I was hunting around for more musical sites and found this one: Lyrics Training which actually has cloze activities at multiple levels for some videos.
We hooted in the Merrilands teacher room because the Chris Isaak video is so suggestive. Would this motivate your students, distract them or upset them?
Here’s one that might be more suitable: ABBA plays “Money Money Money”. Plus a few more links:
- It’s Now or Never – Elvis Presley
- You’ve got a Friend – Celine Dion and friends
- Money, Money, Money – ABBA
- Better be Home Soon – Crowded House
- Diamonds – Rihanna
- Bonnie & Clyde – Rihanna (funny)
- Set Fire to the Rain – Adele (harder)
- Someone Like You – Adele (harder)
i found the site via Larry Ferlazzo who is a great collector of “best of” lists for ESL, for example his page on the best music sites for English language learners.
On top of that, there’s a site called “TubeOke”. Doesn’t have the same interactive quality as lyrics training though.
Other technical things: web browsers and video players
We looked at a few other things. There’s been such difficulty around the Adobe Flash player in the last few years. One solution Fraser has come up with is to recommend people use the google Chrome web browser instead of microsoft Internet Explorer. Chrome comes with Flash built-in, so it doesn’t need administrator permission to show youtube videos.
(And you don’t need admin permission to install it either. Brilliant web browser.)
Update Nov14: this youtube enhancer doesn’t work well anymore. Zoe has been experimenting with an alternative called “KeepVid“.
We looked at VLC video player which (in my opinion) is one of the very best software video players around. It’s free and open source, and supported by a strong worldwide community. VLC also takes screengrabs really well – which can be super useful for language teaching.
Other links:
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By the way, Larry has other ‘best of’ pages, including best youtube channels:
- [Extra information: What is a web browser?]
- KeepVid works in any web browser as long as you have a plugin called JAVA.
- VLC video and media player.