Mass Media and Education

Searching newspapers and other mass media online to check the usefulness and relevance of the resources available was also a very dynamic part of this training course about the multimedia resources in the teaching of English as a second language.

1- Our first challenge was to analyse the impact of the Oscars night on four newspapers. Two of them are British: The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian Online. The others are American: Newsweek and New York Times.

While the American newspapers gave no prominence to the event on their homepage, with just a simple piece of information included in a list of general information on cinema and no photos, both British media emphasised this worldwide famous night with headlines, captioned pictures and even with a video of the ceremony,in The Daily Telegraph, unfortunately not available any longer.

This difference of approach arose some curiosity and made us check another British publisher, The Mirror, to come to the conclusion that the Oscars night was also treated with great significance. The truth is that, as someone suggested, the winners of the night are British.

2- As a second challenge of the session we skimmed a newspaper online for children we chose   timeforkids.com. We focused on the resources and tested out its possibilities of classroom uses. The website seemed colourful, usable and motivating. This material could be used to develop different skills either in a lesson of the unit about the topic Multicultural world or as a warmer or follow-up work inside the same topicand maybe as background information and practice for the extensive reading "Names" by Maya Angelou.

Concluding, the mass media online can be an important help whenever we want to use authentic models (texts, videos, images or even audio materials) and introduce some pedagogical innovation in our activity. There’s a wide range of resources to develop the different skills – listening, writing, reading, grammar, vocabulary, any other.

The Electronic European Language Portfolio

We had the first contact with the ELP and discussed about the advantages of using the e-ELP as a pedagogical tool.

Some information was given to lead these first steps and about how

-        to download the application of the ELP;

-         to use it;

-         to modify it;

-        to understand its sections, contents, objectives, possible documents.

We found this portfolio could be an interesting tool to support one’s learning process. It can be used to enrich our future activity as teachers and to provide the students a more complete and motivating learning process

Cambridge Dictionary Online

We have to admit that the first impression this dictionary arises is not favourable as the homepage is little imaginative. However its simplicity makes the research easy, which can be an advantage.

Although some of the areas of the site have free access, many others, like the Teacher Zone, require a registration. We didn´t make the registration and so had no opportunity to evaluate those resources but, after going through the Student Zone, we felt it might worth it because we were positively impressed by them.

Among the resources there are more than Activities. We can find The Word of the Day, Data for Researchers, Topic Areas like Business, Clothes, Education, etc. Of course there's the possibility to buy dictionaries online. The catalogue shows a large list of dictionaries for sale: British English Dictionaries, American English Dictionaries, Bilingual Dictionaries.
In  the archive Dictionaries there are interesting links, too - Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary   and Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary, which include Worksheets and Infoquests.

The word staff was used to try the dictionary online and we got all the entries for the word and a link to VISUALTHESAURUS an interactive tool that allows us to discover, among other things, the connections between words. However, it is a trial version.
The folders for the students include four areas and we could open the archive Interchange Arcade, providing activities to review the learning. We also opened the students' book nº 2 and chose the article "Listen for the stress", where they can practise pronunciation. Another archive, Touchstone, has links to self-scoring activities. Different levels of learning can be chosen.

Very relevant it is the fact this site enables us to copy worksheets, tests, projects that we can use in our lessons. Moreover most of the materials are interesting and amusing and there's a great variety of activities.

How We Used Dictionaries Online

From the great variety of dictionary activities suggested by the trainer we chose OEDS_Activity_5_word_class. We had to use different dictionaries online to clarify our doubts about some of the words we had to deal with. We had the chance to find out about words like puffin, a seabird, or Krypton, which is a chemical element of atomic number 36.

We went through another activity, OEDS_Activity_1(origin of words), and, with the help of an etymology dictionary, we learnt that phobia is a Greek word and calf comes from the old English.
The dictionaries online were also useful to complete nursery rhymes and find out about the meanings of some idiomatic phrases.The phrases were very amusing, particularly this one: "Lose one's marbles". It means to lose one's mind, something that often happens to us.

In our opinion all these tasks have a great interest for our activity as teachers of English. They are very useful, motivating and usable and can provide good resources for Warm-up or Follow-up activities.

Encyclopedias

We've searched four different encyclopedias online and these are two of them chosen for different reasons:

1-)http://www.britannica.com/

- An interesting list of contents ( History and Society, Arts and Entertainment, Travel and Geography, Science and Technology, Featured Videos, Advocacy for Animals).

- Appealing side and bottom folders with specific subject and links to spotlights.

- Useful and usable reading, writing and listening resources.After checking some examples we concluded that they include short, clear and motivating texts, with a variety of possibilities of multimedia and well organized learning activities.We tried the classroom activity "Black History", which gave us a good impression for the text, the image gallery, the timeline, the videos and a wide range of activities.

- Access to a dictionary online and a blog.

- Anyway, it requires subscription but its interest is worth the effort.

2)http://www.encyclopedia.com/
- More than hundred sources (encyclopedias, dictionaries, definitions, biographies, synonyms, pronunciation keys, word origins and abbreviations).

-Imaginative top folders, opening the topics like Martin Luther King, Socialise Medicine, Global Warming, Immigration,etc.

-Writing, reading and listening resources.

-Access to reference links,   dictionary,further reading,videos from the youtube and also images.

-We've tried the folder "Immigration" and we could adapt part of those materials for our students.

-This is a very good encyclopedia to get information.  However we found it difficult to work it out in class because it has too much information and may become time consuming.

-It's free.

21st March!!!!!

21st March!!!!!!!!

International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination!!!!!!