Monday, 17 January 2011

Teaching English through songs in the digital age (part 4 of 4): Music-related web 2.0 tools

Finally, this is the last part of the series which summarizes the #ELTchat from Jan 12th about Teaching English through songs: activities, resources and benefits of using songs for teaching. In this post I have collected music-related web 2.0 tools which were mentioned during the #ELTchat and examples of how to use them.

  • Music and lyrics copied and pasted on IWB.
  • Put up a playlist on YouTube for students. So, if they like a song, then they can listen to more beyond class.
  • There are lots of karaoke videos on Youtube; with just a computer and a mic, you can have a great singing lesson!

Spotify (Spotify is available in the following countries:Finland, France, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and Grooveshark
  • Get students to make a playlist, then ask them to walk around class & find out who else’s they would listen to.
  • Make a quiz on lyrics. Ss answer as they watch the video clip.

  • Great for autonomous work on the songs they like.
  • Choose song, choose level, fill gaps. Music will stop.

  • Ask students to subtitle song. Then compare each other’s versions

    • Do a word cloud to predict the song theme.
    • Students make up their own song based on word cloud , then compare with real song to see who is accurate.
    • A great warmer for a song is to stick the lyrics in Wordle or Worditout and ask learners to guess song from word cloud.

    Other tools and websites

    Tune into English is a fabulous free resource to use with students!!

    English Central always includes a song for pronunciation work.

    Karaoke Party is a great interactive online karaoke venue – very useful interface with ratings et al.

    Tubeoke is also great. It shows the video and the lyrics alongside.


    I hope these tools can really make the use of songs more fun. I have really enjoyed writing this series!

    7 comments:

    1. Hi Vicky,

      It's my first time submitting a comment on your blog. I'd like to say that I really liked your ideas to work with songs. Congratulations! I particularly like to use songs to teach prepositions as well as phrasal verbs. I will definitely use some of the resources you mentioned here.
      Cheers,
      Luciana Podschun
      @inglesinteract

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    2. This is a fabulous source of ideas and resources, Vicky! Congratulations! I will follow you!

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    3. Thanks Vicky for this really practical guide. Have posted a link to it on the TeachingEnglish facebook page http://www.facebook.com/TeachingEnglish.BritishCouncil so that contributors there can benefit from it too.

      Please feel free to post there directly yourself when you have anything else you'd like to share.

      Best,
      Ann

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    4. What you've provided makes English learning more fun. Thanks a lot.

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    5. Thanks for all the comments! It is really the result of true collaboration!

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    6. I'd like to invite you to join us on a pilot project designed to help English teachers develop their Digital Literacy and to discuss Technology Integration. Please, read my post and join us! Any contribution (photos, posts, videos, discussion) is welcome. http://leonardolinks.blogspot.com

      Best Regards!
      Leonardo Ornellas

      ReplyDelete
    7. Interesting to read this type of blogs ....to know more. Thanks for your sharing.

      ReplyDelete