Using AudioPal to Assess Listening and Speaking

Do you have the problem of insufficient teaching hours?  Do you always complain that there’s no time to assess every students’ speaking ability.

How do you make students practice English at home?

Well, with AudioPal, students will listen to your question very carefully, write down the answer first, and read it out many times until they think the recording is perfect enough.

See how I carry it out.

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Hi students,

This is your homework of B2 U2.
Answer the question & record it with AudioPal.

Here’s the question.

Please read the comment to see how to post your answer.

Don’t know how to use AudioPal?  Please watch the pictures below.

Sinking Vs. Thinking

It’s about a German Coast Guard who can’t tell sinking from thinking.

Questions to discuss:

1. What does the message ‘mayday’ mean?  And how do you know?

2. Where might the message be sent?  From a train, a ship, or a plane?  And how do you know?

3. What sounds does the German mix up?

4. Because of his poor English, do you think they were saved?

5. What does the ad want to tell you?

讓愛傳出去Pay It Forward

No Copyright Infringement Intended
All credits go to its rightful owners

Plot:
When 11-year-old Trevor McKinney (Osment) begins seventh grade in Las Vegas, Nevada, his social studies teacher Eugene Simonet (Spacey) gives the class an assignment to devise and put into action a plan that will change the world for the better. Trevor calls his plan “pay it forward”, which can be described as a charitable pyramid scheme, based on good deeds rather than profit. “Paying it forward” means the recipient of a favor does a favor for a third party rather than paying the favor back.

Trevor does a favor for three people, asking each of them to return the favor by doing favors for three other people, and so on, along a branching tree of good deeds. Trevor does his first good deed for a homeless man named Jerry (James Caviezel). This effort initially appears to be unsuccessful, but Jerry will pay his debt forward later in the film by talking a suicidal woman out of jumping off a bridge.

Meanwhile, Trevor’s mother Arlene (Hunt) meets Eugene after discovering Jerry in their house and confronting Eugene about Trevor’s project. Then Trevor selects Eugene as his next “pay it forward” target and tricks Eugene and Arlene into a romantic dinner date. This also appears to fail, but then Trevor and Arlene argue about her alcoholism and she slaps him in a fit of anger. The two adults are brought together again when Trevor runs away from home and Arlene asks Eugene to help her find him.

Trevor’s school assignment marks the beginning of the story’s chronology, but the opening scene in the film shows one of the later favors in the “pay it forward” tree, in which a man gives a car to Los Angeles journalist Chris Chandler (Jay Mohr). As the film proceeds, Chandler traces the chain of favors back to its origin in Trevor’s school project. After her date with Eugene, Arlene paid Trevor’s favor forward by forgiving her own mother Grace (Angie Dickinson) for her mistakes in raising Arlene, and Grace, who is homeless, helped a gang member escape from the police. This gang member then helped the daughter of the man who gave Chandler his new car.

After finding Trevor, Arlene begins to pursue Eugene romantically. Eugene has burn marks visible on his neck and face, and he initially resists Arlene’s overtures. When they finally sleep together, he is seen to have extensive scarring over his torso. Arlene accepts Eugene’s physical disfigurement, but abandons their relationship when her alcoholic ex-husband Ricky (Jon Bon Jovi) returns to her, claiming to have given up drinking. Ricky’s return angers Eugene, whose own mother had a habit of taking his abusive, alcoholic father back. He explains that his stepfather intentionally burned him, and he warns Arlene of Ricky’s potential to abuse Trevor. When Ricky resumes his abusive behavior, Arlene realizes her mistake and asks him to leave again.

Chandler finally identifies Trevor as the originator of “pay it forward” and conducts a recorded interview in which Trevor describes his hopes and concerns for the project. Eugene, hearing Trevor’s words, realizes that he and Arlene should be together. As Eugene and Arlene reconcile with a passionate embrace, Trevor is fatally stabbed while defending a friend against a group of bullies. This news is reported on television, and Eugene and Arlene are soon visited by hundreds of people who have participated in the “pay it forward” movement, gathering in a vigil to pay their respects to Trevor.

Main cast:
* Kevin Spacey as Eugene Simonet
* Helen Hunt as Arlene McKinney
* Haley Joel Osment as Trevor McKinney
* Jay Mohr as Chris Chandler
* James Caviezel as Jerry
* Angie Dickinson as Grace
* Jon Bon Jovi as Ricky McKinney

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Pronounce Some Daily Expression

Move mouse to the English word and a real man will say the word. 點到句子就真人發音。

Greetings

Hello, Hi, Good morning, Good night, Good-bye, bye,

See you soon, See you later

Please, Thank you, You’re welcome.

Excuse me, Sorry,

Congratulations, Good luck

Numbers

1~21  30  40  50  60  70  80  90  100  101  200  1,000  10,000

100,000    1,000,000    1,000,000,000     1,000,000,000,000

Time

時間，季節，星期，早中晚，月份等

更多單字圖解發音，請上 LanguageGuide.org

Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers

Summary of the E-Book: (53 pages)

Teaching Listening:

1. Listen and Write — http://www.listen-and-write.com/  (also writing)

自建聽寫測驗的好工具，適合各種不同程度的學生。

A dictation exercise creation tool.  It offers a number of options to support and develop students ability to listen.

How to use it with students

• Create your own activities - You can create your own dictation activities for your students based on the audio files that you want them to understand.
• Track you students progress – Ttʼs an ideal tool for creating homework tasks. If your students are competitive you can also keep a class scoreboard to show which students are doing best.

2. ESL Video — http://www.eslvideo.com/index.php

自建線上選擇題。可寄給學生連接或直接內嵌到自己的部落格。學生看完影片後做答並得到線上回饋。註冊後，學生可以傳送他們的結果給老師。但老師要建立學生帳號並告訴學生。

It enables you to create web based interactive quizzes based around
online videos. You can create a variety of multiple choice type questions, add transcripts or translations, add notes , etc. Once you have completed your quiz you can either send students a link to it on the ESL Video site or you can embed the quiz into your own website or blog.

The quizzes you can create are mostly multiple choice. Students watch the video and
select their answers.  They can then get some feedback on their answers.  If you and your students are register users of the site, your students can send you their
results. To do this you need to create a class ID and give your students their code.

How to use this with students

• Video task for homework – You can create video based quizzes for your students to work on for homework.
• Student created tasks – You can get your students to create quizzes for each other. These could be based around video that they like or they could find or create a video which demonstrates understanding of a particular language point you have been working on.

Teaching Writing:

1. Penzu — http://www.penzu.com/

A simple online tool for creating a personal journal.

How to use it with students

• Writing portfolio - You can use it to set written homework task for students. These are then neatly stored and can be reviewed as a kind of writing portfolio and shared with parents or employers.
• Model process writing – You can use it to create models for writing activities. You could use a new entry each time you redraft to show how the text changes through the process steps of brainstorming and drafting to the finished product.

2. Dvolver Moviemaker – http://www.dfilm.com/live/mm.html

動漫製造機

It enables you to create your own animated cartoons by selecting from a range of characters backgrounds and scenarios and adding your own dialogue text bubble. The movies can then be sent by email or embedded into blogs or websites for others to enjoy.

How to use this with students

• Social expressions – You can create movies which demonstrate social Englishlanguage points or phrases and expressions being used in context. This can really liven up presentations of new language for students.

• Vocabulary examples – You can ask students to create animations which incorporate specific language points or vocabulary.

• Create conversations -You can give your students images of some of the characters + a context background for where they meet and then ask them to brainstorm a conversation between the two characters. They could then use the site to produce a ʻpolishedʼ final version of the conversation to share with other students.

• Tell jokes - You or your students can use the site to get the characters to tell jokes(often told by two characters). These could be jokes that are translated from their L1 or you could get students to search through online joke sites to find something they like.

• Film festival - Set up your own film competition to see who can produce the best 3+ scene film. The best ones could then be embedded into a class blog or website.
• Demonstrate time relationships – You can create animations that demonstrate time relationships for teaching tenses.

3. Wordle — http://www.wordle.net/create

Create colorful graphic representations of texts.  You can change fonts and colors as well as the text direction.

How to use this with students

• Revision of texts – You can paste in short texts that your students have studied recently. Show them the word cloud and see if they can remember what the text was about and how the words were used within the text. You can build up a bank of word clouds over a semester and pull them out at random to get students to recall the texts they have studied and the key vocabulary in them. You could also see if they could rewrite or reconstruct the text based on the word cloud.

• Prediction – You can create word clouds of texts before the students read or listen and ask them to make predictions about the content of the text based on the word cloud. They could also check any new words from the word cloud that they are unsure of before they read or listen.

• Dialogue reconstruction – You can create a word cloud of a dialogue students are studying and use it as a prompt to remember or reconstruct the dialogue.

• Short poems – You can generate a word cloud from a short poem, then ask students to create their own work based on the word cloud.
• Personal information – You could get your students to each create a text about themselves and then turn it into a word cloud. You could then put the clouds up around the class and see if the students could identify each other from the cloud. They could exchange clouds and use them to introduce each other.

4. Wallwisher — http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/teachersweb20

留言牆，留言者不須註冊，就可留文字、圖片及影片，作為提問者的回應。可做為研習工作坊時，第一件請學員做的事–寫下對此研習的期望。學員只要在牆面任意處快按兩下即可留言。

Wallwisher is like a virtual ʻstickyʼ notice-board, though unlike real notice-boards you can post stickies with text images, links to websites and even videos.

How to use this with students

• Video tasks – We can create video tasks and get students to post responses to the wall by leaving it open for everyone to contribute.

• Treasure hunt – We could use the wall to collect different links to various resources around the web for students to explore, a little like a web quest or treasure hunt.

• Theme based walls – We could give students a theme and get them to create their own walls based around that theme.

• Fan walls – We could get students to create fan walls based around a favorite band or celebrity.

• Share resource links – You can use the wall to collect and share resources.

• Image based tasks – This activity uses an image to get students to practice using present continuous.
• 
• Grammar walls – We can even create grammar walls and get students to post what they know and examples of different verb tenses or grammar points.
• Wishing walls – We could even get students to post their wishes on it using third conditional.

Teaching Speaking:

1. Voxopop — http://www.voxopop.com/  (also listening)

A web based audio tool that enables users to record their speaking for others
to listen and respond to.

How to use it with students

• Narrative building - You can record the first sentence of a narrative and then ask students to listen to the thread and add a sentence each to the story.
• Dictations - You could record your own online dictation texts. Get the students to listen to the text, and write down what they hear and then record their own version of the text for you and other students to listen to.
• Pronunciation drills – Record some pronunciation drills and get students to listen to them and then record themselves saying the words or sentences.
• True false statements – Record some statements about yourself and get students  to leave questions for you to find out which of the statements are true. You can leave your answers to the questions online too.

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