Teaching with videos and music

Oishi brings to our table the popular web page "youtube" and a hilarious but catchy video called Mentos and Coke. It didn't take me more than 5 minutes to log into the page and find the video ... and it was impressive what those two guys showed us with that video. There are so many videos in youtube that the possibilities and scenarios to use them are countless, and as it is described in the article the main point is to stimulate student's interest in the content. I hadn't heard of Revver.cor or Zudeo.com, so that will be my next task, to test them out.

Kanel's article was pretty interesting, it is the first time I read about how using songs contribute toward various aspects of teaching a language, besides all the different exercises that teachers can create with songs. There were two things that caught my attention: first it was new to me that "music is generally processed through the brain's RIGHT hemisphere, whereas lyrics are generally processed through the LEFT hemisphere". Great support to keep on using songs !!

Second when the article was suggesting ways to select songs for the class, I found a statement I don't agree with. On page 129, Audibility and clarity of lyrics, says "If the teacher cannot distinguish the words, then there is a little chance that students will be able to." If the teacher decided to give students the opportunity to work on songs they like, it is obvious that students are going to be more familiar than teachers, so chances of teachers not distinguishing the words are bigger, right? Therefore this part of the article doesn't work quite the way it was stated and I will change it to: Just because teachers do not distinguish the words, it does not mean students cannot do it. 

That happened to me a couple of years ago, I was teaching a communication class and most of my students were teenagers, so I decided to let them choose and present their favorite songs. One of my students chose a song from Green Day (I'm trying to recall the title) and amazinlgy the cloze activity he designed was too easy for a big part of the class. Most of my students were familiar with the lyrics so they completed it faster than I did. I had heard the band before and the song a couple of times, but I discovered that day that my students were able to distinguish the English sounds better than I did. I was amazed and my students too, they believed as their teacher I should be able to know it all ... and that day we learned that was not true.

I remember the song now "Basket case", I will try to post it here just for the sake of learning how to link blogger and youtube.