BBC as a ICT resource

Tuesday, 1 November 2011
Using the website of BBC as a resource in ICT learning-
Susanne Vanberg
This resource seems endless to me. You can easily use it on the projector with the whole class but also as an individual or as a pair comprehension. On the first page you will find eight different departments:

General & Business English
Grammar, Vocabulary & Pronunciation
Talking Sports
Quizzes
The Flatmates
Community
For Teachers
Specials

I will not go in to all af them any accurate, just briefly guide you through a few. Under General & Business English you will find the current news. There are six minute movies with an easily understood english which are fun for the children to look and listen to. This week there is a movie about fear because of Halloween. You get to listen to different persons telling you about their fears. Below the movie you can read a summary of the short movie with the fear words highlighted. You also get language tips, in this case you get a description of the word phobia, which is used in the movie, and a cultural tip related to the current film you just been watching. There is also a following up rehearsal for the kids, this time they are being encouraged to write about there own fears and submit it on the web.There are a few related links to similar pages where kids can read and listen to texts with similar subjects.
For more creative learning you can go to the Flatmates. This a cartoon that is a serial. You will find worksheets to copy with for instance background of the characters of the serie to start off with. You can show the image for a particular episode and hide the text to let your kids make up a storyline which they think will fit in. Then you play the episode with the text and afterwards you talk about what differences they found in the real story. You can also begin with giving the class the text of one episode, cut up line by line and let them figure out how the plot could be and then listen to the episode and let them check for themselves.

This is just a few of the many things you can use this website for. As a said in the beginning it feels endless. I don´t think it is suitable for young children but I will use it with my sixth graders and I believe it works for fifth graders as well.

The link is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/