Using Social Networks For Teaching

There are so many social networking sites out there these days. They are a great way to connect with friends and family back home, but more than that, they are a great way to connect with students. It’s a great way to get your students practicing their English in a fun and interesting environment. Setting up a social networking account for your teaching is a great to really connect with your students and communicate lessons and homework.

As you know, there are several social networking sites out there. I am impartial to Friendster. It’s a great place to set up a full featured page to communicate with your students and put up videos, music and even a blog.

A good runner-up is Hi-5. Hi-5 has many of the same features as Friendster and your students may already be a Hi-5 member. This could be good or bad.

So what is the deal? Do you use Social networking sites in your teaching? Which sites do you use?

Yahoo Answers For TEFL Classes

I came across a great idea for an activity for students using Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Answers is a service on Yahoo that allows you to both ask questions for those things you don’t know and give answers to the questions that you do know. It works out nicely because people with knowledge to share will gain knowledge and those interested in gaining knowledge will learn more.

By now, your brain is probably running through all of the different activity opportunities. My favorite activity is to give a each class member an assignment that involves asking one question on Yahoo Answers and then providing 10 answers to questions. Give them one week to complete the assignment and then have them present their question to the class. Have them also read off 3 or 4 of the answers they gave when they shared their own knowledge.

There is a lot of pre-work that can be done with this activity. You can teach how to ask a question properly, how to answer a question properly, you name it. You warp and morph this activity to fit any need you have in your class. Best of all, it’s a lot of fun for your students.

What The King Wants

This week’s TEFL Game of the Week is a traditional camp game that’s been modified for the TEFL environment. It’s called “What the King wants.” We all know that what the King wants, the King gets. This game is a lot of fun and is a great way to teach new vocabulary to young kids.

Description:
This is a offshoot of indoor scavenger hunt (30-100+ people)

Time:
15-20 min

Material:
Nothing

Objective:
Get the object to the King first

How to play:
Split the group into smaller groups of about 10-12 people. The leader is the “king”. Then get the “king” to stand at the front and say: “The King wants ….” and the first group to get it to the “king” gets the point. Some ideas of what the king would want are:
-1 sock
-a size 12 shoe
-something that smells pretty
-belly button lint
-toe jam
-ear wax
-a retainer
-a pink rock

Remember that if they do not have it they need to get and get it.

Rules:
First group to get the right item wins the round

Keep score and run it through several rounds until you have a winner of some sort.

TEFL Good: It teaches students new and interesting vocabulary words in a fun and energetic way

TEFL Game: Why Ask Why?

Why ask Why? Wasn’t that a commercial for some beer product several years back? This games has nothing to do with beer and everything to do with having fun with the English language. It is the perfect game for classes of between 5 and 15 intermediate students.

What materials do you need? A whiteboard and/or chalkboard is all you need. The teacher starts the game by writing a simple fact on the board. An easy one might be, “I am a student.” Ask one student to answer the question. Use their answer to formulate the next question for the next student.

For example:
Teacher: “Why are you a student?”
Student #1: “Because I want to learn English”
Teacher: “Why do you want to learn English?”
Student #2:”Because English is fun.”

Continue this through the entire class and when you are finished, rewrite the first fact on the board with the final student’s answer. An example from one of my classes was, “I am a student because I don’t want to die.”

If you are students have decent English skills, you may get one or two students to play the role of teachers in asking the questions. I use this is as a weekly warm-up exercise to get my students thinking and it never gets boring.

Sentence Rewriting

Sentence rewriting is a good way for intermediate and advanced students to learn about grammar and vocabulary. It entails understanding the sentence given and being able to rewrite it in their own words. It’s an excellent way to help students who like to cut and paste their assignments from Wikipedia. We’ve all had them, haven’t we?

How to teach your students to rewrite sentences? Never fear, About.com ESL has a Sentence transformation exercise online that you can use and tailor for your students, depending on their level. With just a little reworking, you could have an exercise that you could use over and over again and give your students a skill that would serve them well.