Save It and Save Yourself: Books

I don't know if any comprehensive studies have been done, but I think it's a safe bet to throw this out there as fact: the younger your students, the shorter the lifespan of the books that are anywhere in their vicinity.

Now, believe me, I am the first proponent of that new book smell, though I prefer the musty smell of old books. I can admit that I have listed a books smell as one of the deciding factors of my purchase. But I also don't have to box up my e-books so my cat won't chew on their covers.

This is a wave of the future that many book lovers have had trouble embracing, even as book-like as marketers try to make their product. About a dozen programs have a feature that allows you to press the screen with your finger to turn the page. Hmm. Not a big selling point for me.

In fact, one of the biggest reasons I usually print stuff out even if I have a digital version is so I can make notes on it or dog-ear my place. Well, if you thought you could only do this on real, physical paper, you were wrong!

The site Mobipocket not only offers a wide selection of e-books to download, but it allows you to download them to your smartphone or BlackBerry for free. While it has yet to include an app for iPhone, the much more famous Kindle program from Amazon.com offers this, also for free, while Kindle users are waiting on a BlackBerry version!

What's even better--both versions allow you to download samples before purchasing. For an ESL class, a single sample like this can provide more than enough material for a day's scanning lesson or in-depth reading homework.

But for book addicts, that probably won't be enough. Mobipocket's e-books are about $8 a piece, which is a lot better than most paperbacks, but there are many sites that offer free e-books, some for classic literature now in the public domain, some with new work by aspiring authors, and some with a nice blend of both. The best known of these is The Gutenburg Project, which provides tens of thousands of free books as well as editing services if you want to submit your own.

Other free sites include Feedbooks, Scribd.com, and ManyBooks.

The ability to upload your own material provides a great project opportunity--having students write poems or short stories for publication. They will not only have something to show others for their effort, but you will have reading material for the classes that come later. Short stories may seem like a lot of work for less advanced students, but be sure to look up "nanofiction" if they give you too much grief.

Another great site is DailyLit, which sends a 5 minute excerpt from a book of your choice to your e-mail. This is a great way to help make larger readings more manageable for students or to let students focus on specific chunks for discussion.

Finally, if you have books you just couldn't live without but which may never reach the public domain (the way Congress keeps extending copyright duration), then a last resort option is always to scan them in as pdfs. Many scanners can now do this with the push of a button... well about 300 pushes in all?

Sure, it sounds tedious, but if you have a student teacher, then you can always just say it's the new wave of education. They'll need to get used to it, so why not practice with your library?

Save It and Save Yourself: Flashcards

I have hundreds of flashcards for Russian verbs. It's my area of trouble. Of those hundreds of verbs, I have learned a very small percent. That's probably because one pack of flashcards is under my bed. I'm not sure what happened to the others, but I know I don't study them. My little brother is the exact opposite... in some ways. He loved studying the German flashcards I made him... until he lost them.

Flashcards are a hassle. For each chapter in your run-of-the-mill textbook, there are 50 or more words. For economical students, I've seen flashcards the size of paperclips, or multiple words on the same card. Ultimately, I've found that the most economical thing to do (and the best thing for the trees if you blame your bad grades on saving the planet) is to make digital flashcards.

Or not! Lots of people have already done just that and stored their flashcards on web sites like Flashcard Machine! It is 100% free. And if you register, you can make your own cards or save lists you want to study.

While there is a plethora of material from the RFL books Golosa and Nachalo, there is a... something bigger than a plethora of ESL-specific vocabulary, including the ever-popular 20+ lists called "Essential Words for the TOEFL," "Prefixes and Suffixes," and "Everyday Idioms." However, there are also smaller lists by content, such as "Body Parts."

Unfortunately, just searching for "ESL" will also bring up lists meant for native English speakers, such as words for the SAT or the GRE, though really advanced students may also appreciate this practice.

This is a great site for students, but it is even more useful if teachers post vocabulary lists for discussion topics or tests and e-mail students the links to them to ensure they are working on the right list. Or, for projects, students can also provide their peers with jargon that may be specific to their interests or that will help their presentations be more comprehensible.

I am very partial to the desktop version, called i Study to Go, though it costs about $17. While both versions allow you to create your own cards and study them anywhere, it's a little difficult to pop your laptop open on the bus or get an Internet signal in the deepest subway in the world. Desktop versions allow you to study cards without the Internet, which I like. The Internet gives me the option of playing Mafia Wars instead of studying my flashcards. But the desktop version also allows students to add words to their iPods.

