hi this is Russell Stannard from teachertrainingvideos.com
today I'm going to look at probably the most impressive repository of video content I've ever
seen in English it really is outstanding I've been playing around with it I've been using it I've
even been watching the videos they're so good now I must emphasize that this website is not free you
can test the material for a limited amount of time but as you'll see there's a lot of work and a lot
of investment that's gone into this technology and for that reason obviously the company are charging
however if you are a teacher or you're in a school and you've got an opportunity to sign up and use
this content I think you're going to be really impressed I don't cover many paid tools in fact
I think there's only four paid tools I've ever looked at on my website i try to focus on free
content but this particular website is really outstanding and the result is it needs to be
paid for let's take a look remember you can sign up and test it for free anyway
and I'm going to just take you through some of the key features that I like in sensations English
I hope you liked the video as always if you do please like it please share it with other teachers
please comment on it and of course join me on my YouTube channel let's get started the first
thing I like about this is the content there's so much interesting content here and a lot of it's
really contemporary it's all about latest news stories etc if you look at the top here you've
got community culture entertainment hard news innovation lifestyle natural world and if you look
at any of the topics there really are right up to date relevant things that students are going to
be interested in and they're not as bland as you often find in books and that's one of the things
i like i always felt that when we teach English sometimes we all keep to very safe topics and
often they're not hard hitting enough what I like about this content is the type of issues the type
the types of issues that it deals with in fact the video content is so good that I keep actually
using it I keep watching it myself just out of interest I mean this video here about coral reefs
and using technology to try to improve the quality or to expand the use of coral reefs now what I
want you to notice also is that you can select the level and this is really clever and something
I've never seen before you take a video but you can then watch that video at different levels
and so you know you I can listen to the commentary at level two or you could listen to the same video
at level c one and one thing I was thinking about I've not tried this yet is the possibility of say
for example working with a group of students let's say they're levels around a a1 a2 you might start
the video at a1 level and get the students to understand the basic concepts and get a basic
framework around the video and then watch the video at a higher level it's not something I've
done but it's often something I've thought about something that I've tried to introduce sometimes
when I'm teaching by doing things where we kind of skim and scan and look for basic information
at the beginning but then we go into greater depth and I think that this could be a really
interesting way of using this content so for this example I'm going to choose b1 intermediate I'm
going to click on here and the video is going to start playing coral reefs are dying off in
countries as far apart as panama Hong Kong and Cyprus this decline has prompted scientists and
volunteers to turn to technology to find solutions okay now again something else that I really like
is that of course you've got the um the actual subtitles along with the content
but I could actually watch that same video a completely different level and it means that the
commentary is adjusted to fit the level though the content of the video is more or less the same it
is slightly different but what I really like apart from the transcripts is simply the quality of the
audio it's real professional kind of high standard content
This is a coral reef coral reefs are dying all over the world
scientists want to save the coral reefs now I can really see this content being powerful both from a
teaching point of view and using with our students because I think the topics are so interesting but
also a student working on their own for example I'm studying polish it would be a dream for me to
have this kind of content available in polish and where I could jump perhaps between level a1 and a2
Nice, clear, simple way of accessing the content you've got the kind of topics here so we can go to
things like hard news we can go to innovation people these days are very interesting things
about technology but of course the natural world and the environment is also really important
we can click here and simply go to all lessons that just gives you a huge great list of all
the videos and of content that's available and there is masses of it but they've also got games
and tools okay so you've got activities that you can do uh around the technology and around the
language and in fact there's a number of them here as well just really quickly to let you know that
on the 27th of may 2021 I am doing a free webinar on using video in ELT I will look at English
sensations but I will also look at some other things about teaching video some of the theory
behind the flipped classroom I'll talk about this idea of the springboard I'll show you a few
technologies that I use to link into video content as well and how I use it with my students in the
class and get them engaged in it the webinar is free and I'm going to put the registration below
this video in the description in case you're interested let's get back to sensations English
when I make these videos um I simply look for different content on the internet from
suggestions a teacher have sent me and then if I like something and I've worked with it and
perhaps I've tried it out and I like it I make a video so no one ever sponsors me to do these
videos and I must say just being completely honest here I don't think the games and the tools are
as good as the content there's some nice stuff in here but i think there's still a little bit
of potential I'm just going to explain to you a couple of the things that I've been looking at um
that i kind of like but I think could be a little bit better so if we click just to let
point you out you've actually got quite a number of different things and I've said some of them
are pretty good but some of them I think they could be improved if I look at this one here
it's a nice idea you can shadow the commentary uh that you're listening to so the idea here
is that you can kind of listen to the sentence and then you can read uh listen back the only problem
with this is that I've noticed that it's not been levelled and so this would be difficult obviously
for a high level student to do this particular activity but the idea here is that you can click
karate is growing in popularity in Pakistan and then you can you can actually do your recording
and then you can submit it now I'm guessing the submission part really is if you're working with a
teacher but the fact that you could click on here karate is growing in popularity in Pakistan and
click on stop and then you can submit I think you can listen back again on here karate is growing
in popularity but I do like this idea but i think that particular activity would need to be levelled
the games there's a couple of missed opportunities I generally like the games they're not as strong
as the quality of the video content is for me the video content is really powerful but if we just
took this second quick example here where we're basically listening to a sentence that we have to
complete so we'll choose level b2 we'll play the game and what happens is we get a sentence and
then we need to finish it and we have to listen here now it's a bit of a shame that they haven't
read out the whole sentence rather it only plays the last two words but let's have a quick listen
turn two so then you would write the word turn sorry turn oh god come and here sorry
I'm trying to look at my screen and uh okay turn two and then obviously you would check your answer
and hopefully I got that correct and then obviously would move on to the next question
so um yeah some really lovely content the games are pretty good they're not as good as the
quality of the content I would personally say it's the best video content that I've
ever seen for learning English language teaching and certainly if I was teaching in class
I would be making use of it obviously I totally understand that we do have to consider
with this particular tool that it's paid let's have a quick look at the prices to finish with
so you can sign up for free you get access to the website for seven days you don't need
to give a credit card or anything like that so it's definitely worth doing that and if you want
to look at the pricing the six months plan works out at seven dollars a month for just over seven
dollars and the three month plan works uh works out at nine dollars you do get a lot of content
speak to your bosses encourage your bosses of different schools universities institutions to pay
if you can if you're teaching on your own private lessons it really might be an investment worth
making if you are looking for interesting content and particularly if you've got quite
a few students and it's economically viable I'm sorry that the website I'm showing you isn't free
sometimes products that obviously cost a lot of money to make they need to charge hope
that video was useful please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com loads more
free content there's a special section actually on languages and most of the technologies that I
highlight off are free or they have a free option so please have a look at the free
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webinars the blog posts the online courses that I run and of course all the new videos
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