Here's one about hearts... Image from eltpics by @AriannaBasaric

February 14th was approaching. Hm. What to do for a special Take a photo and… post? Where to find ‘the love’? Love is….  I love…..  I love eltpics? I love photos? And then the idea came. As the phrase I love images popped into my mind, so did the name of a well-known ELT person who has not only contributed photos to eltpics and supports it by mentioning it/us in sessions he gives around the world BUT has written books about using images in the ELT classroom, books such as Working with Images and The Big Picture. So I asked. And guess what? He said YES.

So, without further ado, I shall wish you all the love in the world today and every day, and hand you over to……(Valentine drumroll)… Ben Goldstein.

Heart as Symbol.     Various tasks

As we are celebrating Valentines this week I thought I’d look at symbols and icons, in particular the significance of the heart symbol. The original idea for these tasks came about when I was writing my Working with Images book. I came across the work of Iranian photographer Moza Hantoush who created a number of artistic images based around the heart. Also, a friend of mine in Barcelona Maria Molsosa was an inspiration – she has an impressive collection of heart images, some of which are included in this activity and also makes her own artistic hearts.

A     Brainstorming hearts

1  Brainstorm with learners different contexts where they might find the heart symbol, e.g. on a box of chocolates, one of the suits in a deck of cards, on most commonly on “I love…” posters, badges, flags or stickers.

You could also mention less likely contexts which feature hearts, (e.g. on the froth of a cappuccino), or those things which can be designed in a heart shape, e.g. cakes, chocolates, balloons. Hearts can be used in contexts in which there is no association with love, for example in campaigns to give blood. The heart is clearly not just a romantic symbol.

2  Brainstorm places where learners might write the symbol of a heart, perhaps as a romantic statement to somebody: e.g. scrawled on a beach (as in the image of this blog’s home page), cut onto a tree trunk, painted as a piece of graffiti on wall or a tattoo on their body or simply as a way to sign off when writing a letter or an email.

B       Hearts and words

3  Sometimes hearts have words written in them, particularly on Valentine’s Day cards or messages when hearts are used as symbols of love. Learners complete the gap fill task. Younger students might like to draw them.

hugs   love   mine   ever   me

A Be ______

B True _____

C Big _____

D For______

E Love _____ Tender

Do people send similar messages in hearts in their language? What do the class think of this custom? Sentimental? Fun? Romantic?

4  What words are associated with hearts apart from love and what mental images do these conjure up in the learners’ minds?

Ask learners what the significance of these words might be? Do they have the same associations in their first language?

(e.g beat, broken, arrow, key, gold, stone (as in “to have a heart of….”)

Show this photo from ELT Pics and ask learners to think of a suitable title:

Image by @sandymillin

(answer: an arrow through my heart)

5  Present some song titles which might include these words or others (e.g Heart of Glass, Unbreak my heart, Heartland, Heartbreak Hotel, etc.)

Ask students to picture or think of an image that could match these songs. They could design a CD cover for the song based on their image idea.

Artistic hearts

Maria Molsosa

6  Look at these different images of hearts uploaded on to Flickr/ELT PICS by Maria Molsosa. Maria goes around the world taking photographs of hearts which she finds in unlikely locations. Look at these two images of hearts that have a connection with trees.

Image A

Open heart

Open heart Image by María Molsosa

Image B

The girl who watered hearts

The girl who watered hearts Image by María Molsosa, by kind permission

Look at image A. How does the image make you feel? Why do you think the photographer called it ‘open heart’?

(Sample answer: The image is a sad, even brutal. Trees have long lives and this has been chopped leaving just a short trunk behind. The essence of the tree has suddenly been exposed like an open heart. The title ‘open heart’ could also refer to ‘open heart surgery’. In fact, ‘surgeon’ is used to refer to people who operate on human hearts and trees.)

Look at image B. In what way is this is a positive image? What do you think is its message?

(Sample answer: It could be positive because the girl is watering a tree that may bear many fruit or produce a lot of love in her life. However, the graffiti could also be asking: “Can love grow on trees?”

Moza Hantoush

7 Match these heart images with their titles. What do you think the different photos are saying about love? Which image do you think is the most striking or original? Why?

Seven Images by Moza Hantoush

Trapped

Served with Love

Even when the heart stopped beating

A very special penny

With love comes pain

True inner beauty

Love is a gift

You don’t die of a broken heart

Follow-up

Consider the symbolic nature of other images. What diverse cultural associations does this image have? What does it mean to you, literally and metaphorically (e.g. the apple is the forbidden fruit, the record label of the Beatles but also the logo of an important computer company).

Someone else from Cazorla, Jaén.

The teacher, Carmen Martínez, who goes by the twitter name of @educandoando had read this blog and had taken Paco Gascon’s idea and developed it with her students. I’ve read her blog and it has really REALLY made my day – her take on the #eltpics idea alone is perfect for Easter, or for any time of year really. Apart from that, all the ideas in the blog are fresh and creative, not an adjective you can apply to much of the mainstream education syllabus nowadays, and I love the direction in which she has taken ‘our’ (Paco’s) #eltpics activity. If you teach children, and can understand Spanish (or can get a friend to help you) I can only recommend you take a look at Escritores Tiernos.

Fiona

Photo credit: Image of a deer in Cazorla by Jashir at flickr.

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When I asked Fiona to post an article for the eltpics blog I had some ideas in mind I found totally original but, after going through all the stuff published, I just realized there was nothing new under the sun…

I’m a Secondary Education teacher in a state school in Martos, (South East Spain), so my target groups are made up of teens with a low/low-intermediate command of English. Most of them are mixed-ability groups that normally include some students with special educational needs, so it is important to provide assignments and activities that cater for such a wide range of abilities, motivations and interests. Pictures are valuable resources as they allow for a variety of multilevel tasks.

Lesson planning #1: The getaway

These activities – based on the eltpics Roads set – was intended for intermediate level students (15 year olds, equivalent to KS4, roughly) and was (fairly) successfully carried out a few days before the Christmas holidays. The educational objectives include:

• Writing a collaborative narrative text.
• Using sequence connectors to make texts cohesive.

