Thanks to Betsy Potash, the author of the marvellous space nowsparkcreativity.com ,  I have discovered and come to love one pagers- the response one pager, for example TedTalk one pagers like these: or hexagonal thinking templates, such as this one:   Both types are a wonderful way to afford student autonomy and creativity at the same time providing a framework to harness and channel those time and content-wise. They are much loved, universal yet personal tools that can be used to process and produce  language and content for numerous activities- listening and reading comprehension, class presentations and vocabulary work. (If you want to find out more, check out my presentation on one-pagers that I delivered during the recent IATEFL Poland conference- here )  Still, it is retrieval practice one-pagers that I find most useful these days. You may ask what these are- they are simple grids or tables where students put eg. vocabulary they manage to recall from las...

I know for a fact you all love Ted talks and use them in class, to practise listening, get students to learn new vocab, spark discussions.....The problem is the wonderfully creative and personal speeches often become just yet another predictable handout story, with activities to do and check in class. How to break this mould and get students to really process a Ted talk, its content and language at a very personal level?  Let me introduce Its Majesty the TedTalk One-pager, lo and behold:) How do we go about the one-pager? 1. Let students choose a tedtalk that they find appealing  (I recommend giving it a topic framework, for example- travelling, migration- anything that you're currently discussing) 2. Students watch it at their leisure and then complete the one-pager with: -the title, speaker, star rating - two most important quotes  - their response to the talk /takeaways - vocab to go (a few items that stuck) or the most important topics - questions to ask the speaker -...