tokyokevin

ShowaELC Logo

Showa ELC, or English Language and Communication, is our unofficial department website for students and community building. I’ll be posting any further tools for students over there, and tools for teachers here. I’ll be maintaining that web site too, so keep a look out for new stuff there. Set up your News Reader to [...]

Scrolling messages in a .gif picture

Some of you will end up making web pages for your students. This will liven up any message you have to send to them, such as a warning about a deadline or important information they need to see. It is called a screed. Try it, it only takes about 30 [...]

Get everyone across the river

This is supposed to be a Japanese IQ test, given to all students in Japan. The online version is like a game. I would guess many fail it, but the best thing about it is they could discuss between themselves in small groups, how to get everyone across the river. There [...]

Teaching with Twitter

I’ve recommended Twitter already, in Tool #53, but here is a long list of ideas about how to use twitter for learning and teaching.

Twitter is very, very popular these days. It is gaining in popularity in Japan. You post short messages about what you are doing thinking or discovering, and people follow you, [...]

Pass the message in a chain

A simple mis-communication game. Remember “Telephone” or “Chinese Whispers?” This is done with a chain message like that, but online, and with pictures and writing instead of whispering in your neighbor’s ear. Broken [...]

Students and Teachers meet online

Teaching is no longer tethered to geography. If I want to learn German, I can get a German teacher from Germany, living IN Germany right now. If I want to teach English to someone in Argentina, I put up my rate and other details at Myngle. Students find me and I [...]

Interviews for Podcasts

Doing interviews is an essential part of many podcasts. Podcast Academy explains in text or in audio how to make your interview interesting and successful. Then read James Fallows write in the Atlantic about how to give a good interview. He’s famous [...]

Learn Grammar with Movies

Great little site MSTAGG with short clips from recent movies used to teach grammar points. This is definitely upper intermediate though, but he has gone through the material and done a good job of presenting examples. The clips are sometimes too long, but you can further filter them if you want to [...]

WeboWord

Learn a new vocabulary item each day with an illustrative drawing, examples, explanations and lots of information about that word. Lots of fun [...]