Niamh's classroom

  I've been using this website in classes to have students guess a world location. It is great for all levels to discuss vocabulary about shops, the environment, the climate, fashion, and around town. The website places you in a random city with a person walking around. The goal is to guess where in the world is the city. You can have students observe what they can see, and use hedging language to make a guess.  You can even make it competitive by having two teams see who makes the closest guess.  There is also a monuments setting to have students speculate about famous world sites. This is great for modules on tourism! We even had one turn where some eagle-eyed students spotted the Eiffel Tower! City Guesser link

What's the point? After spending hours browsing the subreddit dataisbeautiful  and staring at the pages of David McCandless' 2009 book  Information is Beautiful , I decided a while ago I needed to start to incorporate data visualisation into my ESL classes. Don't get me wrong, I hate graphs as much as the next humanities student but when data is displayed in a visually stimulating way I can stay focused.  You might be asking, what's the point in this for an English learner? And honestly, that's a fair question. But I've taught many Academic IELTS preparation classes and this is a fun way to practise for task 1 of the written exam - which is a graph, diagram, table, map or chart interpretation.  Even for those not taking an exam, practising vocabulary associated with change and data is incredibly useful. Verbs such as 'diminish', 'increase', 'stabilise',  'decline', 'plummet', 'fluctuate', and 'vary' are be...

Music Genre Map  A great resource for seeing how genres are interconnected. Available here . Similar Artist Cloud A nice way to learn about similar artists. Available here . Sampulator MPC style sample player. Useful for demonstrating rhythms. Available here . Chrome music lab Range of musical tools, such as a rhythm generator and an oscillator demonstrator. Available here .