• Making landscape descriptions.

• Using different ICT tools to carry out a task.

• Valuing the advantages of collaboration and group work

Warm up : How to make an omelette

Students brainstorm all the steps to follow to cook a delicious omelette and the sequence is arranged on the board after the appropriate sequence linker:

- First, we get a couple of fresh eggs

– Then, we crack them open and pour them into a bowl.

- After that, […]

- Finally, we serve the omelette very hot

This is an easy way to review connectors and arrange events chronologically.

The getaway

Two criminals have escaped from prison, stolen a car and now they are being chased by the police. They’ll try to reach the coast where a partner will be waiting on his yacht to take them away to another country. While trying to get away, they drive across different places which are shown in the pictures. In pairs, students will share a computer to type a collaborative description of this getaway. They’re shown a mosaic of landscapes and each pair chooses one of them as the setting for their contribution to the collective task. The starting out and winning post places (top left corner and bottom right corner pictures, by @cerihiannon and @SueAnnan) are provided together with the beginning and the end of our story:

Doc McCoy, a dangerous criminal who was convicted of bank robbery, broke out of Folston prison early this morning. His wife, who had stolen a sports car in a private car park nearby, was suspected to be waiting for him to get away with part of the loot she’s believed to have been keeping since her husband was jailed. The police was immediately warned, but the criminals managed to get away. Several witnesses maintain they’ve seen Doc and Carol driving fast down Southern Avenue, dashing out of town…

… Now they could see the sea down there, at the end of the winding road that began to slope downwards into the waves. They knew Sascha would be round the bend, waiting for them to take them on his boat somewhere safe.

Pairs are assigned turns and a text document is opened on GoodleDocs for all to share. We’ll use the slide projector to show the photo mosaic on screen so that each pair chooses an only image that will constitute the background of their part of the story. The first ones resume the narrative at the point where it’s been left and according to their choice picture. Kids are asked to write a single paragraph including no more than four sentences and strongly advised to include sequence connectors that will be the glue that brings every chunk together into a cohesive text. They’re also allowed to look up key words in online bilingual dictionaries. Once they’re done, they pass the baton on to the next pair, who must ease the story they receive into their own landscape. It is important that the pairs are balanced and tasks are fairly distributed according to individual capabilities.

When they’ve all finished, the text will be printed and copies of it will be given out for all to read. They will also download the mosaic and open the image to re-edit it by drawing the route the couple has followed – this will ensure a full and comprehensive reading. Finally, sketches will be reviewed and corrected.

Follow-up

As a follow-up activity, students who wish to could brush up the collective story, polish and rewrite it, so it can be published on the class blog.

Lesson planning #2: Landscape contest

This time, landscape eltpics will be used. I created a mosaic on Adobe Flash and embedded it on a web page where students can black out images by clicking on them. There is a serious disadvantage about this format: it can not be reproduced on iphones or ipads and html5 yields similar results, but I’m afraid I’m not acquainted with this script language. If you’d like to embed this flash movie on your own website, see it here or you can just watch it here:: eltpics on flash

The mosaic will initially look like this:

Images are buttons, so students will wipe them out by clicking on them. In fact, we can switch images on and off by alternatively clicking on them:

I haven’t put this activity into practise yet, but it was thought for 2^nd year secondary students (KS3 equivalent) aged 13. The educational objectives include:

- Asking and answering yes/no questions.

- Assimilating intonation patterns.

- Talking about landscape features.

- Reaching agreements in teams.

Students gather in teams of two or three people. We can use a laptop to open the swf file with the images and project them on a wall or an in-ceiling projection screen. The first group of students is asked to go out of the classroom and the rest of them choose a picture from the set (the teacher can take down picture number on a piece of paper to avoid cheating). Students are called back in and sit in front of the computer: they’ll have to find the picture their classmates have chosen by asking them ten questions, at the most, being yes or no the only possible answers. When they get the answer they have thirty seconds to discuss and decide which images to discard. They must be careful to ask relevant questions that allow for multiple discarding and not to switch off the target image; if that’s the case, their turn will automatically end and they’ll get no points at all. If they aren’t able to come up with the right image after using up all ten questions, they won’t score, either. Teams that manage to find the chosen picture will score according to the number of remaining pictures (each one will get them two points). Obviously, the team with the highest score is the winner.

Photographs authorship (left to right, top to bottom)

The Getaway panel

@cerihiannon @abfromz @JoeMcVeigh @VictoriaB52 @thornburyscott

@thornburyscott @VictoriaB52 @cgoodey @VictoriaB52 @GoldsteinBen

@Harmerj @cgoodey @abfromz @ALiCe__M @cecilialcoelho

@thornburyscott @melgarrish @ShellTerrell @ShellTerrell @SueAnnan

The landscape contest panel

@fionamau @Raquel_EFL @Raquel_EFL @worldteacher @ij64

@thornburyscott @pysproblem81 @escocesa_madrid @thornburyscott @sandymillin

@ij64 @ij64 @pysproblem81 @sandymillin @CliveSir

@thornburyscott @pysproblem81 @malusciamarelli @SueAnnan @cerirhiannon

@worldteacher @ij64 @worldteacher @cerirhiannon @thornburyscott

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(These ideas are mostly based on the ‘Time‘ set.)

Telling the Time

After teaching students how to tell the time, you could use #eltpics to revise and to push the students a bit more. Here is a collection of clock faces and other ways of telling the time (some are a little small, I’m afraid) with an assortment of different times. It should be a bit of a challenge, as very few of them are nice round numbers like “Two o’clock” or “Quarter to five”. Here are a few ways to do this:

• Write a list of times and ask students to match them to the images.
• Students work in pairs/small groups and go through all of the pictures working out how to say the times together.
• One student says the time and their partner has to identify the photo it is from.

