Category Archives: Websites to See

What are SPORCLES?

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(My sporcle post)

Sporcle.com is a page that provides a huge collection of quizzes of all kinds. For my classes I like using those where language has to be linked to imagery. There are some very creative ideas on this site waiting to be discovered. You can add them to a class at the end when some time left or at the beginning as an introduction or supplement to a topic.

Sometimes, when you start with a sporcle quiz it can also evolve into a full swing lesson. This happened in one of my classes when we played a geography quiz where you had to identify all 50 states of the USA. For one, it took much longer than expected, and then we ended up talking a lot about the single states, researching them on the internet. For something like this to happen, though, it is important to change the setting “timer” to “stopwatch”.

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London Tower Commemorates World War I

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On my visit to London this year, I went to the Tower of London to look at the art project installed to commemorate the British soldiers who died in WWI.

It is quite fascinating as you can see if you go to the link below or google Tower of London.

http://globalnews.ca/news/1491578/photos-red-ceramic-poppies-spill-from-tower-of-london/

November: In the meantime some weeks have past and the sight around the Tower has changed dramatically. Continue reading →

The Economist’s Annual Issue of the Year

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Link for 2023 The World in 2023 – what to expect

The World in 2014

Every year, the British magazine The Economist publishes a special issue that focuses on the events of the coming year. They write about upcoming events, things that might, could or will happen, and report on how on-the-spot their predictions for the previous year were.

This year, their selection of events around the world (Calendar 2014, p 32) was accompanied by a wonderful illustration by Kevin Kallaugher, their editorial cartoonist, and … Continue reading →

NPR: National Public Radio

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A great new website I have found.

I was actually googling ‘gap between rich and poor’, looking for an article I had recently read about how the growing income gap, especially the growing income loss, is one of the most volatile issues for the future of societies, and the biggest threat to peaceful co-existence. I actually believe this fact to be a no-brainer, and at the core of most violent conflicts in the world – poverty bears violence -, but it seems more and more people (some of whom in the past couldn’t have cared less) are beginning to see a growing threat in and to hitherto basically democratic societies. Continue reading →

Internet session Thursday morning 26 September

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Every once in a while I like to show groups how the internet can be used to integrate more English into your everyday life, plus just plain interesting stuff, as I find.

Below are some of my favorites that I have also listed or mentioned in other posts.

In the end, one of our group brought a page of his interest (I love it when class participants do that), including copies for reading. It was Louis C.K.’s explanation of why he hates smartphones. Continue reading →

TED and other youtube favorites

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Youtube has evolved from being a forum for private videos to a platform where all kinds of institutions publish their visual material. Here one of my favorites is TED.

A student of mine showed me a talk given by Colin Stokes (How Movies Teach Manhood). Our classroom has access to the internet and we watched and discussed it together. In the mean time I have shown it to other groups as well.

Colin Stokes talks about his experience as a father Continue reading →