The best program for this, in my opinion, is actually Flash My Brain, which allows cards to also be downloaded to cell phones or PDAs, in addition to including talking flashcards and memory games. It costs $30, so if you're going for mobility, the extra cost is worth it for this program over the other one.



Whichever you choose, I've found it very beneficial to be able to scroll through a list of Russian words while on the way to class, sitting in a boring class, riding on the bus, and anywhere else you can eat green eggs and ham.

Save It and Save Yourself: DVDs

Until recently, CDs and DVDs were assumed to be a lot more reliable than information on tape because there wasn't any chance of it getting tangled up in the machine or mysteriously wiped after spending two months baking in storage. Well, disks can be just as tricky, whether it's a tiny scratch that makes the whole movie freeze or new time effects known as "CD rot."

Ripping and copying CDs has become a common method of backing up music and data, but doing the same for DVDs is more difficult. I am not encouraging you to rent movies from Netflix and make a library for yourself! But why should you have to buy a new DVD every time your old one gets a scratch from a dodgy player?



Or even more ridiculous--why should you have to buy or bring a Region 1 DVD player to Russia or set one of your computers to only play Region 1 disks just so you can watch movies from America over there? If Pixar had released Ratatouille in America with Russian subtitles or a Region 5 coding, I wouldn't have had to buy it in Russia to get what wanted out of it! (In fact, it's a much better deal in Russia, even buying from legal vendors like Mega Video, because I got both versions of the movie for the price of one!)

Okay, so the DVD industry has really restricted us teachers with all this copyright nonsense, but fear not! There is a safe and legal way to back up your classes' favorite DVDs and take the region coding off of them, too!

Some quick notes:
-With a VHS -> DVD recorder, you can back up tapes, but the cheapest of these is in the $150 range, and may not copy protected material like Disneys.

-One Step DVD Duplicators also may not copy protected material, and they are in the $300+ range.

-DVDShrink is able to decode most protection encryption to allow you to copy your DVDs and also removes the region code, so you can play it worldwide. This sounds very illegal, and it can be used to do illegal copying, I'm sure. But if you own material, there's no reason you shouldn't be allowed to protect your investment.

DVDShrink:

DVD Shrink is a program that copies DVDs into a digital format. If this works for you, and you have the classroom technology necessary to hook up your computer to a projector, then this is all you need!

It is 100% free, but it isn't the most user friendly program, but the YouTube tutorials are so good, that giving instructions here would just confuse you!

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If you want to burn a copy of the disc, DVDShrink won't be enough. Firstly, you will need DVD burning hardware inside your computer. A CD-RW (read / write) does not mean you can write DVDs, and neither does DVD-R! You need a DVD-RW. If your computer didn't come with this built in, then exterior ones are available in the $50 range.

Secondly, you will need DVD burning software. These programs range in the thousands at least, but DVDShrink is set up to work with Nero. You used to be able to find used versions of Nero pretty cheap on e-Bay, but now it's easier and cheaper to use a program called Image Burn.

To use Image Burn, in DVDShrink, you can click "Back up," then select "Create an ISO document with Image Burn. Save the file where you can find it, then go to the Image Burn program and click "Write to Disc."

If this becomes too tedious, however, you can also follow this guide to download a version of DVDShrink already integrated with Image Burn. This is only practical, though, if you have more than one DVD drive on your computer tower. It also costs about $12. Depending on your computer's speed, the entire process takes 15 - 30 minutes using them separately, and for $12, you're really only shaving off a few seconds.

Save It and Save Yourself: YouTube

About a month ago, I directed people to a site that downloaded YouTube videos via their links, but this turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. I spent a few hours looking for cookies... the less interesting kind. But thanks to my friend Zhenia, YouTube now has immortality in its grasp once more!


Download Helper:

Download helper is a widget / add-on that works with the Firefox web browser to save YouTube videos as flash (.flv) files or other file types, depending on your preference. As often as videos get taken down or changed on YouTube, this widga-ma-jig has become my new best friend. My Queen karaoke videos will not be taken from me if (against all expectations) Freddy Mercury rises from the dead to join the ranks of Metallica and McCartney on the side of corporate greed.


Instructions

1. Download Firefox. If you don't have it already, chances are you do a whole lot of waiting, when you could be doing much more surfing. It's much safer than Internet Explorer, too!

2. On the Menu bar (File, Edit, View, etc), click "Tools."

3. On the drop-down list, click "Add-Ons," then on the pop-up window, click the button that says "Get Add-Ons."

4. The screen will change to a list with a small search bar above it. Search for "Download Helper." A few different devices will pop up, but the one you want is named Download Helper and has an icon of three atomic-looking balls: yellow, red, and blue.