1. Clock on Cathedral (@sandymillin), 2. Digital or Analogue time 2 (@SueAnnan), 3. Digital or Analogue time 3 (@SueAnnan), 4. Ariadne~The steam clock (@SueAnnan), 5. night1 (@fionamau), 6. Three extra minutes (@SueAnnan), 7. Alarm clock (@aClilToClimb), 8. Times two (@sandymillin), 9. Znojmo town hall clock (@sandymillin), 10. Jakubska, clock in Brno, Czech Republic (@sandymillin), 11. Digital alarm clock (@aClilToClimb), 12. Painted clock, Mikulov, Czech Republic (@sandymillin), 13. Flat Stanley on a clock (@mrsdkrebs), 14. Train times (@sandymillin), 15. Clockwork (@sandymillin), 16. Big Ben (@aClilToClimb), 17. Next story time (@sandymillin), 18. Guinness Time (@sandymillin), 19. Guiness time, Newcastle (@sandymillin), 20. Time gone wrong (@sandymillin), 21. Flower time (@sandymillin), 22. Clock on Rathaus wall, Chur (@vickyloras), 23. Clock with Roman numerals (@sandymillin), 24. 10:45 (@sandymillin), 25. Selling time (@sandymillin)

Dividing up the day

You could also use pictures to talk about how we divide up the day in English. The images below show morning/sunrise/dawn, noon/midday, evening/sunset/dusk and night.

• Is this the same way you divide up the day in your language? Do you have other words for different parts of the day? (For example, in Spanish the ‘madrugada’ is roughly equivalent to ‘the early hours’ in English – about 12-3a.m.; in Czech ‘cervanky’, while not a time, is the red sky that you get in the evening)
• What do you/your family normally do at these times of the day? Is this similar to/different from what is normal in your country?
• What is your favourite time of the day? Why?

1. Sri Lankan sunrise (@CliveSir), 2. Three extra minutes (@SueAnnan), 3. Sunset fishing (@sandymillin), 4. night2 (@fionamau)

Chiew Pang is a teacher based in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, around 1,000km off the south coast of Spain. He’s best known for his ground-breaking blogs, in particular iasku, and is a keen photographer. I leave you in his capable hands:

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I can’t remember when it was that I first heard of #ELTPics; I think it was in an interview with Victoria Boobyer; anyway, I checked it out and I got involved with it almost immediately as the idea appealed to me. The group has progressed steadily since then, and has amassed quite a respectable collection of images. So, it was with a feeling of honour that I accepted the invitation to guest for this blog, such a natural progression of the hashtag.

I’m not sure why the number 2 keeps cropping up in my brain lately. First, I wrote Two for the price of none, then I published the double bill in iAskU, and when I was thinking of what to write, this occurred to me…

As far as I can tell, most, if not all, of the photos in ELTPics have been taken by casual photographers like you and me, with a basic point-and-shoot camera. The essence of this article is two-fold; you may or may not need the second “fold”.

First, the lesson idea.

Enter the classroom, write P H O T O S on the board, hand a few markers around the classroom, sit down, or stand back, and watch.

You will get some funny looks until someone catches on, and start writing something on the board. What we’re doing here is basically to brainstorm words related to photos. Anything is acceptable, of course. Encourage variety; most will probably just write nouns as “photos” is a noun, but it’d be nice to have verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

When the pace starts to die down, ask a few students to explain the link between their word and “photos”. To vary, ask them for their opinion on someone else’s word.

That’s the first part.

Then, ask if anyone has a photo, which they themselves have taken, on their mobile phone, a pen drive, etc, to share with the class. If they haven’t, use some you have previously chosen (from ELTPics, naturally!). Beam one up. Talk about it. Or better still, hand the class over to a student – I’m very fond of doing this. Very often, teachers do all the asking with the result that the students don’t know how to structure questions! Encourage the others to ask this student questions based on the image. Take notes of emergent language to go through later! Repeat with other students.

Think of questions yourself. Throw one in every now and then to encourage them to think critically; you’d want more than just the normal ‘”Who is it?” and “Where was it taken?”

Examples:

What were you trying to capture when you took this photo? Were you successful?
What were you doing before taking this shot?
What was the weather like? The whole day?
Where was the sun?
If evening/night, what/where was the source of light?
Where was the camera (at which level)? How did you hold it? With one hand or two?
If you could take the same shot again, what would you change?
What do you like/don’t like about the photo?

Ask if there are any enthusiasts of photography. If you’re lucky, there will be some! Do they consider themselves knowledgeable on the subject? You’ll be even luckier if there are some yesses!

If the answer is positive to either of these questions, tell these aficionados to explain to the class what makes a good photograph. If not, ask the whole class what a good/bad photograph means to them. Show a few from ELTPics and ask for their opinion, why they consider it good or bad, why they like it, or not. Show a few images and ask if they think there were taken by the same photographer. Why (not)? How can they improve the shot?

As a follow-up, why not have a competition? Get your students to submit one photo each. Here’s a good excuse to start a class blog! Load them up, set up a poll and they themselves pick their favourites.

How to make the most of your compact camera

OK, now comes the second “fold”. To prepare yourself for the above lesson, you’d need to familiarise yourself with some aspects of photography: you don’t want to be caught in a situation where you don’t have a clue as to what your students are saying, do you?

I don’t consider myself an expert, but having dipped my toes in photography on and off for the past few decades, I’d like to try to pass on some of the rudiments.

First of all, there’s nothing wrong with a point-and-shoot. Try to learn its strengths and weaknesses and use your eyes and imagination to create shots you’d be proud of. A great photographer can produce sensational shots even with the most basic of cameras, but the best camera money can buy won’t guarantee you a sensational photo. Remember that it’s the carpenter, not the tool.

You’d also need to know the basic photography vocabulary, so take out your camera manual and have another look. Learn the names of the parts of your camera. Know its features. Apart from the physical components of the camera, you’d do well to know this short list of important words especially if you want to try the above lesson idea.

aperture (also referred to as f-stop): this controls the amount of light entering through the lens. Note that the smaller the f-number, the greater the aperture is, and the more light that enters. It usually has an ‘f’ displayed before a number, e.g. f2.8, f16. Generally, when shooting in bright light, your automatic will narrow the aperture down to 11, 16 or even 22 (less light enters), and the reverse will happen when shooting in low light: my present camera only opens up to a maximum of f2.8 (more light enters).

