Random Quote
Drink coffee! Do stupid things faster!
---- unknown
Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford
A magician pulls rabbits out of hats. An experimental psychologist pulls habits out of rats.
---- anonymous
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
---- Fred Allen
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
---- Pablo Picasso
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
---- Malcom Forbes
As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly.
---- Mary Roninette Kowal
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
---- Galileo Galilei
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
---- Isaac Newton
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
---- Mitch Hedberg
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)
The least of learning is done in the classrooms
---- Thomas Merton
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
---- George Orwell
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
---- Thomas A. Edison
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
---- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
---- Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519)
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.
---- Robert Copeland
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
---- Terry Pratchett
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
---- Terry Pratchett
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
---- Arnold Toynbee
it's probably not a good idea to underestimate my ability to make an ass out of myself—just when I seem to have it under control, I'll turn around and surprise you.
---- Tenser said the Tensor
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
---- Arnold Lobel
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer
Real English
I’ve been clearing out some email and came across another email from a reader with a site for students using real people called Real English - sounds similar to what I posted two days ago - Real ESL.
Real English is produced by Mike in the south of France. The videos head out to the street and stop random people and interview them on a specific point illustrating a language point. I can definitely see this being useful for very low level students. Mike says:
I interview people in the street in order to get original, spontaneous speech on camera. Then I take this very messy spontaneity and organize it into structures and functions for beginners and intermediate students, and then make lessons around these video.
I really like the intro to each video - it’s catchy. Below is the video for lesson six - introducing people, introducing yourself. This video also has participants spell their names.
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Jul 3, 2008 at 10:37 PM
Teaching | useful_web_sites | Video |





Michael Marzio wrote 101 words on Thursday Jul 3, 2008 at 11:49 PM
Thanks for the review! I just want to disagree with one sentence where you wrote:
“I can definitely see this being useful for very low level students”.
It is true that I concentrate on spontaneous video for beginners and intermediates, one reason being that it is difficult to find authentic video for low levels, but there is a difference beteween “authentic” (today’s films with actors, for example) and “spontaneous”. I’m not sure, but I think that the naturalness of the speech makes very easy material difficult for students who have never travelled to, or spent time in, English-speaking countries.
Thanks again!