5. After the Download Helper is successfully widgetegrated into Firefox, its icon will appear next to the address bar and above YouTube videos. If you want to just save them as flash files, you're work is done!

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But it's often helpful to be able to alter the content of the video-- cut parts out, add an intro slide, add subtitles, etc. The easiest way I've found to do this is with Windows Movie Maker, which comes free with most Windows packages and is very user friendly. To be able to use the video file in Windows Movie Maker, you will need to download a file converter.

1. In YouTube, find a video you want to download. Notice that next to the Download Helper icon there is a little arrow pointing down.

2. Click the arrow, and the available download will appear. Don't click the selection! (The world won't explode. You'll just get an .flv file) Just put your cursor over it, and another menu will appear that includes the option "Download and Convert."

3. When you click this option, you will be informed in a pop-up that you need to click a little box that allows conversion. Sort of ridiculous, I know, but check the little box.

4. You may receive another pop-up that says you need to install a converter. Even if you don't get the pop-up or you already have a converter, it's easiest to just click the link that downloads one for you, since then the add-on will download and convert for you. (The link is about half way down in the pop-up window.)

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After you've downloaded a video, you can start playing with Windows Movie Maker. I'll list a few unintuitive things about the program, but there are a lot of tutorials for the program on YouTube.

1. To shorten movies, you need to view them on the timeline. If you are presently in Storyboard mode, just click where it says Storyboard in the lower left hand corner, and a drop down list will appear.

2. To add subtitles, "Titles and Credits" in the left hand bar. On the next page, select "Title on the Selected Clip."

3. On the following page, there will be two text boxes to type in. The bottom one will make subtitles. Once you have added this subtitle, it will appear below the clip on the timeline, where you can select how long you want it to last.

Save It and Save Yourself: Evernote

Whether or not you are technologically savvy, you have probably lost some vital piece of work at some point in your life because of technology. There is nothing more irritating than completing your thesis or finding that perfect resource for class... only to discover the next day that it has disintegrated into invisible 0s and 1s somewhere out in the great digital unknown.

So, whether or not you are technologically savvy, I have found a few sites that will help you preserve all your favorite teaching resources.


Evernote:

Evernote is a digital notebook that really looks more like a scrapbook. It allows you to save webpages through a type of screen capture, so even if the link breaks somehow out in the Internet, your sample of it is safe. Of course, if only one small part of the page is relevant, then you can simply highlight it and save it, which also works well with pictures. You can access everything you capture from any computer--or a hand-held device like an iPhone or BlackBerry with these downloads.

All this content can be sorted into separate notebooks. I have one for EFL, and one for RFL (Russian as a Foreign Language). I thought of breaking it down even more into the four skills, but it isn't necessary. Just like you can "tag" people in a photo on Facebook, you can write tags under each entry and find them by typing the tag into the search bar. Every political cartoon I've saved is under "rhetoric," "cartoon," "politics," "culture," and "discussion." If I type in just one of these, all my cartoons pop up.

But what's even better- I don't have to tag a lot of content aside from that, because the dialogue in the cartoon does it for me. If two characters happen to mention zombies in their quote bubble, then Evernote can decipher the text and bring up the cartoon when I search "zombies." It even works with hand writing! The only thing that could be better is if it understood Cyrillic letters, so I wouldn't have to tag as much on all the pictures of Russian plaques I took, promising myself I would read when I got home.

Price: Free, unless you want to upload pdfs. You also get a lot of upload power. But if you find you need more and really want to save those pdfs, you can do so for just $5 a month.


Registration Help:

1. Click here to "Get Started."
2. Enter your information. Before you really get started, you will need to check your e-mail and click a link the site sends to confirm it is a real address.
3. Once you enter your notebook, you can create notes from scratch using material already on your computer, or you can download the Web Clipper, which will allow you to copy information from sites.
4. For more help, visit the support page or feel free to send a comment my way.

Mary Poppins' Bag of Speaking Fun

For those who don't remember or who had an underprivileged childhood, Mary Poppins is a nanny with a magic bag that fits anything and everything. This post is kind of like that. I found some great sites that will address all your speaking needs--topics for discussion, idioms, pronunciation, and everything in between.



I'm very partial to discussion topics, myself. For one, it makes students feel like it's worth it to speak up when the topic is important or interests them. And though some may try to avoid using forms they aren't proficient with, they will also be confronted with these same forms when other speakers use them. But sometimes it's difficult to constantly come up with something to discuss. At least if I went on a blind date, I would run out of things meaningful things to talk about pretty quickly before reverting to the daily habits of my cat.