The other important thing to remember is that the higher the number the more depth of detail you will get (see below).

depth of field: this refers to the range between the nearest and the farthest object in sharp focus. Generally speaking, you’d want the greatest depth in a landscape shot, but the contrary on a portrait so that the focus is on your subject, and not on the background (which will be in “soft” focus).

exposure (or shutter speed): this is the amount of time the aperture remains open. The slowest speed at which I’d recommend shooting hand-held is 1/60th of a second, maybe 1/30th if you have steady hands. For slower speeds, use a tripod if you have one; otherwise, support your camera on some steady surface.

ISO: International Standards Organization. All things being equal, the lower the value, the better the clarity and quality of the image will be. Bear in mind that the lower the ISO the less sensitive will the film be to light, meaning it would need more light.

JPG or JPEG: this is the file format most of you would be familiar with, and, unfortunately, is the only type most point-and-shoot will allow you to save your photos in. Just remember that it is a lossy format, meaning it’s compressed  and each time you save the file, some detail will be lost. RAW is a lossless format, and TIFF is almost lossless.

Megapixels: This is the number of pixels a digital camera can record. 1 megapixel = 1 million pixels. Contrary to popular belief, greater does not necessarily mean better. Sadly, this value has become more of a marketing gimmick than anything else.

Know your camera

So, how would knowing these terms help you shoot better photos with your little automatic camera? Well, first of all, even fully automatic cameras do give you a certain control of the variants. You can probably control the ISO, you can compensate the exposure, and you can play around with the “scene” modes, where the camera adjusts the aperture/speed according to the scene you choose, for example, beach, candlelight, or portrait. There are a fair few possibilities you should certainly play around with.

Don’t shake!

Get into the habit of holding your camera with both hands, your right hand holding the right side of the camera with your forefinger on the shutter, ready to shoot. Support the bottom of the camera with your left hand. Make sure your body is stable: stand with legs slightly apart, feet flat on the ground, not on tiptoes! If doing frog’s eye (see below), lie down flat, supporting your hands on both elbows. You can also place the camera on a steady surface. If you want to be on a squatting level, go down on one knee, or sit down on the floor.

Right way

Wrong way

Distance from the subject

Your camera is likely to be equipped with both optical and digital zoom. There is always a trade-off in zooming. If you can move closer physically, do it. I tend to stay away from digital zoom as the trade-off is usually unacceptable. When doing close-ups using macro mode, use a tripod if possible, and when using a tripod, use the self timer to avoid shaking. Pressing the shutter manually usually involves a little shake.

Angle and level

This is one aspect of photography which a lot of casual photographers ignore. Look at the hordes of tourists taking photos and what can you notice? They’re all shooting standing up, and looking straight ahead unless they’re taking a photo of a tall structure, whereby they will point their camera upwards, or, conversely, if they’re shooting at something below them, they will point their camera downwards.

So, there you have the three angles: up, down and straight.

But, apart from the angles, the level you shoot from can make an immense difference to your photo. The three basic levels are bird’s eye (overhead shot), eye-level and low (frog’s eye). Try taking a shot using all angles and levels of the same subject, and see the difference! Or walk around one day and shoot everything at frog’s eye level. That’s my suggestion for the next set on ELTPics: frog’s eyes!

Bird's eye

Bird's eye (@sandymillin)

Frog's eye, looking upwards, almost vertically (@CliveSir)

Low level angling upwards (@fionamau)

frog's eye, camera on floor, angle straight

Focus

This is a bit trickier with fully automatic cameras. The idea is to have the subject in sharp focus, and the rest in soft focus. The following photo was taken at 1/320s with an f-stop of 2.8, ISO-80. Notice that the rose remains in focus while the background, in contrast, is a little softer. It’s important to focus on the subject, and click on the shutter gently. If the subject isn’t in the centre of your frame, you’d still need to focus on it, press gently, but without going all the way. The camera will register the optimum settings. Without letting your finger go, re-frame the shot the way you want, and now, click the shutter all the way.

Framing

Try to frame in your mind what you’d like to have in your photo. Are you interested in the background, or just the main subject? Or is there something even more interesting about the subject, such as the ring on her finger, or the tattoo on her neck? Move closer, or farther. Turn more to the left, or to the right. Angle upwards, or downwards. Which format suits better: portrait or landscape? Think about shapes and spaces. Look behind the subject: would he look like he had a tree growing from his head?

Lighting

Where’s the light? Is the subject squinting? At the same time, remember that with the light behind your back, the subject’s face will be clearer, and if the light is behind the subject, it accentuates its form. Shooting subjects from behind can sometimes be very interesting. A fine example is Ian James’ photo (see below) I used for my Lonely Teacher Blues post. Observe shadows, play around with contrasts. If you want your main subject to appear darker, focus on a brighter area, press the shutter gently to get the settings before re-framing and clicking all the way (see Focus above).

The best time for day shoots are early morning and early evening, where the light is softer. The light offered by bright sunny days, contrary to what some people think, is just too harsh. Try stepping into shadows, or as I mentioned above, observe the contrasts.

I normally avoid using flash because the flash in compact cameras is just too hard at the best of times. Force the flash off, and if a tripod is not at hand, place the camera on a steady surface: chair, table, wall, floor… (see Distance from the subject above). Of course, by all means use the flash if there isn’t any choice, but just remember that the effective distance of these flashes isn’t very far. Don’t be like those people shooting in stadiums and concert halls with flashes, unless you’re more interested in seeing the heads of those in front of you.

In this image below, the camera was pointed to the sky first to get an exposure of 1/200s, f8.0; with these settings, the buildings and the tree appear as silhouettes against the brighter sky.

1/200s, f/8.0, ISO80

Try doing some black-and-whites for impact or nostalgia.

