Reader's Digest

The vultures are circling round Google Reader. Those two nice men at Google are pulling the plug on it in July.

So I took the opportunity to jump before I was pushed, and I had a look at what the Linux community has for blog readers. I tried out four different readers from the standard Ubuntu repositories. All of them were either stand-alone apps or extensions of mail clients, by the way.

My standard home-office machine is an ageing Gateway with 512 MB RAM. I'm currently running Lubuntu 11.04. And what runs on Ubuntu doesn't necessarily run on Lubuntu, which is a much more Spartan desktop environment. So I wasn't making it easy for the candidates ;)

And behold the white smoke over St Peter's - we have a reader.

yarssr is popular, but got stuck starting up on my antediluvian machine.

There are extensions for the Thunderbird and Evolution email clients, but I had never used either. I tried both and had trouble setting up the main apps on which the extensions depend.

(By the way, I've heard good things about the Firefox extension for RSS, but I don't use Firefox at the moment, so I didn't try.)

Blam installed and worked fine, with one big but. I was able to import my subscriptions, but simply as a list, and I'll be buggered if I'm going to spend 20 minutes putting them all back in their categories.

And the winner is Liferea.

If you need to do lots of fancy things, read the specs and reviews first. However I just need a pretty simple application. And liferea seems to do the simple stuff fine. It has the same three-pane view as Google and most other readers, so no surprises there. It's not as fast as Google, but I only noticed the lag when marking-as-read all the hundreds of old posts.


And importing my subscriptions in the right folders was pretty simple. You download a file called OPML from GR and import it to the new reader. Google it.

If you hear of more, let me know.

Till then, byeeee.

PS While writing this on Google Blogger, I noticed that the autocorrect doesn't recognise the word "blog". Tee hee.

Thanks for a lovely future.

This is my first January as part of an online community of EFL teachers. I started reading blogs around this time last year, starting with the venerable Ken Wilson, and accumulating more blogs through the blogrolls. In March I was persuaded - very much against my instinct - to start tending my own little vegetable patch.

And now I can't imagine what the hell I did without it....

Readers and writers, colleagues and penpals,

Thanks for what you've done,

but even more, thanks for what you're going to do this year.

[Oh and a tiny footnote. I didn't see this post because I hadn't realised that Chiew Pang's A CLIL to Climb has moved!]

Do You Accept Reality Cheques?

It's one in the morning. My partner and toddler are snoozing together, and it's blog time:

I had come home tonight grumpy and depressed; I have a small group of teenage girls whom I had bawled out this evening for failing to participate in class, and I was already mentally composing my rant/moan/cry-for-help on the road home: How can I get them to apply themselves? How do other people find time to read blogs, never mind write them? Why can't I find anything about teaching YL on the net? Why is everybody on my PLN brighter and better and faster than me?

(I wish I could remember which novelist wrote something about the shiny moon-face of self-pity.)

Recently, I've only had the time to speed-read my EFL blogs, not any of the others that I follow. My mistake. But tonight while waiting for the computer to update, I finally got round to them.

While I'm moaning about a slightly scatty group of girls, other people are organising their Christmas in November because they might not still be alive a month later.

And still others are passing on timeless wisdom:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

Guess who said that?

So thanks again, not just EFL bloggers, but to all the rest of you for the bigger picture.

Oh and Brad's pics were pretty refreshing, too.

Letters of Note

Dear Reader,

This post is dedicated to you especially if, like me, you are still at work. While the rest of the world is making sandcastles, you and I are looking for a board pen that doesn't leak, or ferrying two hundred sweaty and libidinous teens around London.

I thought I'd share with you one of my absolute favourite blogs. And it's neither an EFL site nor a techy one. It's plainly and simply a collections of letters,  Letters of Note. It's a tribute to curator Shaun Usher's perseverance and dedication that he has collected such a fine corpus. I salute you, Shaun.