ESL Discussions is a great site with a plethora of topics to discuss, and each comes with several questions for teachers to ask students to elicit their opinions. There is a bar on the right side of the page with links to discussions of the latest news topics, such as "Swine Flu," "Barack Obama," and "Rising Prices." There are even sections for discussions that revolve around grammar and idiomatic language.

The discussion on animal idioms, for example, opens with "Does your teacher ever have to badger you to get your homework?" This can open up into a great cultural comparison of which animals are used to convey which personality traits in the L1 and L2. There are actually many similarities between these in Russian and English, such as the infamous crafty fox.

Another site I'm fond of, English Daily, focuses specifically on idiomatic language. Each "lesson" provides a short conversation for context that features an idiomatic word or phrase, such as "to get on board" for "to participate. At the end of the conversation, it glosses and explains the phrase. These can provide great warm-ups for a class in general or for a discussion in which you want students to use idiomatic language. No book-talk allowed!

I would also like to use these discussion questions, particularly those on "Russia" and "A New Cold War" and record the reactions of people from different cultures to discuss Russian history and stereotypes and how they feel about them.

Finally, the real bag of goodies comes from the website SpokenSkills. There are idioms, specialized vocabulary (from business English to aviation), and speeches, and practice with pronunciation. Every one of these is accompanied by listening practice and a recorder, so students can compare their pronunciation to that of a native speaker.

Many advanced students can recognize which sounds they need to work on because they are the same sounds they have difficulty distinguishing in listening comprehension. For example, Russians tend to have trouble distinguishing between the short "i" and short "e" (pin / pen) and the short "u" in "but" and "love" and the long "a" in "father." (On this site it is referred to as the short "o," but it is commonly known as the long a). These clips will help them compare the sounds, so they can draw the line between them.

The site also offers teachers the opportunity to upload sound clips, so students will have more of a variety of material. This would be a great site to supplement practice with minimal pairs or drawing attention to the different types of language that are used in different situations, such as telephone calls vs. business meetings, but it also offers students an invaluable resource for self-evaluation and practice.

Role-Playing Madness!

In the world of language teaching, role-playing usually means a short activity where students pretend to interact in situations, such as "You are having lunch with a friend, but you forgot your wallet. Try to negotiate with the waiter to let you go get it, so you don't have to wash dishes all night." These make great speaking exercises, and I found a few I really like.

Strangers on a Train: In this activity, students are situated in groups of four, facing each other as if they are in a train car. They then engage in some light conversation about the weather, where they are going and why. Now, it may be unusual for Russians to talk to each other on the subway, but they have no trouble talking on trains in my experience. Why the difference? I have no idea.



The next part of the activity, though, is where it gets interesting! Taking students aside individually, you give them time to memorize a short phrase. They will have to work it into the conversation in a regular way, so the other students can't guess what their phrase is. This not only encourages fluidity of speech, but also focus on what their partners are saying. Phrases like "I agree" or "me neither" depend on what the former speaker said, and more uncommon phrases like "I've always wanted to go to Zimbabwe" depend on the topic of the conversation.

Jungle Survivors: This activity splits the class into reporters and the survivors of a plane crash. Questions could include everything from what they lost in the crash to how their bowels handled coconut milk. They have been living on their own in the jungle for two days, but that's not too unbelievable, is it? You can survive that long easily without food or water. I think students would have a much more interesting time explaining how they survived if they'd been lost for a week or more. And why did they leave the crash site to begin with? Maybe someone shot them down, or maybe they just couldn't stand each other anymore! I think this activity could be spiced up a bit, but the download comes with some nice resources.

Similar activities can be found on ESL Flow


Other Types of RPs
Now, these are fun, but there is also a wide, wide world of role-playing beyond this. It includes video games like Final Fantasy (one of my favorite, but pretty useless for the classroom), forum stories, IRCs (instant refresh chat rooms), and- best of all- the LARP (live action role-playing). Each of these have some similarities, though: participants create an original character that is appropriate for the story setting, and they reply to each other as if they are this character.

Now, I'm not telling you to have your students run around screaming "Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Plus 20 damage!" But this can be a great way to tie writing, reading, and speaking practice in with culture, depending on the setting.


Forums:
A forum is a place where members can create threads and reply to comments on each thread. On forums for computer trouble, for example, threads usually denote different types of problems, different conversations. An RP forum is laid out in exactly the same way, but the threads usually denote a new scene to help with organization. Other sections can also offer a place for students to provide information about their character. This alone could become a great research project for students.