Old lady by @ij64

So, there you have it. You’re now ready not only to give a super photography lesson, but also to be more adventurous and to take even greater shots than you’ve already been doing, and all with your point-and-click!

All the above photos were taken by myself using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS62 (unless otherwise stated), and, no, I wouldn’t mind a Nikon D7000, thank you very much

For more samples of my photos, look in ELTPics in Flickr. For the full sets, look here.

As we come to the end of the year, many people look back over what they have done and reflect on it ready for the year ahead. How about using eltpics to prompt your students to reflect in class?

Before class

Take a screen shot from a set which has a range of pictures from different situations. In this case, they are ‘Close Ups‘, but you could also use ‘Things I Like Doing‘, ‘-ing‘, ‘Every Picture Tells A Story‘ or make your own selection of pictures and put them through the Flickr Mosaic Maker. If you don’t have a screen in your classroom, you could also print a selection of pictures.

During class

Show the images to the students. They should tell their partner anything they can about the different pictures, using any clues they can see. For example: what time of year/day was the picture taken? Was it indoors or outdoors? What materials/colours/shapes can they see?

Now ask them to think back over the last year and look at the pictures again. I have tried to keep them as generic as possible, but if you know your students well, you can perhaps predict better the kind of pictures they will respond to. They should choose one or two pictures which bring back memories from the year.

Put the students into small groups. They should indicate to the other students which pictures they have chosen. Their group should then ask them questions to find out about the memory. You could encourage the students to take this into their senses as well, rather than purely describing the events. This word cloud could help students to think of questions to ask:

Once everyone has shared their memories, students could:

• write a diary entry from the time of their memory.
• record a video/audio diary entry from the time of their memory.
• choose their favourite story from the group and write it up, using the picture that prompted it as an illustration.
• try to remember as much as they can and tell someone from another group.
• choose a picture that wasn’t selected by anyone in the class and create a ‘memory’ prompted by it, using the word cloud to help them think of questions.

Image credits

From the close-ups set, by:

1st row: @cgoodey; @dfogarty x 4; @sandymillin x 2; @dfogarty; @fionamau

2nd row: @vickyloras x 7; @fionamau x 2

3rd row: @fionamau x 5; @pysproblem81 x 2; @sandymillin; @vickyloras

4th row: @EclipsingX x 2; @sandymillin x 3; @evaguti x 4

5th row: @cerirhiannon (all)

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Fiona Mauchline: LOOKING FORWARD

Looking back, looking forward. Image by @sandymillin

I thought for my post I’d try digitalising something I’ve done many a time with paper and magazine photos: make a glorious, personal New Year poster showing students’ hopes, plans and resolutions for the coming year.

I usually do this with a stack of magazines – in groups, students zoom through ripping out any photos they think might be useful until there’s a pile of photos in the middle of their group. They then choose photos they’d like to use for their poster, with no limit to quantity, and after sticking the photos on a sheet of poster paper, they write a sentence, paragraph, a few words… to go with each image, explaining the hope, plan or resolution. The language is ‘emergent’ in that the students will be expressing whatever they want to express, so there’s no pre-taught vocab set, but you inevitably review/present future forms, want to etc. Obviously.

The future looks bright... Image by @thornburyscott

When Sandy and I were mulling over what to do for this post, I decided to find a way to create a New Year poster using eltpics and Glogster. It worked, though as I go through the stages, I’ll drop in some tips, as it was not THAT easy – at least for a Glogster novice like myself. I think it’s fair to assume that what I did any student could do with perhaps some technical support and creative nudging from teacher, and a little language advice at the text stage. Ultimately, it was fun, creative, engaging (I was engrossed for ages!) – and I ended up with something rather different from what I had intended to create!

[this is where I wish I had little photos of my hands doing the different stages, like those How to (cook / sew / do origami...) books years ago] [make that someone with nice nails' hands]

1Selecting I went through various eltpics sets such as Close-ups, Music, -ing, and Emotions looking for images that drew my attention and downloaded them. At this stage, I hadn’t planned what I was going to say, but had a vague idea of concepts like ‘travel’, ‘write letters’ (note to self: there weren’t any photos for the latter, must take one later today). I collected 25 photos and left them on my desktop.

2 Poster maker I opened a Glogster account (There’s also Glogster for Educators). Free. Now this is where it got a little tricky, as there isn’t a ‘How to make your first poster‘ tab, so – if you’re technologically dim like me – you wander around Glogster for a bit wondering what it’s all about and how it works. However, despite getting mildly frustrated, abandoning the project and coming back to it after a coffee, it worked out well in the end. Once you’ve set up your account, you just hit Post New Glog (sounds more like a nice festive drink, surely?)

A nice drop of Glog or will a wee dram do you? Image by @cgoodey

3 Starting your poster What you get is a what looks like a poster made of old red jeans, so you go to the top menu bar and click on Content. This allows you to select the photos you’ve left on your desktop. It’s a bit temperamental, though, so I found that it was actually easier to upload in threes or fours. When your photos are in the Content window, you can drag and drop. Once you’ve dragged and dropped all three or four, delete them from the window and go for the next few. Repeat the process.

Curiously I found that as I was dragging and dropping, I was mentally writing the texts and began to discard some images that didn’t quite allow for the same feel. For example, I had this one:

Vejer de la Frontera, Spain. Image by Jane Arnold

but the text in my mind was ‘spend more time in Vejer‘ – which, as you’ll see, was more specific than the rest, less poetic, so I blipped it. In all I blipped 8 photos, a third of the originals. I’ve noticed that students also discard magazine images as they create, sometimes because the colours, shape or size are wrong, but also because of the ‘inner composing’ that goes on. One of the images I’d chosen refused to be uploaded, so that had to be discarded too, but I’ll add it at the end of this post to make up for it.

4 Composition Change the Background to Solid Colour (you can change your colour later, but the red jeans thing is distracting at composition stage). You can now move your images around your poster, change their size etc. You may find that, like me, you shrink some of your photos during stage 3, so you have an idea of how many will fit.

