Technology lesson - My Blackberry is not working!

This is a quick, funny technology vocab warmer for Upper-Int using the wonderful Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield. One list of vocab, taken from the video, was dictated to the class including: blackberry, boot (v), blackspot, crash, juice etc. The class were then split into two groups who had to quickly discuss the meanings of the words. The twist was that Group A had to find technological meanings for the words and Group B had to find everyday non-technological meanings. This is pretty easy for the fruit based words (as they are often the brands) but not so easy for juice (trying to elicit a reference to electricity via thirst metaphors was a challenge) and boot (make sure they know this is a verb).

The groups reconvened, found a partner and compared answers. They then tried to find ways to combine these words in sentences to predict what usage they might hear or collocations that might work, e.g. My Blackberry has crashed. My Blackberry is on Orange.

This all culminates in the watching of the video. Show it once to see if they understand the jokes - I was pretty concerned that my students wouldn't find this funny at all, as puns are such a linguistically challenging step for students to make, but by this time they had embedded both meanings simultaneously and I was pleased to find they laughed. Even at the dongle pun - for which I had not given them a definition, only a suggestion that it may have evolved from dangle!

A second viewing could be used to make notes of the collocations which are actually used in the clip which can lead into speaking practice for complaints about technology glitches. For me this led into a complaint letter lesson. But I think there are plenty of other places it could lead.

Credit for this idea must go to my colleague, Kirsty, who happened to watch this programme over Christmas and suggested it for the 'technology' week we had coming up in the new semester.

Any ideas how you might use the video?