LessonWriter

LessonWriter was recommended to me by Louise Kennedy. It does what its name suggests, letting you copy in a reading text and then creating a sophisticated mix of tasks, from vocabulary and morphology to phonology and grammar, and supplying prompts for questions based on Blooms Taxonomy and the needs you detail. The free version lets you output a document, while the premium one has a wide range of applications in blended learning, including colaborative modalities that allows a team of teachers to work on the lesson, e.g. to address matters of differentiation that may arise in CLIL, mixed L1 or mixed ability classes. The latest video shows how team lesson prep works:
No Administrator Left Behind 2011

EFL Carnival of Lessons

Karenne Sylvester has just published the latest EFL blog carnival, dedicated to lesson plans. She's put the whole thing in a great looking presentation on her blog, Kalinago English.

I just had a look at them all (same order of sequence as presented) and took short notes on who did what:

• Sabrina De Vita - reviews the Present Simple and Present Continuous with a movie segment
  
• Mike Harrison - has students lipreading from a video, a new and interesting approach
  
• Nightwalker - is teaching students how to brainstorm most effectively
  
• Johanna Stirling - created a spelling code to crack / spelling puzzle to solve
  
• Shelly Terrell - presents Tagul, a tagcloud builder, and vocabulary resources to work with
  
• Anne Hodgson - uses 2 videos for business English (writing reports, small talk)
  
• Jessie Voigts - a collection of icebreaker ideas for YL and teens
  
• Larry Ferlazzo - does a class survey with activities about sleeping enough
  
• Mr. Foteah - is awarding medals for words
  
• Nick Jaworski - uses a video his students find funny to lead into creative writing
  
• Diana Diodati Konrad - is setting up the framework for negotiating in business Engl.
  
• Jeremy Day - is reflecting on how and how not to teach ESP
  
• Vicki Hollett - her dictation is "similar but different" to the listening comprehension
  
• Arjana Blazic - turns texts into Hotpotatoes gapfills, also has students writing
  
• Natasa Bozic Grojic - has nine roles to play in an argument over children using mobiles
  
• Barbara Sakamoto - uses the "sight barrier" information gap technique and realia with pre-intermediate adult learners
  
• Janet Bianchini - explores how to teach ppt from her own learning experience
  
• Eva Buyuksimkesyan - discusses the pros and cons of playing games in class
  

What a wealth of lessons! All the links here.

Preparing a Negotiation Role Play - Lesson description

Aim: to practice negotiating skills and the language of negotiating
Resources: worksheet, Preparing a Negotiation Role Play
Download: worksheet pdf
Preparing a Negotiation Role Play
Level : Adult learners B2 and up
Length: 60 mins

Method: Preparation: The students are put into small groups and asked to think of a real or hypothetical negotiation. They complete the worksheet and hand it to another group.
The other group may ask any questions they have about the situation.

Task: The groups then role play the negotiation they have been given.
At the end of the role play each group writes a short report.

Analysis and feedback: At the end of each report the group which prepared the role play can comment; "Was the outcome the one they expected (if hypothetical) or the actual outcome (if real)?" "Were there other options which were not considered?" etc.
The trainer then gives feedback.

By Diana Diodati-Konrad

Share your lesson idea

• Do you have a lesson plan, a warmer, a game, a controlled practice unit that has worked for you?
• Would you like to be part of a community of teachers who share lesson ideas?
• Would you enjoy having your idea published for all of the interested teaching community to see?

Then join the upcoming 15th EFL blog carnival, the Carnival of English Language Lessons, hosted by Karenne Sylvester.
Here's how:

1. Write up your lesson plan.
2. If you have a blog, publish it there.
3. If you don't have one, publish it on Ask Auntie Web. Contact us at info (at) melta (dot) de. We'd love to publish it for you.

Then register your published post (or we'll register it for you) on the blog carneval site using Karenne's form here.

Deadline: March 21.
Publication: April 1.

With this focus, the 15th blog carnival is sure to be a winner. Come on, everybody, join in!

See the EFL Carnival Archive

What is a blog carnival?
A blog carnival is a tool used by bloggers to promote their work. In a classic blog carnival, one site is designated as the host or organizer, and participants send in permanent links, or "permalinks", to posts on the theme of the carnival. The organizer collects the links in a single post, which becomes the starting point to all of the participating blogs. Good for readers, because it gives them access to a wide variety of blogs; Good for bloggers, who appreciate the publicity. (Summary of this definition)

Alex Case's TEFLtastic

One of the really great blogs to follow is TEFLtastic by Alex Case, an experienced teacher-trainer and editor of TEFL.net with, I'd wager, a preference for Paul Simon and the number 15 ("15 ways...") who has worked all over the world (Turkey, Thailand, Greece, Spain, Italy, UK, Japan), now in Korea. A great mentor and motivator.
Recently he has begun publishing a lot of worksheets to print out, including these topics:

• medical English
• business/ ESP games
• telephoning games
• technical English/ numbers games
• English for artists (!)
• EFL exams
• travel
• writing games
• vocab games
• social English
• videos/ films
  
• songs
• culture

He has listed them all very neatly for you and me here to download and print out. With all this great free materials production going on, can you please tell me what we still need coursebooks for?? And how do writers survive, pray tell?

YouTube for teaching English

Jamie Keddie has created TEFLclips, a site with free lesson plans for using YouTube videos in TEFL. Geared to very different levels and target groups, he pairs videos with pdf lesson plans and worksheets.

He has also created a nice video on how to download YouTube videos and organize them in your iTunes:



So the site he recommends for conversion is www.savevid.com.

His site is more than "simply" a free resource for the busy teacher. Jamie Keddie is exploring media with this project, and if you study his lessons carefully and try them out yourself, you can learn a great deal about the didactic potential of video. He explains:

"For the language teacher, YouTube may be the single best source of material the classroom has ever seen. The question, “How can we use YouTube in the classroom?” encompasses many others including:

* How can we use moving images in the classroom?
* How can we use audio in the classroom?
* How can we use film in the classroom?
* How can we use art in the classroom?
* How can we use technology in the classroom?
* How can we use music in the classroom?
* How can we use adverts in the classroom?
* How should we use and approach news and current affairs in the classroom?
* How should we approach the subject of the media in the classroom?
* How can we organise class film-making projects?

This website has been set up in order to address some of these questions." TEFLclips: About

Jamie Keddie has just won an ELTon from The British Council for TEFLclips. Visit his website at http://www.jamiekeddie.com. Thank you to Dagmar Taylor for recommending this teacher and his site. Have a look and tell us what you think.
Technical problems with downloads? Ask Auntie Web.