This is the stage at which it’s a good idea to encourage your students to begin to plan their thoughts/texts so they can group images a little. If they leave it until later, they’ll go nuts moving images and text boxes around and trying to get everything to fit.

5 Adding text When you have your images more or less where you want them, it’s time to add text. Go back to the Add Content button and then hit Text. Hit the Use this button several times (again, I batched them in fours) so you get several text boxes. They’ll appear somewhere around the middle of your poster and are not necessarily easy to spot if you have a dark colour there. Drag and drop the boxes towards your photos. These text boxes are fiddly until you get the hang of it, but if you select the words ‘Sample text’ so they are shaded, you’ll be able to delete them without deleting the whole box. If the shading doesn’t appear, you’ll zap the whole text box and get mildly annoyed the fourth or fifth time you do it. Believe me. By clicking on the little ABC that appears to the left of the text box, you can change font, font size, colour, go Italic, Bold etc etc. It’s worth playing around with font colour as, unless you leave your texts between photos, the images will render some colours invisible. My final poster is in pretty glorious Technicolor but I think it’s legible.

6 That’s about it. You can change the way the photos overlap, move texts and images etc as you please. I can’t see a Print button but the amount of ink you’d consume would be pretty major anyway. You can also embed all your posters on a class blog or wiki and use them as a ‘read and comment’ activity. The posters are bright, fun and personal, and at least one of my own sons is just waiting to get his hands on the computer to have a go….here’s a sneak preview of mine:

Part of Fiona's 'glog'. Image credits below.

And here’s a link to the complete glog (NOTE: WordPress blogs aren’t very Embed-friendly, and their hostility extends to ‘glogs’, so I’m giving you a link, but if you use a wiki, Blogger etc embedding is possible. Here’s a link to show you how, and many thanks to Marjana aka @mscro1 for sending it to me.)

Next week, a guest post by one of eltpics’ top contributors…. Oh, and here’s the photo I couldn’t upload:

 Photo credits on the poster: red hair – @pysproblem81  weights – @AnthonyGaughan   trolley-bus – @olgabarnashova   water – @fionamau   sunrise – @CliveSir   coffee – @melgarrish    Buddha – @pacogascon    daisies – @aClilToClimb   fireworks – @elt_pics   parrots – @thornburyscott    musicians – @mrsdkrebs   Brussels sprouts – @Alice_M   painting – @fionamau    connected to home – @Amandalanguage   figure and sea – @mkofab    windows – @nutrich

To be honest, we eltpicsers have really been pretty busy – all 126 of us – and I’m feeling particularly festive and smiley because this week our blog post is a little different and a lot special, largely because it is by Victoria Boobyer. Victoria is not only one of eltpics’ top contributors with photos ranging from gorgeous to amazing, but, as one of the founders of #eltpics, whose tenacity and drive despite all odds in the last 14 months or so is not a little inspiring, she is, for me, the top of my list of ‘ELT People 2011′. Without any doubt. So I am genuinely over the moon to be able to say: Ladies and gentlemen, Victoria Boobyer…:

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As you’re reading this, the chances are that you’re already familiar with #eltpics and how and why it works. If you happen to have stumbled upon this post, I’ll write a very potted history. In 2010, myself, @cgoodey and @vickyloras lived in very different parts of the world. We began sending each other images of Vietnam, Scotland and Switzerland, and taking our cameras out on a daily basis. One very late night we came upon the idea of storing these photos on flickr for other teachers to use. During the night we refined the idea of #eltpics: a collaborative Creative Commons collection of images for teachers sent by teachers via twitter. At first we changed the topic/ theme every week but recently this changed to every fortnight. This year we celebrated our first birthday and 5000th #eltpic. The original curators were joined by the marvellous @sandymillin and @fionamau. Then there was the birth of this blog, superbly managed by @fionamau. The curator and guest posts, with ideas for using images, tie in perfectly with the collaborative ethos of #eltpics. It seems that with the blog and over 5,600 images in 56 sets we’re still going well. #eltpics posted by the curators: @cgoodey, @vickyloras, @elt_pics, @fionamau  We all know that this wouldn’t have been possible without those wonderful people who take their time to send us their images. So, we decided to make a little thank you gift to everyone who has ever contributed to #eltpics and also share it with everyone who works in this crazy ol’ world of ELT.  Introducing… the #eltpics 2012 calendar! You can download this superior calendar to keep on your computer or even print it and stick it on the fridge door. The calendar was created using images from our top ten contributors (ie who have contributed the greatest number of images so far), the winner of our December ‘newbie’ competition (drumroll….check out the December page – is it yours?) and a selection of other wonderful images. It would have been impossible to choose the top 10 best images but we hope you’ll agree that the images that make up the calendar would grace any monitor/ fridge door! We haven’t included images from any of the curators…so we’ll add some to this post. As the most prolific contributor, @sandymillin gets a deserved place at the head of the post. I had turning the pages of a photography-inspired calendar in mind when I knocked up the music that accompanies it.  You’re welcome to mute it! That leaves me with nothing else to say apart from thanks, as always, to the contributors, curators and users of #eltpics and happy holidays to you all reading this. Victoria Boobyer @elt_pics p.s. Here’s a post about how to join in if you haven’t already.  http://goo.gl/V1xdY                                 ************************************ And as a closing note from all of us eltpics curators, may you have a wonderful festive season; although we’ll be here next week to close the year with you, for now wishing you “A very merry Christmas And a happy New Year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear” (J. Lennon). FM Silent night....

Ready for Christmas by @nutrich

This week we have another Special Guest Star. Dale Coulter, from near Reading in southern England. Dale, who is currently based in Rome, is increasingly well-known for his great blog, languagemoments, and his thoughts (and talks) on reflective teaching. Apart from his great ideas, one reason I invited Dale to write a post was because I wanted to see how a teacher who isn’t so familiar with eltpics would use the resource, and (minor spoiler alert) Dale’s chosen topic of tables has, in turn, given me an idea for a ‘challenge’: after you read Dale’s post, please tweet us a photo of your work table (or play table! remember to use the #eltpics hashtag) and I’ll upload it here and send you an invite to write about your table in the comments section (see Dale’s post for details about what to write). If, by the way, you don’t use twitter, you could leave me a link to your photo in the comments section with your text, and I’ll add it to the main area of the blog. Enough from me, over to (fanfare)…………DALE!

