CLIL THROUGH VIDEO VIEWING

Happy New Year to you all, seminar members and blog  followers alike. Today I am writing to comment on  some great sites where students can learn about a wide range of content from different areas through video viewing.

I will start by  letting the new seminar members know about www.neok12.com. I wrote a post about it about four years ago so if you hear about this great site for the first time, you can have a glimpse about it here. To sum up, it is very clearly organized and it covers lots of different topics. It includes some interactive games, diagrams and quizzes but you have to pay to access them whereas the videos are for free.

A very nice site where students meet "the crew" formed by four teenagers who teach in a very entertaining way is studyjams.scholastic.com/studyjams. The content areas in this site are Maths and Science. Some of the documents are printable and there are some interactive tests, definitions of key vocabulary items and even some karaoke songs.

If you are looking for well organized content, www.watchknowlearn.org is a good choice. There are categories,  subcategories and an age filter. 

 Johnlocker.com was anonymously created in 2007 with the sole purpose of spreading and promoting knowledge. Johnlocker.com provides the venue for the public to “deposit” videos into its virtual video locker. Most videos on the internet can be automatically copied on Johnlocker by clicking on “Add Video” and pasting the URL. The videos you see on Johnlocker are there because someone thought that the video was good enough to share with others.

If you are interested in searching  for a good documentary and you wish to know about the content in an easy way, www.topdocumentaryfilms.com is a very suitable option. If you want to find the documentaries corresponding to a specific area, click on  documentary list section and you will access the most recent   documentaries in each category. Clicking on the category title you will find the whole list of documentaries. A very positive feature of this site is that it provides you with a description of the content as well as with comments by users.

Finally, I reckon all of you know about video.nationalgeographic.com. The reasons why I am mentioning it are mainly two: on the one hand, I cannot skip this site just because it is known to all of you since it offers really top quality. On the other hand, I would like to encourage you to make use of it in your CLIL contexts because it also includes content which is not necessarily heavy.

Once again, Happy New 2016 and welcome to our first session on January 19th, where we will talk about the topic I have just developed and also about strategies to foster academic writing in CLIL classes.