On the way back from the Andalucian capital, my friend Daniel Barber (that’s Barber of of Cádiz, not Seville) informed me that the university building that the conference took place in used to be a cigarette factory (la Real Fábrica de Tabacos).

So I found this 1915 painting by local artist Gonzalo Bilbao Martínez and it occured to me - isn’t that exactly where we had cocktails? It also turns out that the building was part of the setting for Bizet’s Carmen.

It was a great weekend and I have to say thank you to all the organizers for another great job. The conference theme was Blending tradition with Innovation which I suppose could be a euphamism for “Technology in the classroom“. I gave two talks and as promised, I am posting the handouts here:

Do YouTube?

Here we looked at seven different YouTube activities, each of which used video in a different way:

1. The first activity used 10 different animal clips, each with a title consisting of the structure: -ing + noun (a sleepwalking dog, a dancing cockatoo, a sneezing panda, etc). The activity is called ‘Recall the clips’ and can be seen in full at teflclips.
2. The second activity was a simple idea in which we used a YouTube clip to engage students with a story. The example story was that of Patty Hearst who, in 1974, was caught on camera taking part in a bank robbery along with the people who had kidnapped her just 10 weeks before. The clip can be seen here and the story can be read here. The full activity is in my new book.
3. The third activity was the BBC’s ‘Spaghetti Harvest’ April fool’s day joke. I’ll be putting this lesson plan on teflclips next week just in time for April 1st.
4. The fourth activity was ‘English on the London Underground’. You can see the lesson plan here.
5. The fifth activity was ‘What happens next?’ Here we used the clip ‘Cow gives birth to a dude‘. More ideas can be seen here and here.
6. The sixth activity was the McGurk effect - an auditory illusion (link here).
7. Finally, the sixth activity was a simple idea in which we search YouTube to find a clip that could be used to engage students with a topic that we want to look at in class (a topic in the course book, for example). We used a clip of the Antarctica for this one.

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Finally, I said that I would show you how to download YouTube videos so that you can store them on a hard drive. Click here for that. Please let me know if I’ve forgotten anything.

From Flashcards to Flash Images

In this talk, we looked at characteristics and applications of our old friend, the picture flash card. We then considered how we could give it a digital makeover. I wrote a posting on this a while back (see it here). We looked at seven different lesson plans/ideas:

1. In the first activity, we saw how we can use an image search engine to look for pictures to preteach or revise new vocabulary in a text. The text used was the lyrics from El Condor Pasa and the full lesson plan is here.
2. In the second activity, we used 11 images of colour-noun collocations which were obtained from Google image search (the Pink Panther, a black hole, a grey squirrel, the Whitehouse, a red card, the Yellow Submarine, the blue whale, brown sugar, the green man, Purple Rain, orange alert). In the activity, students are shown the images and then asked to recall them from memory.
3. Activity three was the make and do collocation cards. I will be putting the full lesson plan for this on my blog in the next few days.
4. Activity four was the ‘Where’ book covers. The images used for this were taken from Amazon.com. Click here for the lesson plan.
5. Activity five was another activity using images of book covers from Amazom.com. Click here for lesson plan.
6. Activity six was the superlative flash images. This idea comes from my new book.
7. Finally, activity seven (which was more an idea than an activity) used sites such as Getty and Corbis to find images of idioms. There is a posting on this here.

The last thing - there is a posting here that shows how to use Microsof Paint to cover up parts of images. Please leave a comment below and let me know if there is anything I’ve forgotten.

Well thanks to everyone for coming. Hope to see you again soon