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I was invited to write a contribution for the ‘Take a Photo and…‘ blog and was somewhat stuck for ideas, so I took a look at some of the posts written before for inspiration. I got as far as the third paragraph, then an idea came to me. While reading “are you sitting comfortably“, I thought “where am I sitting?” – at my desk, where I normally sit when I need to do some work, check the various social networking sites I use and catch up on the latest news etc. I then went into the kitchen and had a cup of tea, at the kitchen table… do you see where this is going?

Tables

Tables: for credits, please send end of post.

1. Dining table, 2. Garden furniture, 3. Chess pieces, and a frog, 4. A feast, 5. Dressing table, 6. My home office. This is where the magic happens, or not, 7. Personalised furniture, 8. Tea for two, 9. Holiday, 10. Meeting room, 11. playing with dolls, 12. Table football

We spend an extraordinary amount of time in our lives seated at a table. How many tables are there in your life? What sort of relationship do you have with your tables? Crazy, when you think about it, how much information about someone’s life can be conjured up with this thought. The idea is to connect with your students’ lives, past and present, through their tables.

What does this remind you of?

There’s enough information in these pictures to trigger a whole host of memories and experiences. Not into table football? Never played chess? Never studied? Never been to school? Never eaten dinner?

Warmer: Give learners the question above to answer. Do it in pairs, do it in groups, do it as a class. However it works best for you.

Or, if you want to loosen the reins a bit, give them a question table:

Did you use to________________?

How could___________________?

What’s the best way to __________?

Let learners create questions and then ask them to write their efforts on the board. Tell learners to answer the ones they have something to say about, leaving the irrelevant ones.

Categories: Ask the class to put the tables into categories. This helps make more concrete links between the pictures and concepts, for example, ping-pong table and the table football table could go under ‘free time’.

Develop language: Learners pick a category they want to work on; groups brainstorm vocabulary; pick five lexical items to write on cards with an explanation on the back.

Contextualise: Once you have finished and helped learners develop their language (adding collocations, clarifying, correcting if necessary), distribute cards to groups, they match them to a category, then to a picture. Swap the cards until each group has done this with all the new vocabulary.

Use: learners write a ‘me and my tables‘ description, choosing the tables that reflect their life the most and using the vocabulary produced from the previous activity.

Credits: The photos in the mosaic are by (from top left to bottom right): @aClilToClimb, @sandymillin (x2) / @sandymillin (x2), @Senicko / @mrsdkrebs, @aClilToClimb, @mkofab / @sandymillin, @CeciELT, @mattledding.

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NEXT WEEK: A very special Christmas post by a very special person…..ho, ho ho.

Exam classes are notoriously hard to make interesting, truly useful, learner-centred and so on, so I thought that for this week’s post, I’d tackle this aspect of ELT. I’ve chosen to use images from the Shopping and shops set, as they often seem to appear in the examiners’ kit. The ideas are variations of old favourites, too ‘favourite’ for me to know whose ideas they were originally, so I apologise for not crediting.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Choosing the images

As I said, I’m using Shopping here, but there are many others that would do, including Working week. As you look through the photos, you may see some you really like, but be careful – mentally brainstorm the vocabulary for what you can see; are your students going to struggle too hard to come up with the words? Can they see a sufficient number of things they can describe? Look at this picture. I really like it, but had to discard it – can you see why? Try brainstorming it yourself.

by @sandymillin

The next stage of choosing is to cover each side of the images and decide if one side is easier to describe than the other (you’ll be chopping the images in half – I use Paint). Have a look at this photo. My initial reaction was Oh yes! Love this! So British!

by @Amandalanguage

But let’s cut it in half. The student getting the lefthand side might not have too many problems (flowers, boxes, blue plastic, house, windows, trees….)

On the left...

But what about the student with the righthand side? How can (s)he show range of vocabulary?

...and on the right

brussels sprouts, parsnips, turnips, brick wall, broccoli of some kind, metal post, something like dirty carrots…….. Perhaps not. They’d be ok with onions and vegetables, but the panic button would probably be hit.

First idea: Matching (needs three photos – or six if you think pairs can cheat by looking over the shoulders of neighbouring pairs)

Create two mosaics using the halves of three photos (three left sides, three right sides in a different order). Try to ensure the difficulty level is similar. I used Paint to cut, stored on flickr and then used the mosaic maker to create the mosaics. You can print and laminate sets (ie pairs) or just keep the digital version.

By @pysproblem81

and

By @pysproblem81

Brainstorming

Give half the class the left mosaic and half the class the right mosaic. Put students in pairs and ask them to brainstorm vocabulary for each image. Remind them to work quietly so the other half of the class can’t overhear/cheat.

Pairwork

Put a ‘left’ with a ‘right’. Tell students it’s important that they do NOT show each other their mosaics until after they have worked with all three photos. One student in each pair chooses a photo to describe to their partner for their partner to guess which half to match it with. They should describe the picture in as much detail as possible while their partner listens silently. (The silence is important at this stage). When they have finished, they swap roles with the other student choosing one of the remaining images to describe. This time, allow the listener to ask questions. They do not compare their photos yet but ask them if they felt different, being able to ask questions or not, and if so, how so.

After a show of hands ‘Who thinks they’ve matched the halves?’, ask them to work with the third image, but instead of describing, they should ask and answer as many questions as possible to work out what the complete picture looks like eg I can see some oranges on the right – is it a place selling fruit? Are there any bananas in your part of the picture? Are they any people buying fruit? Etc.

When they’ve run out of questions and have worked together for two or three minutes, students show each other the mosaics.

Aftermath

Ask students to talk about where they think they photos were taken and why, what time of year they think it is, what any mystery objects in the photos might be etc. Remind them that if they have no idea, it doesn’t matter – saying ‘ I don’t think it was taken in Mexico because….’ is better than saying ‘I don’t know’.