For example, if you fancy a story that takes place in the old American West, students may need to become familiar with the geography, the relationships between immigrants and Native Americans, the different jobs available, and maybe a little history. As many times as I've been asked whether or not I ride a horse, this may not be as much work as it seems!

This can become an area for students to freely practice their English, or you can develop scenarios that elicit certain forms. If your cowboys are about to go on the Oregon Trail, for example, they need to buy some oxen and whatnots. This then becomes an interesting way for students to practice shopping vocabulary.

Free forums are available at My Free Forums, and the site offers a lot of tutorials for narrowing membership, adding sections, etc.


IRCs
Instant Refresh Chats are very similar to forums, but these would be even more helpful for advanced students because replies are required in real time. They are basically instant messaging tools that allow multiple people to write to each other at the same time. Many IRC role-playing groups usually have an accompanying forum or web page for members to reference information about their story setting or characters.

One free IRC service is Star Chat, but it may require a download of the program pIRCh. The same can easily be done by inviting multiple members to Windows Messenger or AIM conversations. But Windows, AIM, and pIRCh all allow participants to save or "log" conversations, so students can have something to show for their effort.


LARPs
The most famous LARP known is Vampires: The Masquerade, but if you ever played "make-believe" when you were a kid, then you have LARPed. In free-structure LARPs, this will be exactly the same, but just like with the others, if you want students to concentrate on something specific, then you simply do something like, oh, tell them they are strangers in a train car that strike up a conversation about the weather!

All LARPs give a little freedom, but there are also pre-made structured games online that you can purchase, such as Dinner and a Murder. These are a little costly (~$40) and much too long to be completed in class, but it is definitely worth it to organize a fun get together like this for students at the end of the year.

In the Dinner and a Murder games, students will receive information about their character, their background, and their personality. In the 1920s game, festivities are interrupted by a murder, and all the guests are detained while an investigator talks to them. As the night goes on, however, other guests may feel inclined to murder each other for various reasons. (After a body is discovered, these people get to come back as a secondary character of less importance.)

Once the party is dying down, the participants regroup to try to solve the mystery together, but this can also be revised into a writing activity-- just to make sure you cover all four skills!

Compulsive Liars

On the site ESL Go I found an interesting activity called "Unbelievable Story," which basically has a student tell a story about having met Tom Cruise during an LA taxi ride. Then another student must argue and say they don't believe the story. I thought a starter like this might be good, but imagine how great our students would speak English if they were compulsive liars! Maybe a day should be set aside for students to exaggerate everything!

I know in my Russian, I tend to give an awful lot of "normalno"s when people ask how I'm doing. Maybe on this particular day, you could begin the class by telling students you felt like you were hit by a bus--and then proceed to insist that it really happened, with each detail making the accident seem worse and worse. After the students begin to insist that it's not true, you can explain the day's mission: lie as you have never lied before!

This should also provide some great synonym practice. When it's the students' turn to say how they are, they don't just feel "okay." They feel great, awesome, wonderful, magnificent-- or bad, awful, terrible, miserable, wretched! (And if they insist they're only okay? Well, then they're ambivalent or nonchalant, which will be a lot harder on them!)

And, of course, I will ask the students just why they happen to feel this way, which should elicit some fun results. After one student has exhausted their lying capacity, I might ask if any student can top their experience. The discussion can focus on whatever you wish, so long as you ask the right questions. If we happen to be working on time expressions, for example, the conversation might go like this:

S: I'm tired.
T: How long has it been since you slept?
S: Four days.
T: Well, that's nothing. I bet Dima isn't just tired. He's exhausted. How long has it been since you slept, Dima?
S: Two months.
T: You haven't slept in two months? Why not?
S: I flew to the moon.
T: I fly to the moon every weekend, but I still sleep every night. When will you finally get some sleep? (etc.)

I think young adults would have a lot of fun with an activity like this. It could also be adapted into a writing activity, or a getting-to-know-you session. Students could tell stories about their lives and discuss whether they though each others' were true or false.

It could also work well with other activities listed on the site, just to spice them up, such as "Restaurant Interview." In this activity, some students are restaurant owners, and some are applicants who have no experience but really need the money. Lying seems to be the only option, but what if the interviewer wants to try them out in the kitchen? Maybe they happen to be a master chef allergic to salt, or the lack of feng shui in the kitchen is giving them too much of a headache to work right now. In America, you can't refuse to hire someone because of their health issues!

Whatever you decide to do, just make sure they know you're not lying about the homework!