But it's also a testament to the power of that odd combination of ink, paper and distance as a channel, seedbed and butterfly net for human emotion. You'll find here outrage, ambition, sympathy, paranoia, sorrow, encouragement, humour, complaint, madness and pretty much every other feeling there is:



A pant-wettingly hilarious memo on bad language in 1890s baseball. John Hinkley's eerily tender stalking letter to Jodie Foster, written hours before he shot Ronald Reagan. Queen Victoria's elegant and moving letter of condolance to Abraham Lincoln's widow. Oil magnate Tiger Mike's terrifyingly vitriolic business memos.
 
(Use the search engine embedded in the website. Or better still, browse.)



But here is possibly my favourite - how a 6-year-old got his dream job. This also includes a video interview, by the way, but for my money the letter is the star of the show.




Must write off now. Got to go scuba-diving do some photocopying.

Wish you were here (instead of me).

Ever yours,

Alan xxx

Guest Post from Gordon Scruton

Laydeez an Gennelmen..., 


I'd like you to give a warm welcome to my guest blogger Gordon Scruton. Gordon is a fellow Scot based in Northern Argentina, and we got in touch when we found a shared love of the Videojug website. He has joined the online EFL community quite recently, but with great energy, writing two separate blogs which I wholeheartedly recommend to you: So Where Did It Go Wrong  is mainly orientated towards fellow teachers, while Understanding How We Learn  is more directed at students of English. 




If you haven't invited a fellow blogger to guest for you, do try it. It opens various doors. Not only do you get to chat to a faraway colleague, but you'll almost certainly end up sharing influences, favourites, contacts, classroom tricks and all manner of curiosities. (It turns out we were born just across the River Clyde from each other, he in Dumbarton, I in Greenock. Which curiously makes him a Highlander and me a Lowlander...)

But over to Gordon:

Where I Like to Go on the Web

When Alan asked me about doing a guest post about my favourite websites my first reaction was “Yeah, that sounds great, there’s lots of great stuff out there!” but then my mind went blank and I thought, “Yeah, sounds great, lots of stuff… where to begin?”  So thank you, Alan, because this finally gave me a reason to go through my bookmarks, blow off the dust and cobwebs and remind myself of one or two gems that I’d forgotten about.

So what do I like on the Internet?

1.Conversation Questions for the ESL/EFL Classroom on The Internet TESL Journal

This is one of the oldest teaching resources on the Internet (indeed their records go back to 1995!) though with all the new websites available I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you out there had forgotten about it… I certainly had.  The conversation questions section of this site is amazing for the simple reason that it is SO extensive!

Teaching Suggestion:  If you are 15 minutes from your class and you are stuck for something to do this is an excellent resource to go to, find a list of questions, print them off and then select the ones you want and write them up to stimulate discussion or any number of other conversational activities.

Not that any of us have ever been so unprepared… ahem… moving on.

2. Lyrics Training

This is one of my students’ favourite sites and if they see I’ve got the laptop and projector it is difficult for me to get out of giving the last 5-10 minutes of my class over to this website.  My students obviously love it because at least a couple of them have told me they tried it over the weekend! Who can ask for more than that from a teenager?

One of the great things about this site is that the music automatically stops until the correct word is typed into the gap and there is an option to play back the last line only (just hit the backspace key).

Teaching Suggestion: I usually just give the keyboard duties to one of the students and that frees me up to make notes of any phrases/grammar/idioms/etc. that comes from the song that the students have chosen.

A big thank you goes to Russell Stannard and his brilliant website, Teacher Training Videos, for bringing this website to my attention.  I would have put Russell’s site on this list but I’m sure that everybody already knows and visits it already!

3. TeachingEnglish

I promised myself I would limit myself to one BBC website though I do find that there is a veritable embarrassment of riches provided by the collaboration between the BBC and the British Council.

TeachingEnglish is a great resource of ideas for teachers which includes resources, tips, articles and - as is common for BBC websites - much, much more.  I have easily spent hours and I’m sure I have many more hours to come looking through this site’s content and mulling over the ideas and suggestions it provides.

4. Mr Bean animated shorts on youTube

By a strange coincidence, one of Alan’s recent posts was all about Mr Bean, so this recommendation simply supports that.

