Tag Archives: video

May 3 2020

Record your weather forecast from home

If you want to record videos with a green screen effect (replacing the background) or invite your students to do it, there are different tools you can try. You can find some suggestions below:

Without any green background:

Using Zoom:

You can use an image or a video as the background for your Zoom meetings. You can also start a meeting just to yourself, and use this tool to record your very own weather forecast.

Using TouchCast Studio (iPad):

TouchCast Studio also allows you to have a teleprompter, which would make the experience even more realistic, as you could be reading from the teleprompter as actual weather presenters do on TV.

More about TouchCast studio here

You can also use TouchCast studio to record ‘Pasapalabra’ /The Alphabet Game, to revise vocabulary. You can find out how to do it here.

With a green background:

You can find many different tools to record green screen videos here, together with their different functionalities and pros and cons.

British Backgrounds you can use: 

Transport for London

BBC shows (Fawlty Towers, EastEnders, Doctor Who, Strictly Come Dancing, sports studio…)

 

Mar 31 2020

Cómo editar los subtítulos de YouTube

Los vídeos de YouTube muchas veces incluyen unos subtítulos generados automáticamente. Las transcripciones por inteligencia artificial van mejorando, pero aún suele ser necesario realizar algunas correcciones debido a errores de transcripción o ausencia de puntuación, entre otros. No obstante, aunque sean defectuosos, esos subtítulos nos pueden servir de base y ahorrar mucho tiempo para hacer nuestra propia transcripción y poder compartir el vídeo con subtítulos correctos con nuestros alumnos. De hecho, nos evitarán tener que transcribir buena parte (a no ser que sean muy desastrosos), pero sobre todo nos evitarán la tarea de sincronizar. Aquí tenéis un resumen de cómo hacerlo:

  1. En YouTube, copia el enlace del video.
  2. Páginas como downsub.com permiten descargar un archivo .srt o .txt con los subtítulos. Pega el enlace del vídeo, y descarga el archivo .srt.
  3. En amara.org, pega el enlace del video. Una vez allí, importa el archivo .srt.
  4. Dentro del editor de amara.org, modifica lo que sea necesario. Probablemente podrás respetar los tiempos de comienzo y final de cada subtítulo, aunque se pueden modificar.
  5. Una vez finalizado, tienes dos opciones: descargar el archivo .srt (o .txt) que has generado, o copiar el enlace del video para compartirlo con los alumnos. También se puede incrustar en páginas web y algunos blogs.

En este vídeo tenéis cómo hacer esta edición:

*Si queréis reproducir el vídeo con los subtítulos e nun ordenador en clase sin tener que depender de la conexión a internet, podéis utilizar el reproductor VLC. Si el archivo de video y el de subtítulos están en la misma carpeta y tienen el nombre, al abrir el vídeo los subtítulos se reproducirán automáticamente. También podéis seleccionarlo en “subtítulos”>”añadir archivo de subtítulo”.

También te puede interesar: Herramientas para descargar videos y subtítulos

Mar 3 2020

Film genres and subgenres- vocabulary

Watch this video to find out more about different film genres and subgenres:

You can download the slides here.

Jan 6 2020

Keeping up with the news in English

If you want to keep up with the news, these may be useful sources of information:

To see the front pages of newspapers every day, you can visit these links:

You can also watch these news channels: 

Radio:

Further ideas:

Sep 2 2019

Starting secondary school: icebreaker ideas

Starting secondary school can be a nerve-racking experience for students. These are some suggested activities you can use on the first day of your English/literacy classes with year 1 secondary students.

  • Shonny’s first day at secondary school: the day before (Newsround). This British girl describes her feelings when making the jump from primary to secondary school, something most of your students can relate to. You can download the worksheet with some questions based on the video, as well as the transcription.

As a follow-up, you can also use Shonny’s video describing her actual first day at school.

  • What to expect when you start high school (Newsround). Some year 7 students (11-12 year-olds) who have been in a secondary school in the UK for some weeks now are asked about how they feel now. Based on the questions the kids on the video are asked, you can ask these questions to your own students:

    • How do you feel on the first day of high school? (elicit adjectives from your students, and suggest synonyms using a thesaurus).
    • What is the hardest thing about starting school?

Further ideas: Secondary school struggles: captioned video and article

Screenshot 2019-09-04 at 16.18.16

  • Time-capsule: one of my favourite activities to start school. Ask students to answer these questions individually. Nobody else will read their answers unless they want to share anything with their classmates by reading them aloud. Then, a ‘digital time-capsule’ can be created, which can, in turn, become the first element in a digital portfolio. Their worksheets can be scanned and then uploaded, for example, to Seesaw. That way, they could also record their voice explaining some of their answers.

What I did back then was to scan all the answer sheets as pdf files that I have kept on my drive. The students I did this activity with are in their year 4 secondary this year: it would be a nice end-of-year giveaway to show them what their thoughts and hopes were on their first days at secondary school.

  • Finally, another possible nice activity is for students to write a letter to their future selves. The website https://www.futureme.org/ allows you to write text, and schedule it to be sent to your email inbox at a given point in the future. The letter can be scheduled, for example, for the last class of the year, and it can describe, for example, students’ expectations, hopes, fears, and/or resolutions. Then, by the end of the school year, they can check what they wrote in the letter against what actually happened.

Jun 8 2019

Tips for speaking tests (EEOOII Aragón) (B2-C1)

If you’re going to take the speaking test at any of the Official Schools of Languages in Aragón, you can watch this video with tips for the exam. Good luck!

Apr 22 2019

Cleft sentences to emphasise part of the sentence

Sometimes, you need to give special emphasis to a specific part of the sentence, either because you want to make a contrast, or because it is new information you want to highlight. The so-called cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences, or it cleft and wh-cleft sentences can help you achieve those ends.

Watch this video to see some examples of how to use them and to what effect: