Using websites = Using websites in the = Planning lessons using the classroom Internet = ELT websites or authentic = Working with lower levels of websites? language proficiency = Howto find useful websites = Web teaching dos and don’ = How to evaluate websites Using websites in the classroom In this chapter we look at the basic skillset needed for effective use of the Internet with your students and take a closer look at the process for introducing the Internet into your teachin Using websites is one of the easiest and least stressful ways of getting started with technology in the classroom, There is a large and constantly expanding collection of resources on the web, at a variety of levels and covering an amazing array of topics. You can choose from authentic (written for Internet surfers in general) sources or ELT-specific sites (made by, and for, teachers), monolingual or multilingual sites, sites with multimedia, or just simple text, for those on slower connections. The web is a source of content which can be used as a window on the wider world outside your class, and is — of course ~ a readily available collection of authentic material. As such, it is a much larger repository of content than would previously have been readily available to you and your students, Perhaps one of the best tips we can give you at this point is to work as a team with other teachers in your centre. Everybody has their favourite websites, and plenty of teachers will, at some point, have used websites in class, or taken material from the web and adapted it for teaching purposes. Take the time to share sources of content with other teachers and organise regular get-togethers where you sit down and discuss what you have found on the Internet and how you have used it in class. Collaboration like this can help to reduce the time you spend searching for good materials and the time spent preparing activities or making worksheets. Just as the Internet is becoming more of a collaborative medium, so should your use of it in your teaching. The technology needed to use the Internet for teaching is relatively limited and the chances of something going wrong are greatly reduced over.more complex technology approaches such as attempting to carry out live chat or video-conferencing sessions. Another advantage of this tool is that you don’t necessarily have to rely on a constant Internet connection if you bear in mind that it is possible to save local copies of websites onChapter 3 your computer, or print out potentially useful pages for later use. Indeed, you can use web pages in the classroom in a variety of ways: * as printed pages, with no computers. Although printing is not necessarily the cheapest option, it is certainly a viable one in places where there may be limited access to the Internet. Indeed, a lot of activities using web pages will only necessitate the printing of one or two pages, which can subsequently be photocopied. ‘* with one computer with an Internet connection. This can be enhanced by connecting the computer to a data projector or even an interactive whiteboard, allowing for greater visibility in class, but itis also possible to make use of a single computer on its own connected to the Internet for reference. * ina computer lab with a set of networked and connected computers. If you're lucky enough to be in this kind of situation, then you are ideally placed to incorporate Internet content into your regular teaching. It’s important that both you and your learners see the use of the Internet as an intrinsic part of the learning process, rather than as an occasional activity which has nothing to do with their regular study programme. We would therefore recommend that, if you plan to use the Internet, you should talk to your learners and explore the reasons for using this resource with them. This can be done at lower levels in their own language or in English with higher-level classes. You will need to talk to your learners about why Internet content may be useful to them and discuss their attitudes to technology in general - when they use computers, and what for. Show them how the coursebook and other materials can be enhanced by extra material from the Internet, but above all, make it clear that this is not a toy, not something that you are just using to fill in the time. With some learners there may be some resistance to regular computer use in, the classroom. We have often found, for example, that professional people view computers as work tools rather than as resources for learning. It is vital that they appreciate that this is a useful, as well as an entertaining, tool in the classroom and that it can contribute to their language development in a variety of ways, for example by giving them the opportunity to build vocabulary or improve their listening skills. Lower-level classes can be engaged with visual and multimedia materials, the use of songs and other video materials. © ELT websites or authentic websites? Your choice of website will depend largely on what you want to achieve with it. Many teachers tend to steer clear of authentic websites, and by this we mean any site not created with the language learner in mind, believing that their students will find them too difficult. But, as with all authentic materials, the level and language challenges posed by these sites can be largely mitigated by the type of task you expect your learners to carry out. A well-designed task will allow your learners to deal with authentic sites, guiding them through not only the text, but also the layout and navigation problems that may otherwise impact on their learning experience. It is also the case that many learners these days are far more used to working with computer-based text and information than they are to dealing with more traditional, 28Using websites paper-based forms of text, and this familiarity with the conventions of web design can count in your favour when deciding to use authentic content from the Internet. Of course there are plenty of ELT websites which provide content that your learners can use, for example language practice activities they can do on their own. They provide valuable opportunities for more controlled language work and are often a great help to learners who need to brush up on certain aspects of the language or to prepare for an exam. Such sites are often ideal for homework, access to the Internet permitting. Authentic sites, on the other hand, can be chosen to fit your learners’ interests. This is a key factor in keeping motivation high in your electronic classroom. When evaluating authentic sites for possible incorporation into your teaching, try to find ones which have an easy structure and navigation, and with smaller chunks of text per page. These will be more approachable and understandable. Design your tasks to make them achievable, and show your learners how they can use online dictionary sites to help them ~ if they need them. Authentic sites also provide an ideal opportunity to work through the issues of ‘total comprehension’ that plenty of learners have to deal with at some point in their studies. They can be guided towards being comfortable with understanding the content of a site and identifying what they need to know or find out without getting bogged down in having to understand every word on the screen. How to find useful websites As already mentioned, the Internet is a vast repository of information and resources, and it is perhaps exactly this range that makes it seem, at first, daunting and unapproachable to most teachers. In the following two sections we take a look at how to find and evaluate resources for use in class. The ability to search through Internet content, and quickly and efficiently find suitable resources is perhaps the most underrated, and yet most useful, skill that both teachers and learners can acquire. For teachers, having good search skills means finding useful resources quickly, speeding up lesson planning and facilitating web use in class. For learners, it means being able to quickly accomplish web-based tasks, thus ensuring that the technology enhances the learning experience rather than impeding it. It makes sense, then, both to acquire these skills, and to spend some time sharing them with your learners. There are three basic ways of searching on the Internet, and we will briefly describe them below, and look at ways of making searches more targeted and efficient. Search engines Although there is a large variety of search engines, perhaps the most well-known is Google (www.google.com), which currently indexes over twelve billion web pages. A search engine is almost directly analogous to a telephone directory, or any other database of stored information. You search for a name or a title, and the directory gives you more information about that entry. But with over twelve billion pages to choose from, it’s not quite as easy to use as a phone directory. So how do you find exactly what you want? The answer comes in knowing what kind of information Google actually has on each web page that it indexes. What Google knows about a page is generally the page address on the web, the page title, when it was last updated and a few keywords associated with the 29Chapter 3, content itself. These keywords are defined by the designer of the page, and can reasonably be expected to accurately reflect the content of the page. The key to good searching in Google is to define your keywords properly. Say you have a class project on the history of the Olympic Games and you want to focus on the Barcelona games which took place in 1992. This means that instead of searching for olympic games, you should try something more specific: Barcelona olympic games 1992. In this example, more is less: the more keywords you put into the search box, the fewer page results you will get. Olympic games gives 30,500,000 pages, whereas Barcelona olympic games 1992 gives 619,000 and Barcelona olympic games 1992 10000 meters women’s gold ‘medal winner gives 738 ~ with the name of the winner (Derartu Tulu — result two) clearly visible in the top few results. Sea TT Sa ous en tet Se mes Google #22 Siena ae a a OO A ‘te Witinn aLaa The other technique which you may find useful is to use the ‘phrase’ search technique which involves wrapping part of a phrase in inverted commas, thus ensuring that Google will treat the words not as individual entities, but will actually look for sentences on web pages which contain those words in that particular order. Thus, instead of searching for cheap hotel in Rome, which can search for any or all of these words, in any position and order, on a page, try searching for “cheap hotel in Rome” as part of a phrase you might expect to find on a web page. To elaborate on our example above, “Barcelona olympics marathon” returns only twelve pages, since the likelihood of these three words being on a web page in this exact order is significantly smaller than the chance of the words being on a page separately in any position. This technique is particularly useful for finding song lyrics, where searching for “I never meant to cause you trouble” will return 11,800 results, with the first result being the lyrics of the Coldplay song, whereas a search for Coldplay lyrics will give you access to 7,640,000 websites, but you will have to visit each one to see if that particular song lyric is there. The ultimate trick with Google is to try to imagine the web page you are looking for, and then try to visualise the content that is on this ideal page. This technique will help you decide on exactly what to search for. 30Using websites In our next example, one learner is doing a project on the singer, Shakira, and needs some biographical information. Searching for Shakira on Google returns 43,200,000 pages. But how exactly would biographical information be presented on a website? Perhaps a search for “Shakira was born in” would be more useful, since the only possible information which could follow such a phrase would be a location or a date. This search returns 266 results, with the first few all leading to biographies of the singer. Subject guides Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) currently claims to index nearly twenty billion pages, and ig still the search venue of choice for many people who remember when it was the only way of searching the Internet. The approach here is slightly different in that Yahoo! was never intended as a keyword search engine, but rather as a way of browsing titles. Where Google might be likened to a telephone directory, a more familiar metaphor for Yahoo would be that of the library, where users have a notion of what they are looking for, but not necessarily the exact title. So, in that sense, we are invited to browse, to wander around, rather than directly key in search terms or words we are interested in exploring. Yahoo! derives its description of subject guide from the fact that it divides its content into subject areas, and subdivisions of those areas, Instead of a keyword search from the main page, users browse the section which best reflects their interests, and then search. Using Yahoo! to find our biographical information about Shakira, we would access the Yahoo! directory by clicking on the more dropdown list at the top of the Yahoo! main page and choose Directory. From there we can browse to Shakira: click on Entertainment, then Music then Artists, and finally search for Shakira biography, making sure to select the this category option. What this essentially means is that Yahoo! will only search in ‘Entertainment — Music ~ Artists’ rather than in its entire directory. This yields six results, shown below, all of which lead to biographies of the singer. ‘Waban | io | | Decor [atin Sasa | Mm “YRHOOL SEARCH rstopemy Seach: Oth Dato Cony win Eraarat > Ma > Ate Directory Rosuts Tea atin opm atta +. Micon: Shaliea ‘sing Blorapy, are, orcas, shel gua, aor Shain, ‘tonya oko Bans Sahin Le rete ate wn, bd Meg akc 4 Auongearhcom: Shakira ™ foe opty on sg Saecsloecechcouonsactn 4 Ablazinly Shaka ® ‘Gor, ography, tons, nck ings ort a, ‘Cope fea Pon Shain Sernagy ome! ‘s Shakiamedacom® Shes bogrnhy acayany. etn we, ef mee at pier Sha wie 6 Alshaira.com ‘Shae pte ce, nlp, al, tes, ography, ogy, and mr ‘Ceo atin och. Bons Sabin 31Chapter 3 It is worth noting that Yahoo! search results can often be more accurate than Google results as they tend to lead searchers to the first page of a website, rather than dropping them indiscriminately into the middle, where the chances of confusion are higher. Real language searches A real language search such as Ask (www.ask.com) allows the user to type simple questions as search queries. Thus our learner who is investigating the life and times of Shakira types something along the lines of When was Shakira born? instead of a selection of appropriate keywords. Note that the website does not actually analyse or indeed understand the question itself, but rather selects the keywords from the query (‘when, ‘Shakira}‘born’) and constructs a search based on them. ‘A search on Ask should give you a results page with the answer to your question at the top (where Ask has been able to find a direct answer), and links to relevant sites below that. Your choice of search facility will depend on how you like to work, and which site you find particularly attractive and useful. However, it is worth taking the time to play with all three and to spend some time exploring them with your learners. Learners can benefit from an exposure to all three types, as they activate different linguistic and mental processes. Keywords are good for exploring word relationships and lexical areas, Subject searches help define and refine ideas and contexts. A real search can provide useful practice in question formation. A simple way of introducing the topic of searching the Internet in class is to produce a trivia quiz or short ‘treasure hunt’ type activity for your learners to do. Give them a set of questions and allow them to use all three search pages to find the answers. Make it into a timed quiz, with the first team to finish bringing the activity to an end, Then go over the answers and help them to see how to improve their search skills. Itis at this point that you can examine which search page was used in each case, ifit was the appropriate choice, and work together as a group to extrapolate general conclusions about search techniques. In this example we can see how a variety of approaches would be possible — and how these might lead to a useful discussion on search skills, as well as some basic language work, on question formation, for example. The first search encourages the use of Google and the ‘part of a sentence’ approach discussed above, with perhaps the best search term being “is the president of the World Bank”, while the second one might work nicely as a real language search, with learners coming up with the question What's the capital of Scotland? The third 32Using websites search involves reformulation to be successful, perhaps Who won the 1986 FIFA World Cup? These are the skills which are the basis of many of the activities you will do on the Internet, so it is worth spending some time refining them and examining them a little more closely. It is also worth considering specialist sites as a source of information. Teach yourself and your learners to think a little more laterally. For example, any queries related to movies might be better directed to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) than a search engine. Similarly, book information can be easily found on the Amazon site (www.amazon. com), and football World Cup information on the FIFA site (www.fifa.com). Variations on this treasure hunt activity include learners then making a quiz for another team to do, They must be able to find the answers themselves before they hand over the task to the other team. Or the whole class could make a quiz for you, the teacher, to do as homework! This can be a highly motivating task for learners, as they pit themselves and their Internet skills against the teacher's. There are also subject- or media-specific search sites which are worth having a quick look at,,though do bear in mind that much of what you find on media search sites will be subject to copyright, so please check the terms of use before including anything in any materials you might make, You might like to try the following to get started: # http://images.google.com/ — Google image search, allows you to search an enormous collection of images in various formats. A good place to start looking for illustrations for worksheets, teaching materials, projects or presentations. * http://froogle.google.com/ — Google shopping search, gives you access to comparative shopping results for products. Use this to find products you are interested in, read reviews and find the best prices. © http://video.search.yahoo.com/ ~ Yahoo! video search allows you to search a large database of online video material by keyword or category. Ideal if you want to demonstrate something in a more lively way, for music videos and other multimedia classes. ‘© http://www.altavista.com/video — AltaVista video search works in the same way as the Yahoo! one above, but videos are also classified by different formats, allowing for a range of multimedia players and software to be used to watch them. «© http://www.altavista.com/audio/default ~ AltaVista audio search gives you access toa large online collection of audio files. Particularly good for searching for the popular MP3 format song files. ‘© http://search.singingfish.com/sfw/home.jsp ~ Singing Fish multimedia search, combining both audio and video results in one interface. It has a large collection of sources, and you can search by category, including movies, news, TV, sports and a host of others. ‘« http://tv.blinkx.com/ — Blinkx TV video search allows you to search popular TV broadcasters like the BBC and CNN for short video clips on a wide variety of subjects. Again, this is an ideal source of news material. You may also like to try one of the meta search sites. These are sites which search more than one search engine at the same time, giving you, for example, the ability to search Yahoo!, Google and Ask from one single page. Examples include: 33Chapter 3 © http://www.dogpile.com/ — Dogpile. http://www.kartoo.com/ ~ KartOO. ¢ http://www.mamma.com/— Mamma. You will, of course, get far more results than if you simply used one single search engine, but you will also get a sense of balance from a meta search engine, as the results come from a variety of sources using a variety of search techniques. You will tend to get a more rounded view of what is out there on the Internet. Concentrating on the first couple of pages of results will help reduce the potentially overwhelming quantity of data returned. (One final hint: whenever you visit a search engine, be sure to click on the help link to see what hints and tips the site owners recommend for improving your search techniques. How to evaluate websites Having found potentially useful websites, the next step is to evaluate how useful and appropriate they are for the classroom. You will also need to think about the aims and objectives of your lesson. Does the website you have found fit in with these, and does it enhance and complement the other materials and activities you have planned for the class? Sometimes the Internet content will be the core of a particular lesson but at other times it will merely serve as a jumping-off point into something more closely related to a particular coursebook theme or unit, or be a source of extra material to follow up on the core classroom content. There are various standard criteria for judging websites which can serve as a starting point for your evaluation: 1 Accuracy © Who wrote the page? Is this person an expert in the subject matter? Check qualifications, experience - look for an ‘about me’ link. « Is the page content reliable and factually correct? Cross-reference with other similar websites and encyclopedias. 2 Currency « Is the content up-to-date? Check factual information against other reliable sources. # When was the page last updated? Check for information at the bottom/top of the page. 3 Content « Is the site interesting and stimulating? Consider the content from your learners’ point of view. « Is it attractive and easy to navigate? Check the colour combinations, the logic of the links and visual structure. 4 Functionality # Does the site work well? Are there any broken links? Be sure to check all pages, and follow all links to all pages you intend to use. © Does it use a lot of large files or alternative technologies (e.g. Flash)? Check how quickly it loads for learners; check sound, video and animation work.Using websites It may well be that the accuracy and currency criteria, both essentially factual, are not of interest to you if you are working on a purely linguistic level, that is planning a class that exploits the language of the site, rather than the content itself. On the other hand, accuracy and currency might be the most important criteria if learners are taking notes and interpreting information in preparation for producing a project. ‘Another thing to bear in mind as a language teacher will be the linguistic accuracy of the web page. If this is important to you, you will need to add this to your evaluation criteria. This again will depend on the purpose of the site in your lesson plan. This is an area of contention among teachers, and a subject that almost always crops up in technology training sessions. Only you can really decide on the linguistic content of a particular site. Spending lots of time on a site devoted to mobile phone texting language with a class preparing to do an examination is probably not in the best interests of the learners, for example. As far as content is concerned, note that criteria such as ease-of-use and interest are taken into account, but you may also want to consider adding a further set of criteria here along the lines of appropriateness. In this subcategory you would note which groups or levels the site would be suitable for and any problems you foresee with the site itself. Functionality will be a category with consequences for all teachers. Not only can it be very frustrating to follow through the content of a site to be met with broken links and missing information, but it can be equally frustrating to wait twenty minutes for a short ‘video to download due to the speed of your connection. Again, careful preparation and investigation in the lesson planning stage can go a long way towards making the learners’ experience enjoyable and trouble-free. However you evaluate the usefulness of the websites you find, make sure that you keep a record of the content and address so that you begin to build up a large stock of evaluated sites. Planning lessons using the Internet By this stage you will have found, evaluated and decided on a collection of web pages which you want to use as part of your teaching. The next area to consider is how a technology- based lesson plan will look in comparison with the sort of plans you usually produce. What will the differences be? What might go wrong, and how will you deal with it? The first thing, of course, is to plan your session well: visit the websites you intend to use and make sure you know your way around them properly. Try to use sites which appear to have a potentially long ‘shelf life’ — ones made by large institutions and commercial organisations, rather than personal homepages, which have a tendency to come and go with alarming frequency. Make a note of the particular pages you want your learners to work on ~ you can use the Favorites option in Internet Explorer, or Bookmarks in Firefox to log web addresses for later use — and make sure you're familiar with the content. Your ability to answer questions as they arise will add to your confidence and also inspire confidence in your learners. Planning a web-based lesson, rather than one where the web content plays an ancillary role, is not intrinsically different from planning a more traditional one. We like to divide a typical web-based session into three parts (www): warmer, web, what next. 35Chapter 3 — ‘The warmer part of the lesson is the kind of thing we all do as a matter of course, with introductory activities, interest-generating ideas, and so on. This part prepares your learners for what they are going to be doing in the web part of the lesson. Our view is that this part of the lesson is best done in the familiar environment of the normal classroom. In the web section of the lesson, it's important to spend only as much time as you need working with the computers. We prefer to take learners to a computer room for this part rather than spend the entire class in there. This has the double advantage of allowing more ‘groups to use the room and of keeping learners focused during their time there. It is also an opportunity for learners to stretch their legs and provides a change of pace. On the other hand, moving from the traditional classroom to a computer room does have the potential to disrupt your class, so careful planning of the logistics may be necessary. If you have limited access to computers, or perhaps only one computer in the classroom, you can print off the web-based materials you want to use with your learners in advance, and simply use a print version. This is, of course, not as exciting as using computers themselves, but can bring the Internet into more resource-poor environments. Of course, there are certain teaching situations where teachers are obliged to take their learners to a computer facility for one or more lessons per week. If you do find yourself in this position, you can adapt your lesson plans to make greater use of the Internet than we are suggesting here. You may even choose to incorporate the use of websites more consistently into the curriculum of the course you are teaching — perhaps substituting a part of the course materials you are using for websites, for example the reading texts or the listening material. However you decide to do this, it must be a transparent process for the learners, and they must be able to appreciate not only the thought processes that have gone into this decision, but also the relevance and value of the change. This can be achieved in part by helping learners to cast a critical eye over the materials they work with in class, and encouraging them to talk about what they like doing and what they don’t. It should also be born in mind that your learners will have favourite websites of their own, and it is well worth investigating whether these can be incorporated into your classroom teaching, partly as a motivator, but also as a link to their lives, interests and experiences outside the class. This again will help them to see the value of the technology applied in class. It’s worth remembering that once you put people behind computer monitors, it’s easy for them to forget that you are there, and ~ more importantly — why they are there. So the two vital words here are time and task. Make sure your learners have a clearly-defined task to achieve and a clearly-defined time frame in which to achieve it. Once the group has got what you intended from the computers, it’s time to move them back to the classroom for the what next stage of the lesson. This part should deal with the tasks set for the web part and then proceed with more familiar follow-up activities to round off the lesson. ‘Movie starsisa sample lesson plan based on this structure. You can use this as a template for your own planning. It is worth noting that there is nothing intrinsically different from the more traditional coursebook approach here — perhaps the major value of this material is its intrinsic motivational element: real actors being interviewed for a real programme. This, plus the contemporary nature of most website content, make the web an ideal source of material. 36Using websites A lesson plan - Movie stars This is an upper-intermediate to advanced lesson concentrating on famous movie stars and their lives and work. The language areas covered are: asking and answering questions, reacting to information, and showing interest. Learners will also explore interview techniques, and ways of interacting on a social level. The class uses the BBC website, and its section devoted to The Film Programme on BBC Radio 4, which you can see below. bbc.co.uk een search | oo ns-oo G Film Interviews 21/127206 - Bost of 2008 72008 Film Club: Bute 111272008 - George Clooney ‘99/2008 -The Oscars 114142008 - John Williams Warmer Introduce the subject by talking about learners’ favourite movie stars and their work. At this level, a simple class discussion will work fine, but be prepared to prompt with various subject areas: favourite movies, recent visits to the cinema, forthcoming films, best and worst films, and so onChapter 3 Which movie star would they like to interview, given the chance, and what would they ask that person? Web Have your learners visit the site and find an actor they are interested in — these are all audio interviews, with no transcripts. There is plenty of choice — note that interviews are archived year. Let each learner choose an interview to listen to, and ask them to make notes on the main themes dealt with, and to examine how the interview is constructed — how the interactions were started and developed (see task below). What next Give each learner a chance to report back on what they listened to, who was interviewed and what the main themes of the interview were. What did they find out and what would they have liked to have found out, but didn’t? Developing a conversation with someone is a difficult skill to acquire in another language. Elicit some of the ways they heard the interviewer and interviewee working together to construct the dialogue. Write some of the language and techniques up on the board and analyse structures, purpose, and so on. 38~- Using websites There are plenty of follow-up activities to do here, including: © speaking activity: an interview. Give each pair a role (famous person or interviewer) and have them conduct an interview. This could also be recorded or videoed for later language work. writing activity: ‘a day in the life’. This is often seen in UK Sunday newspaper supplements, where a famous person is interviewed about a day in their life, or a particularly interesting day in the past week. writing activity: an interview. ‘As for the speaking activity above, but styled for a magazine or newspaper. This could be done individually, or in pairs - with one writing the questions, the other the answers. This could be presented as an email interview. writing activity: a biography. *A more formal written piece, exploring the life of a famous person. This might involve more research on the Internet. Working with professionals at higher levels, you might also like to consider the differences in language and register between a social interview like the one they listened to and a more formal job interview. Working with lower levels of language proficiency One of the most often asked questions is if it is possible to work with lower-level classes and the Internet. The simple answer is that it is, of course, feasible but that the choice of websites will be far more limited than for higher levels. A familiar worry for lower levels is how much ofa given text thestudents will understand. Lower-level learners often feel they have to understand everything and this will lead to problems, if not dealt with beforehand. Choosing the right websites can go some way towards raising their comfort levels, though you may need to have shorter lessons than the higher level one described above. Websites which are more suitable for lower levels will include: websites with simple, clearly presented text. websites with non-linguistic data which is easy to interpret (e.g. data in the form of a chart, such as a weather page). websites with visuals — a task can be based around the visuals only. « ELT websites, where the content has been written, edited and prepared with this audience in mind. 39Chapter 3, Borrowed words This is a low-level lesson concentrating on different languages and the words they have contributed to English. The language areas covered are countries and languages. The class uses the KryssTal: Borrowed Words in English website: Warmer Ask your learners if they know of any words in their own language that have come from other languages. Build up a chart on the board. You may need to help with the English versions. Web Put the learners into pairs (Student A and Student B) and give each learner a copy of the chart opposite. Give them time on the website to complete their column, leaving the other column blank for the next phase of the activity. Note that they will not only need to identify the language and country for the given words, but also find words to go with the given languages or countries. 40Using websites Borrowed words in English Use the website to complete your part of the table. In the next phase they will need to ask their partner questions to complete the other half of the chart. Go over the questions they will need to ask, as in the examples (for Student A) given below: ‘© What language does the word sauna come from? What country does parachute come from? © Can you tell me a Russian word used in English? ‘Give each pair some time to ask and answer the questions, and complete the table. Provide feedback on a model table on the board and help out with any vocabulary problems which may have arisen. What next This is an ideal opportunity to do more work with the country and language vocabulary areas covered above. You may also want to brainstorm English words which are currently used in your learners’ languages, and build up their collective vocabulary in this way. ‘An additional follow-up project idea is for learners to ‘collect’ English words they find in their environment, if they live in a non-English speaking country, e.g. English words ‘on TY, or on advertising billboards and signs. These could be added to a poster in the classroom. Web teaching dos and don’ts Planning carefully and adopting a structured approach to the way you use websites in the classroom should give you the confidence to try out different ways of introducing your learners to Internet content. Most of the time you will be using websites to provide your learners with knowledge and content which they perhaps do not know, or would normally not have access to, or to supplement more traditional course materials. This can be highly motivating for them, leading to more language production and a higher stake in the success of the class. Itis worth bearing in mind that it is not necessarily the “all-singing, all-dancing’ websites —ones with a lot of animation, video, audio or other multimedia content — which will be of most interest or use in your classrooms. Don't discount simple text-based websites which might be very beneficial in your own context. Apart from anything else, they are less likely to malfunction or cause problems when you go to use them. 4Chapter 3 — However, having said all this, things can and sometimes do go wrong. To round off this chapter, here are a few considerations and some contingency plans: 2 1 Whenever you use technology you should always have a backup plan in place. There might be times when the websites are down, or the computers crash or, worse still, the electricity goes off. So be prepared. 2 Use the knowledge of other teachers and of your learners to help you with the technical side of the lesson. We often team teach with less experienced teachers, taking care of the small technical problems which occasionally arise, and leaving them free to enjoy the technology and to teach. Asking tech-savvy learners to assist takes the pressure off you and also gives them some investment in the successful outcome of the class. 3 If it’s a lesson that involves relatively few web pages, try saving them to your computer hard disk. From Internet Explorer, choose ‘File...’‘Save As...’ then give the file a name and make sure the ‘Web Page, complete’ option is selected. This will save the web page and all its images and you'll be able to open the pages even if the connection goes down. You could even go so far as to print them out. 4 Unless you are working on something like an email pen pal exchange, itis rarely conducive to have learners working alone on computers. Pairs are best, but three to a computer can also work fine — just make sure that everyone gets a turn in the ‘driving seat. Pairwork and small-group work will help to encourage oral communication and break down the ‘computer as barrier’ effect often prevalent in technology-based classes. For the one computer classroom, use of the computer can be rotated between small groups, with the groups who are not working on the computer occupied with other stages of the same lesson, for example preparing a poster or text. . 5. As was mentioned in Chapter 1, try to arrange the computer room in such a way that you can easily maintain control over learner activities. An ideal layout is to have the computers around the outside walls of the class ~ allowing you to view what is on each screen and to help should the need arise ~ and a central table where learners can congregate for more communicative activities. This table will also serve as a storage place for pens, books and dictionaries, and thus help keep the computers free of clutter and easy to use. 6 Notall of the content that you come across with your learners will necessarily be suitable for them. The wonder of the Internet is that it caters for a wide variety of people, interests and tastes, so much so that you are almost bound to encounter what you consider to be questionable content at some point in your exploration, and the same can safely be said of your learners. We have generally found an open discussion about the kind of things the group considers acceptable in class has been enough to put an end to any further unsuitable exploration, but if you work in a context where this is likely to be a bigger issue then you may need to take more robust steps such as installing filtering software along the lines of Net Nanny (www.netnanny.com), which will limit access to a wide range of content which can be user-specified and controlled.Using websites Bearing in mind all these suggestions — and taking into account the successful combination of these searching, evaluating and planning skills — you should now be in a position to fully explore the web with your learners, Conclusions | In this chapter we have: = considered the difference between EFL-related and authentic websites. = looked at how to find websites using different types of search engine. = considered how to evaluate a website for classroom use. = looked at lesson planning using Internet resources, at both higher and lower levels. = provided alist of Internet teaching dos and don'ts. a