If you’ve got low-level learners (and especially if you’ve got young learners) I would suggest the Mr Bean animated shorts on youTube.  Mr Bean seems to be universally known so you have that on your side.  Plus, a lot of the animated videos are only 2-3 minutes long (perfect for class work) and have next to no speaking in them and are therefore perfect for emergent language work.  The one word of caution is that I’ve found some of the videos are blocked depending on where you are in the world, and not only that, there seems to be little consistency to the blocking.  I haven’t really figured this one out yet but I think that small hassle is more than worth it.

Teaching Suggestion:  Tease the students with a few pieces of vocabulary before they watch, get them to guess what might happen, work through any ideas the students might have and then give them the video at the end to compare their ideas with the video.  From this, they should already have the vocabulary to accurately retell the story.

5.Short Movies on youTube

Really, is there a better combination of inventions on this planet than youTube and HD video cameras?  I love using short movies in class and I’ve certainly found a lot of really amazing videos that I’ve had a lot of success with, but finding them takes time.

However, one channel you might be interested in is Wong Fu Productions.  These are well-produced short films (anywhere between 3-15 minutes long), the language is clean, the images are safe and the topics are usually funny and universal (boy meets girl being a common theme).

6. Videojug

Staying with videos, one of my favourite websites for useful videos with some educational value is the ‘How-to’ video site, Videojug.

The videos are usually short, many (though not all) have good quality video and audio and a lot of the videos have subtitles of a sort (annotated notes really).  The variety of topics also means you are likely to find something for everyone here.

Note:  Some of the site’s content is definitely not suitable for everyone, so I’d become familiar with the site first before introducing it to students.

Teaching Suggestion:  Getting students to make notes and perhaps try to follow the instructions (depending on the topic) can make for a very engaging and active class.  Using this model, they could also try making their own ‘How to’ videos.

7. Phrase Mix

Short, quick, well-explained nuggets of real language presented with nice pictures.  For any classes at an A2/B1 level or higher, I think these are fantastic little explanations that expose students to a new phrase every day.

Teaching Suggestion:  Not much ‘teaching’, but I tend to send one of these to my students every other day or so.  Sometimes they get brought up in class, sometimes they don’t, but for some of my students they have really enjoyed looking through the site and picking up new phrases they can try out on me during lessons.

8. Edmodo

If you are dealing with large classes, or classes you don’t see very often and know they need more ‘contact’ time to progress, then might I suggest Edmodo.  It’s an easy to learn, easy to use, easy to maintain online class management system.  And it’s FREE!

What I love about Edmodo is that is has a look and general layout similar to Facebook and so, for a lot of students (and teachers) a lot of it can be understood intuitively.  There’s also a LOT of support available.  This site has been up for a couple of years now and it only seems to be growing in capability and popularity.

It’s been suggested to me that a Facebook closed group could accomplish much of what Edmodo offers and would have the benefit of not asking students and teachers to regularly check yet another website.  However, I’m not a huge fan of making myself completely available to my students and I tend to like a bit of a distance between me and them.

9. Using English for Academic Purposes

This might not apply to many of you out there but I’ve found this site a complete lifesaver while doing university preparation courses (AKA pre-sessional courses).  While the layout is basic, the content is detailed and there’s a lot of it.  If there is anyone out there who is doing or about to teach a pre-sessional course and doesn’t know about this site, then you should get on it now!

10. FreeRice

A wonderfully simply multiple choice vocabulary game that adapts to your level of English automatically!  For each answer you get right, FreeRice donates 10 grains of rice through the World Food Programme to help end hunger.  Education and Charity – two of the best things you could possibly use the Internet for!  This quickly grabs the attention of any class I’ve shown it to.

EXTRAS

11. Realplayer/VLC Media Player/KeepVid

A lot of the websites I’ve suggested have videos for use in class (either with a laptop or a laptop and projector).  I tend to not rely on online videos but download them in advance so I am not reliant on my Internet connection in class (we won’t go into the details of the terms and conditions of use for websites like youTube in this post).

If you want this piece of mind then there are a couple of ways to do this.  I use Realplayer.  Once the free version is installed, it has a facility by which you can download almost any video you find on the Internet by hovering over it with your cursor (you’ll see what I mean).  It’s ultra-convenient.

