Using Geocam in the classroom

Geocam has, at the moment, over 1000 cameras stationed throughout the world, constantly streaming images to your computer. You navigate around Geocam as you would in Google Maps. See the image above. Since it's streaming live, it's perfect as a tool to get students speaking in the present continuous. Be warned that since it's streaming images, you'd need a decent internet connection.

Of course, you don't have to restrict yourself to the present continuous. Students can practise the simple present and adjectives by describing the image. You can always ask them to choose the location themselves.

You can work on simple past by freezing a couple of images and asking them to compare the differences. See below.

You can practise predictions (future or past, depending on the point you freeze the images) as in the picture below:

What do you think they had been doing/are going to do? (Actually, the baby had to pee!)

It can also be used to demonstrate differences between countries, such as the time, the weather, etc.

If you have other interesting ideas on how to use Geocam in the classroom, please do share them with us here. 

I stumbled upon Geocam @ Ana Maria's Blog

    

Present Continuous Exercises 2

More practice on the present continuous tense. Click on the image to begin the quiz. Some may find these easier than the previous one:  

http://aclil2climb.blogspot.com/2010/03/present-continuous-activities.html

Teachers, please take note: some of my quizzes, like this one, for example, ask for an email. If an email is provided, the results will be sent automatically to it. This allows you to grade/check your students' progress. If you haven't got an email for this purpose, I'd suggest creating one for this purpose, and ask the students to provide that email in the quiz.

Present Continuous Activities

Here are a few activities for you to practice the present continuous. This one here is a fill-in-the-gap exercise. Use the present simple or the present continuous.Click here to begin.

This activity requires you to put jumbled words in their right order. There is also a dialogue exercise where you have to rearrange the jumbled sentences. Click here to begin.

Please note that there seems to be some bug in the software: when you've finished the quiz, it'll say 'sending email...'. This shouldn't take a long time. If you see that it keeps flashing that message, it's best to force the window to close or you and I will be bombarded with countless emails!