I love using multimedia because I feel it gives meaning and relevancy to the spoken word. Many types of media can be easily found at local rental stores, or for those hard to find media files, I have heard that programs such as bittorrent, kazaa lite, WINMX, and Edonkey will locate ANYTHING you are looking for. Quite often it is useful to use the search engine of these programs to locate material related to a theme. For example if you are doing something on weather, it is handy to search for files with the words, “weather”, or “rain” etc, using these programs.

Tools for effectively using media in the classroom

Using Music

Using Movies

Using Computers

Worksheets and Ideas.

Only a sample at the moment. I love using Merry Melodies cartoons because they are funny, only run for 5-7 minutes, and quite often don't rely on dialogue. The kids favorites so far have been "One Froggy Evening" featuring the dancing and singing frog, and the Buggs Bunny cartoon where him and Elmer Fudd become inadvertently embroiled in The Marriage of Fiagoro opera. (The cartoons name is "The Hare of Seville" btw)

Spirited Away

Indiana Jones

Michael Jackson's Thriller

Penny Arcade Comics - I got the idea from this site. He had used the comics from the Penny Arcade website in class with his kids with some fantastic results. My kids also turned out similarly hilarious ideas.

Song Jeopardy

Matrix - An activity from Pejiboy Japan. I am going to put another up soon that is much better and aims at using directions.

Lord Of the Rings - Another activity from Pejiboy Japan

Mr Baseball - Cultural exchange with this great flick.

High Fidelity - From onestopesl. Good for more advanced learners.

Simpson's in Japan - More cultural exchange using this time THE SIMPSONS

Octopuses Garden - I hate the Beatles, but their music was made for ESL unfortunately. This is good for teaching prepositions.

Shiny Happy People - An easy (but annoying) song for low level kids

Tampopo - A very popular Japanese movie. This lesson worked well with my san nen seis because one they were familiar with the film and two they had just finished a lesson from the Sunshine JHS text about making some kind of kudamara dish or something. The language was therefore very relevant and familiar.

Song Jeopardy

Use the Jeopardy rules, but have kids listen to a song, filling in the categories as you listen. Kids might need to listen to the song twice.

Sample categories - Word Beginning with "___"

                            A Noun, verb, adjective, past tense verb, etc etc