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?

Staff noticeboard with lino-it

Our college is moving to a brand-spanking new building soon and the expectation is that we will all, suddenly, be able to change the habits of a lifetime of teaching and become paper-free over night! To that end we anticipate there will be no staff noticeboard to share messages or information on and a debate has raged (well, quietly bubbled along - we're not savages) about what we can do in place of this.

Thanks must therefore go to Sandy Millin whose blog introduced me to the concept of lino-it - an online noticeboard with the capability to stick post-its, photos, videos and documents up on it for all or a select few to see. Click the pic to be taken to the website.

 This is just a representation of what I started with, as the staff want their noticeboard to stay private, but I can honestly say that within 20 minutes we had very little noticeboard left to play with. And play they did. We are talking about a staff room where the IT literacy and usage is average but no higher, and enthusing staff about new technology is not easy. But they were very excited about this website and we had a spontaneous outpouring of ideas of teaching uses.

This for me is the first little success in what I hope is a new enthusiasm for IT in my department. I'm very grateful so far to all the Twitter users on #eltchat who have such inspiring ideas and who seem to have a psychic ability to find all these online resources before the rest of us have realised it exists.