However, for video watching (I don’t like using Realplayer for this) I’ve been using VLC Media Player for the past 6 or 7 years now.  By far and away the most versatile video player out there, I’ve found very little that it won’t play.

Alternatively, if you don’t want the hassle of downloading Realplayer, there is the website KeepVid.  Simply put the URL of the video you want and it will do the rest.  (Again, thanks to Russell Stannard for that suggestion.)

12. Google Reader

This might be such an obvious one… but it has so fundamentally changed my experience of the Web that felt I had to put it in for any of you that aren’t using this yet.  I won’t go into huge amounts of detail (this blogpost is long enough as it is!), I’ll just provide a link to the instructional video RSS in Plain English and say a big thank you to Rob Byrne and his excellent website Free Technology 4 Teachers.

13. Teacher’s Pet

This isn’t technically a website, it’s an application but a damned good one!  If you want to scramble letters in a word, jumble words in a sentence, make a gap fill out of a couple of paragraphs, create a multiple-choice cloze exercise… well if you want to make that, and more, then Teacher’s Pet is a brilliant plug-in for Microsoft Word or OpenOffice that will allow you to do just that.  Thanks to Richard Turnbull at TeflTech for recommending this at a conference in London a couple of years ago.

Hearing Voices

Myself and Osama bin Laden were the only people in the universe not at Brighton, and now that he's gone, it's just me left. So I have been doing my best to follow the conference as it echoes around the blogosphere. Just last night I read Scott Thornbury's technosceptical post and its many comments and reblogs. I too feel ambivalent about technology, but have never been quite how to put my feelings into words. But I do feel glad for my modest old laptop and internet connection. Let me offer my defence of that aspect of technology at least.

I've been in this shabby business long enough to remember when the cassette recorder was the only multimedium available, and pretty much all you could play was the cassette that came with the book. (For those of you who do not know what a cassette recorder is, here  is an excellent introduction.)

All that ffwing and rewing. All that tape hiss. All that lugging the frigging stuff around on buses and tube trains. The constant risk of your tape-player turning into a plate of moaning brown spaghetti. So why did I bother?

Because it was another voice. Even a crap one. Another dimension - especially when I was doing one-to-one classes. And I think the content and quality of that third voice have improved in the days of the multi-worldwide-inter-online-blogo-tubo-sphere-net.

And does the third voice get in the way of dogme? See what you think. I've found the following kind of strategy often works - inviting the third voice to join in near the end of a conversation class.

If we've been talking about food or cooking, we might take a look at Videojug. (See the end of this blog for details about each of the sources.)

If we've been talking about just about anything from science or social science, we make a bee-line to TED.

If crime is the subject, we might try The Real Hustle on YouTube. The Real Hustle is also great for social interaction with strangers (shops, hotels, passers-by and so on).

I think there's a huge difference in emphasis between starting a class off with a video sequence (teacher-led) and allowing a third voice to chip in at the end of a student-generated conversation. Dogme? Dogmaybe.

And I notice one curious thing time after time: If the conversation has arisen from the people in the room, students tend to be able to understand the video sequence much better than if it had been brought in by me. As listeners, they seem to punch above their weight.

If you've never done this before, I would spend a little free time skimming through a few videos from each site. But in class I don't hesitate to say "Well since we're talking about what you ate on holiday in Vietnam, do you want to take a quick look at a website which has lots of recipes? Maybe we can find something Vietnamese?"

And if nothing useful turns up, so be it. We do something else with the existing voices.

So definitely a freshly-made dish, but garnished with a little multimedia. Bo proveite!

Appendix - The Sources


The Real Hustle is a TV programme which has been posted extensively on YouTube. It is a hidden-camera programme where a trio of performers demonstrate con-tricks and scams on the unsuspecting public. The English is hard - lots of untidy colloquial speech - but I usually ask my students to try to follow the dynamics, rather than the speech.


TED is a very well-known conference on various key issues featuring many leading experts. All the talks are posted on TED.com and many now feature multilingual subtitles.


Videojug features short video tutorials on how to cook, keep fit, do DIY and many other subjects. Anybody can upload to the site, but the best quality clips are those made by the Videojug people themselves. A godsend for foodies. Try this one.