to me

She can lead you to love
She can take you or leave you
She can ask for the truth
But she'll never believe you
And she'll take what you give her, as long as it's free
Yeah, she steals like a thief
But she's always a woman to me

She is frequently kind
And she's suddenly cruel
She can do as she pleases
She's nobody's fool
And she can't be convicted
She's earned her degree
And the most she will do
Is throw shadows at you
But she's always a woman to me

COMMENT
I bet that brought a tear to your eye! Still, it's working—according the The Guardian, John Lewis's sales have increased by 40% as a result of the ad.

LESSON IDEAS
1. Use lyrics for gap fill exercise.
2. Show video and ask questions to test student's memory.
3. Discuss the 'message' behind the ad.
4. Discuss techniques used in ad (emotional appeal, music, special effects, etc.)

Cartoons for the Classroom: Volcanic Emissions

The latest Cartoons for the Classroom lesson looks at metaphors in cartoons. In this cartoon, Nate Beeler draws a connection between government emission regulation and the recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland. You can download the lesson here.

VOCABULARY
Buster is used in American English as a familiar term of address to a man or boy who is an object of the speaker's annoyance or anger. • Look, Buster, you're standing in my way!

101 Uses For A Cat: #1—iPad Stand

As this picture from Lifehacker's article Seven DIY iPad Stands for Six Bucks or Less shows, cats do have their uses (though ours seems to spend most of its time figuring out how to get us to feed it—or sleeping). Anyway, it occured to me that a fun idea for a lesson would be to show students the cat pic and ask them to come up with some more whacky uses for a cat. They could even take photos. Of course, it should be stressed that cats should not be mistreated in any way, shape, or form.