Videos can be really fun in the classroom. In older posts, I have explained a few ways to use YouTube videos in the classroom. They can be used in esl lessons about food. Students can also learn to use YouTube videos in their presentations or you can integrate them into lectures. Well, now, I have a slightly new challenge for you. Make your own educational video!

TeacherTube is full of videos teachers and/or students have made. You can use YouTube and TeacherTube to find videos for your esl classes, but when you just can’t find what you are looking for it might be time to make your own video. The next few posts will explain how to make a YouTube video.

First, you have to start with some video clips. Use your cellphone, a video camera, a web cam, whatever to capture some video and audio. I used the built in video camera and microphone on my Macbook to make this video. It will be used in an international studies class. The final project in the class is to make an annotated bibliography and this explains how to do it.

Once you have the video, you have to find video editing software. You probably have one on your computer. On Macs, there is iMovie. On PCs, there is Movie Maker.

So from here out, the directions are for macs on iMovie. But I have used Movie Maker and it is pretty simple too.

Once you have the video recordings, you need to import them into iMovie (File > Import Movie). A simpler option is to record video in the iMovie program using a webcam. Then, go through the recordings and drag the parts you want to use into the video screen. The process is a simple drag and drop. (There is a link at the bottom of this to a more detailed video tutorial.)

The next step is to add titles. There is a little “T” for text or maybe for title. Click on the “T” and the different formats of titles come up. Drag and drop the title that you want to the place where you want it.

Once you’re finished adding video clips and titles, press Share in the toolbar and then select YouTube. Follow the steps (including creating a YouTube account) and before you know it you will have a video on YouTube.

Here is an iMovie tutorial. It may seem a little complicated. But I opened the iMovie program for the first time last week and was able to completely finish a YouTube video in less than one hour!

I used to wonder why the same Christmas specials were shown on TV and the same Christmas songs played on the radio year after year. But now I understand.

We made a week’s worth of holiday lessons last year for English, baby! and did the same this year. But when I went back and looked at what we did last year, I realized a lot of it is still good! (Of course, check the site all next week because the new stuff is better, but still.)

It’s no surprise that people often go home for the holidays. The holidays are themselves a home in a way. We return to them every year and they’re largely the same. There’s a trick to creating holiday content that is timeless. I did it a couple of times last year, and made a couple of our lessons more dated. Have a look at last year’s holiday lessons and see which ones you can tell are a year old!

Jingle all the Day

I was particularly proud of my ability to work a photo of Twisted Sister into last year’s holiday music lesson. Did you know they have an actual holiday album?

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Broken Bulb

Of course, I had to include some holiday decoration flirtation on the soap opera last year. This is filmed on the roof of our office building.

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Christmas Movies

Since so many of the movies discussed in this lesson are classic, it hardly seems outdated. OK maybe the part about Queen Latifah.

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Fruitcake

This year’s slang is “ham.” I guess there’s something about the all the cheer this time of year that makes me think I can get away with puns.

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Hanukkah

Dang it. I should have done something Kwanza this year.

We just posted an English lesson based on an interview with San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis.

I tried something new in this one that I think we’re going to keep doing. I asked Vernon to define a slang term for our members, in this case “Hail Mary.” He seemed happy to do it, and I think it will be cool for our users to learn new slang from athletes and entertainers.

This interview was shorter than the last one I did with Hutch Harris from the Thermals, because Vernon was on the go. So there are fewer outtakes, but there’s still some stuff that didn’t make it in. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until afterward that I realized I should have asked him about his choach’s pants-dropping speech. Here’s the whole Q&A.

Jason: I hear you went to school on Tuesday.

Vernon: Yeah, I did. Take a player to school. It was good!

Jason: What grade were you in for the day?

Vernon: Well, actually I had to go knock on someone’s door. So, it was a kid that was in second grade and I had to go with him to school and pretty much what we had to do was make up workouts and stuff like that for the rest of the kids.

Jason: Did they have a good time?

Vernon: Yeah, they had a great time.

Jason: How do you pick the charities you work with and what’s your favorite one?

Vernon: Whatever I’m pretty much thinking about. My favorite is pretty much helping people who are in need, so I’m all about giving back. This summer I did a charity weekend and what I wanted to do was raise money for people who are using drugs, drug abuse. My thing is to help them get better.

Jason: Oh wow. So let’s see, you majored in studio art in college. I just wondered if your background as an artist affects the way you play football and if art still plays a role in your life right now.

Vernon: It does. Art still plays a role in my life. I paint or draw or whatever it may be every chance that I get. Once you start painting you probably…like me, for me…I sit there for hours and I’m looking at my painting from different angles and, you know, I just can’t stop looking at it. You know, I want to get up because I get tired…

Jason:  Yeah.

Vernon:  …but I can’t leave the painting without pretty much finishing it, you know, so it can be perfect. I want it to be perfect. And how that translates to football or rolls over to football is that, you know, everything I do on the football field, I like to be perfect. I like to win. I don’t want to lose and it just makes you competitive, I think.

Jason:  Totally. You’re a tight end and tight ends do a lot of things, but one of the things they do is catch passes, and I wondered if you’ve ever caught a Hail Mary pass and if you could talk about what a Hail Mary pass is.

