Multimedia English Classroom

This tutorial video shows the old website. It was much more simple and basic but the idea behind it and the sections were the same, so it can help you anyway.


MULTIMEDIA ENGLISH CLASSROOM

		Hi, welcome to my website Multimedia English Classroom, where learning English is fun, funny and multimedia. If you want to learn English, real English, prepare for real life, but you don’t want to study, you want to have fun, then come to this website On this website you can learn English from scratch, or if you already know a bit, you can improve your English in a natural way because, to be honest, how many of you have been learning English for years and then you go to the country or meet a native and you can’t understand anything, because the language you’ve been learning is simplified, artificial English. So, here we’ve got authentic material for you to pick up the language just the same as you would if you go to the original country. It’s authentic material but with lots of comments on grammar, vocabulary, cultural references and everything you need to understand the videos. And, of course, the scripts. The dialogues written. My accent and my spelling are British but half the material posted here is American English. And you’ve got all sorts of nationalities, so that you can get used to all the accents. And now, let me show you around a bit and see what you can find here. It’s going to be a fast trip so fasten your seatbelt and get ready! Here’s a quick tutorial to show you what’s here. We’ll start with the music section. We can watch a video and also read the lyrics. There’s a feature called "easy reading" that will make letters bigger and easier to read, especially on an interactive whiteboard in class. We can turn this feature on and off at our convenience. Below the video, we’ve got explanations: the general meaning of the song, and maybe some comments, and then linguistic explanations about vocabulary, pronunciation and anything useful to understand the song better. Another nice surprise is when you double-click a word. A blue bubble opens with lots of information about it: meaning, pronunciation, translation, and much more. You can explore the different options here. Yet another feature you can find in most pages is the "Text-to-Speech". You select a word or sentence, then click on the "Text-to-Speech" (TTS) link and a robot will pronounce it for you. From any page, we’ve got a link to the corresponding section gallery and see all the previous posts in that section. At the top of every page there’s a navigation bar to move around the sections or go to the home page. Let’s go to the videos section now. We get to a list of present week's selection. Some of them come with a script, some are still waiting to get one, so you can practise free listenings. If we click on a picture, a video opens. And another section we can use is for listening activities. One new listening every week and a gallery with old posts. There’s also a section for video lessons, which usually come with additional explanations. And a nice section for slideshows, like PowerPoint Presentations. You can use the buttons under the slide to move forwards and backwards or simply click on the right or the left side of the picture. There’s also a button to turn the presentation into full screen. Another section is for multimedia activities of different kinds and levels. You can have fun with jokes. You can read them and also listen to them. They come with explanations and vocabulary to make sure you understand what’s so funny about it. There’s a section for phonetics which comes with sounds and all. They use mouse-over technology, so you only have to move the mouse over a phonetic symbol or an example and you can listen to it, so you can easily compare sounds. There are many different phonetic lessons, especially about British pronunciation. In the gadgets section you’ve got different areas, every area with gadgets of a different kind. Gadgets have links or material which is usually updated daily or weekly, so there’s always something new there. At the top of the home page there are also different sections. You can explore them. For instance, there’s a link to all the galleries, where we can find all the material previously posted here. If we click on the video gallery we’ll find more sections. One is for humour, one for movie trailers, for documentaries, cartoons, etc. Pages with videos are all basically the same, with all the features we saw at the music section in the beginning. There’s also a blog where you can express yourself and leave comments, suggestions, communicate with other students or even ask questions about the language and take a survey. Under the right menu on the home page, there are different links with explanations about what’s on this site and how to use it. But there’s still a very important section left. The section for beginners. There are lessons, videos, music and so on for students with just a basic knowledge of English. And there’s a course for absolute beginners starting from scratch. The videos in this course come with comments in English and in Spanish. And that’s all at this moment, but this web has been changing a lot, so in the future you might find new things or a new appearance. Oh yea, and all the videos can also go full-screen. So if you were curious enough to get to this point, now it’s time to go inside and have some fun. And every week we have new postings, so keep coming. See you here!