Music videos at the Reservoir Baptist Church

I went down to the Reservoir Baptist Church, where Yvonne and Paula have been wrestling with the machinery.. to get it under control. Internet, printers, the data projector.. and extension cords! 

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)

...and if you want more, you can search the site for songs you like. 

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.

We started setting up a new wiki page for the learners at Reservoir Baptist Church, on the Learn At PRACE site. (Stay tuned for more details.)

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.)

Yvonne and Paula have been looking for ways to include more music in their language teaching. We looked at music videos on Youtube and we installed a thing called "Youtube Enhancer" which lets you download videos onto the local drive. This can be great if your classroom internet access isn't so good. Download the videos before class, and use VLC player to play them in class. 

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: 

• By the way, Larry has other 'best of' pages, including best youtube channels: 
  • Best of the year lists,
  • Best youtube channels for learning English.
• [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.