Eddy's Temporary Web Page

This page contains links to a few activities for my students at Stirling, Durham and Newcastle.

Stirling

A Short History of the Computer

Test your knowledge of the history of the computer.

A Short History of the Short History of the Internet.

Test your knowledge of the history of the internet.

Matching Information to Media

Choose which media are best used to present different types of information.

Family Life with Frames

An example of a Hot Potatoes activity used in combination with another web page.

Durham

The activities below are examples of Hot Potatoes versions of some typical text book activities. You can link to these individually or move through them sequentially by clicking on the next button on the activity screen.

Timed reading.

Challenge yourself with some timed reading!

Short answer quiz.

This requires students to type in short sentences.

Matching exercise.

This is an example of a drag and drop matching activity.

Cloze.

This is a cloze activity.

Crossword puzzle.

This demonstrates a simple crossword puzzle.

Newcastle

EL3 and EL4

StoryBoard Exercises

These activities consist of texts in which every word has been deleted. You have to type in a word and click on the CHECK button. If this word is somewhere the text, every occurence of the word will be shown. You can see the whole text by clicking on the CHEAT button.

A good way to do these activities is:

1. Click on the CHEAT button so that you can read the whole text first.
2. Try to memorize as much of the text as you can in, say, 3 minutes.
3. When you are ready, click on OK to clear the text away.
4. The first words that you should try to enter are the ones you remember the easiest.
5. After you run out of words that you can remember, start typing in the words that all texts have like articles, prepositions, and verbs like be and have.
6. Next, you should start using your background knowledge to guess words. For example, you know that the article is about a dustman. What does a dustman collect? Rubbish.

Now, here are the activities.

1. The World's Highest Dustman!
   A true story about a very unusual dustman.
2. If You Want to Learn A Language, Get a Dog.
   Everyone has different ways of learning a language. This is one person's story about how a dog helped him to learn Russian.
3. The First Woman Doctor
   This is the story of a woman with great determination who succeeded in her ambition to become a doctor.

HotPotatoes Exercises

The following activities practice reading and vocabulary. To learn how to do them, just open them and try them. You'll soon see how it's done. All of these activities are timed.

1. Practice Reading Newspaper Leads
   A timed exercise to practice reading newspaper leads.
2. A Very Busy Morning
   Practice chronological order by re-ordering a scrambled paragraph.
3. World Refugees
   Reading practice with a multiple choice quiz.
4. Making Compound Nouns: City Vocabulary
   Practice making compound nouns with a matching exercise.
5. British and American English
   Test your knowledge of British and American English with a matching exercise.
6. Food Vocabulary
   Practice basic food vocabulary with a crossword puzzle.
7. Vague Expressions: What Do You Say When You Don't Know Exactly?
   A scrambled sentence exercise to practice talking in approximate terms.
8. Talking About Hong Kong
   A gap-filling exercise on Hong Kong.
9. Matching Idioms and Meanings
   An easy mathching exercise to practice the idioms we learned in class.
10. More Idioms Practice
    Six jumbled sentences to practice idioms using body part vocabulary.
11. Types of Headlines
    Practice identifying the purpose of different types of headlines.
12. Missing Words in Headlines
    A jumbled sentence activity using the words that are often missing from headlines.