As a nearly-final awareness activity, ask them to the three different ways of working with the pictures (1 describe/listen silently 2 describe/ask a few questions 3 ask and answer questions as a dialogue). Tell them to consider which way was best for showing different structures, vocabulary, communication strategies etc, which way made them feel more supported or more vulnerable etc.

Then really finally, brainstorm the language they used, the language they felt they needed but didn’t have and discuss it as a class, focusing on phrases like ‘In the background…’, ‘I’m not sure what it is, but it looks like/could be etc… and reminding them that there’s more to one of these photo tests than ‘In my picture I can see…’.

Second idea: Picture dictation (Two photos, or four if you think neighbouring pairs can see each other’s photos).

By @chiasuan

Select two photos as before (again avoiding photos with obscure vocab) and make two copies of each, cutting one in half either literally or using Paint, as I have.

Stick the half you want to keep on plain white paper, ranged left or right as appropriate. You can also get students to choose their own pictures from eltpics and prepare this at home, in which case they need only choose one and prepare it. It takes less than five minutes. (Though it’s always wise to have some of your own as back-up in case ‘the dog ate my homework’.)

Let’s call your photos A and B. In each pair, one student has a complete photo A and a half photo B. The other student has a complete photo B and a half photo A. Ask them to look at their half photos, and think of three or four questions they’d like to ask their partner about the missing content. Here are some more half pictures and links to the complete versions (at the end of the paragraph) – see if you can imagine what’s missing before you look, though, and note down three or four questions you’d want to ask a partner. (here and here)

When they are ready, they take turns describing the missing bit of their partner’s half picture so that it can be drawn. It’s a good idea to ban questions from the listener at the start then allow them after a few minutes, and afterwards discuss the difference, as with the previous idea. I’d also suggest a final language focus stage as well, so the student has a language reference to take home, rather than just a drawing of debatable quality.

Fiona

Next week… a guest post!

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I’ve admired the eltpics team from the very beginning, and I had the pleasure of interviewing Victoria for TEFL.net back when there were only a few hundred pictures in the flickr collection. Up until a few weeks ago, I thought of eltpics as an ingenius site developed by teachers for teachers. Then one day when I was hunting through my personal photos trying to find the perfect photo for a MyEC blog challenge, I suddenly had a thought. English learner bloggers would love eltpics! Why not introduce them to this collection? Before I went ahead, I asked permission from the team. Would it be okay for our online students/teachers to use eltpics too? The team was quick to confirm that the collection was open for all types of educational use (non-commercial), and I wondered why I hadn’t asked before. Since then, I’ve put eltpics to great use on the social network for English learners and teachers, and I’ve hardly logged in to the clip art site that we subscribe to. What do we do with ELTpics on MyEC? Two words: Wordless Wednesday.

WHAT IS WORDLESS WEDNESDAY?

Wordless Wednesday is a fun exercise we’ve been doing on EnglishClub for a couple of years. It was inspired by the official Wordless Wednesday group. These are bloggers who give themselves a rest each Wednesday by uploading a photo instead of writing a post. These bloggers share their photo posts on a hub blog in hopes of attracting a wider audience of readers. I stumbled upon the official Wordless Wednesday group via my high school locker partner’s blog, imadeitso.

The Wordless Wednesday premise is simple, but like other online challenges that we join as a community, we adjusted it slightly to make it useful for language learning. Each Wednesday I upload an image to my MyEC blog. I invite learners (and teachers) to write a caption in the comments. The winning caption is added to the post the following Wednesday.

While it started out as something I did on my blog, the members quickly caught on and began creating their own Wordless Wednesday posts. This is the way MyEC works, and it’s the best part of blogging in a community. Members are encouraged to submit their Wordless Wednesday post to the hub blog where the original idea came from.

Asking online students/teachers to upload photos to a website can be a bit tricky, however. The last thing we need is more illegal pictures of Brad Pitt! From the beginning of MyEC, we’ve worked hard to encourage members not to steal images from the Internet. We created a lesson on plagiarism, we educated our most active users about artist’s rights, and we began moderating our photo gallery. Our moderators are volunteer English learners and they take their job very seriously. However, it can still be tempting for members to use images outside of their own photo folderS.

CREATIVE COMMONS

Introducing MyEC members to eltpics presented the perfect opportunity to teach them how to use Creative Commons sites. In fact, with thousands of images available on eltpics, there is almost no need for members to go outside these sets, at least for the purpose of Wordless Wednesday. After months of sharing photos from my personal photo folder for Wordless Wednesday, I was ecstatic to suddenly realize that I had thousands of images to choose from. I’ve used images from the eltpics sets for the last three weeks and will continue to use them for future posts. I hope the members who participate in Wordless Wednesday will give it a try too.

SHOW STUDENTS HOW TO USE ELTPICS

If your students are blogging (or thinking of blogging), I highly recommend showing them how to use eltpics.

• introduce them to the concept of Creative Commons
• help them understand that plagiarism is serious
• encourage them to start blogging
• teach them how to credit a photographer and site
• introduce them to twitter (in order to credit the photographer properly it may be necessary to credit the photographer’s twitter account)

CREATE YOUR OWN CAPTION CONTEST

If your school has a blog, please join in on Wordless Wednesday. First, show your students how to use ELTPics. Then, invite students to write captions for the photos that they picked (open it up to teachers as well). Finally, teach them how to submit their posts to the official Wordless Wednesday site. If you share one blog, put one student in charge of the Wordless Wednesday post each week. It’s up to you whether or not you want to work on corrections with your learners. You can also send your students over to MyEC so they can take part in our community fun!

Learners Can use ELTpics to

• add images to school projects and presentations
• add visuals to school newsletters
• add photos to personal or school blogs
• participate in online challenges (such as our Motivational Poster challenge)
• 

  Image by Phil Bird (@pysproblem81)

  For information on Tara’s novel, see http://www.tarabenwell.com