Vernon:  It’s pretty much like a bomb in the air. They also call it a bomb. The quarterback just throws the ball as hard as he can.

Jason:  Totally. And when do you use it?

Vernon:  You can use it in the fourth quarter when you have like 10 or 15 seconds on the clock.

Jason:  Have any Hail Mary passes come your way lately?

Vernon:  I actually had a Hail Mary when we played Dallas. It was 43 yards.

Jason:  But it’s pretty hard to catch a Hail Mary, right? It’s kind of a long shot?

Vernon:  Hmm…Not really. You just…I mean, if you work on it, no, it’s not hard.

Jason:  Oh cool.

Vernon:  I pretty much work on it every day.

Jason: Right on. And then the last thing I wanted to ask you is I notice you have these braids that come out of your helmet and I didn’t start seeing that style until a couple of years ago. Who started that? Where’d you pick that up?

Vernon: I don’t know. I mean guys before me like Bob Marley and I think it roots from Jamaica or Africa.

Jason: Do you feel ties to Jamaica or Africa?

Vernon: No, I just woke up one morning and decided I’m gonna have dreads. It was time to do it.

I sort of misfired with that last question. What I meant was, “When did NLF players start wearing dreads that come out from under their helmet?” I think Vernon just thought I was talking about dreads in general, but I had all I needed for the lesson and didn’t want to keep him on the phone. So if anyone can tell me when players started wearing a tail of hair that comes out the bottom of their helmet (see photo below) I’d be interested to know. I think it looks cool and I don’t remember seeing it as a kid!

Have you ever made up your own slang word? Slang has to start somewhere, so if you and your friends start a new term, there’s a chance you’ll see it in a movie in a few years, or here on English, baby! We’ve been defining a slang term a week for years and it doesn’t look like we’re going to run out of words anytime soon.

But slang terms usually just happen on their own. It’s hard to make one up on purpose. I remember when I was about five years old, my neighbor and I were playing in some mud and decided that we’d call the mud “habla,” a word we thought we made up. But when we told my mom, she informed us that “habla” is the Spanish for “speak.” It’s so hard to think of a word no one’s used before!

In a recent episode of the Sarah Silverman Program, she meets a guy who supposedly invented the term “boo-yah,” and is a celebrity because of it. So Sarah decides to invent her own word. But it’s harder than she thinks. She sings a song about it:

The video has a lot of other slang terms in it like “faceplant,” which is when you fall on your face, “TMI,” which means “too much formation,” and “psych,” which means “just kidding.” There’s also a policeman character who hates the idea of slang because he thinks it’s destroying society.

The word she ends up choosing, “ozay,” which is similar in meaning to “lame,” was actually a word that she and her friends used in high school.  In this behind-the-scenes video, Sarah talks about how she didn’t realize that “ozay” wasn’t used outside of her home town until she moved away.

Have you and your friends ever invented a slang term or tried to? Think you can come up with one right now?

I stumbled upon a New York times article today about several language learning software programs. It was an old article (from  2005). So what was so interesting about a NY Times article from 2005? The article discussed the different programs’ underlying assumptions about language learning. The Rosette Stone, for example, is based on the assumption that people learn their second language in the same way they learn their first. Basically, they believe second language acquisition is the same as first language acquisition. Personally, the idea that adults learn language in the same manner as children seems slightly absurd.

As teachers, we have all sorts of beliefs about how people learn language.  But I don’t think we give the idea much focused attention. While we might have a teaching philosophy that clearly states how we can help students learn, I think we all need to have a clear idea about how people learn language. A colleague of mine thinks that extensive reading is essential to language learning. I don’t know if that is at the center of her teaching philosophy but it certainly affects what she does in the classroom to some extent.

So like all of the software programs from the NY Times article, our ESL classes are each based on our assumptions about language learning.  If you aren’t sure how people learn language, it might be time for you to start researching second language acquisition. And make more informed decisions in the classroom.

The internet has made finding realia so much easier. It’s pretty easy to pluck an authentic news story or find a relevant video clip from YouTube. But with the holidays around the corner and all of the traditional food that Americans eat on Thanksgiving and Christmas, it might be time to bring in some more interesting realia: food!

If you have pumpkin in your area, you can make pumpkin pie.  Or pumpkin cookies like in the picture above, since, in case you didn’t know, no one eats pumpkin outside the US. Students will love to try it! And many will think it is disgusting, so it can be pretty funny. You can integrate these food items into your curriculum in many ways. You could bring it in and have it be the start of a conversation or a discussion. If you’re in another country, you could have a debate about if local stores should sell American food.

You could also have your students make the food in class. This could be good practice for following directions if you have one student dictate the recipe to another who isn’t allowed to read it. It could even be a listening activity if you have a high tech classroom and access to videos from foodnetwork.com or marthastewart.com

Other classic American foods include: scrambled eggs, pancakes, cookies, fruit salad with marshmallows (ambrosia),  meatloaf and more. This activity is totally optional and might just be something you add to a end of class party. But food can be a fun realia in the classroom. So give it a try and don’t be afraid to bring in things that you think taste bad. Some people might like them.