Teaching with computers? Looking for a fun Halloween lesson? Here’s one that upper-intermediate English language learners are sure to enjoy!

1. Start with a brief schema-building discussion of Halloween, the Peanuts characters, and what Halloween means to Linus. This article at Wikipedia provides lots of helpful background information.

2. Watch the movie clip together as a class, and then play some or all of the audio file about Linus for dictation practice.

3. Next, have students download this gap-fill sheet to their computers (alternatively, supply  files via Moodle or other CMS) and do the activity independently.

4. Direct students who finish early to this related listening activity about pumpkins at listen-and-write.com.

5. Check gap-fill answers, and if time allows, do a wrap up of the day’s activities.

Happy Halloween!

A colleague from the Yahoo group Learning with Computers asks if there isn’t a better way to import MS Word-formatted text into his WordPress posts without the tedious process of first stripping out the formatting.

I’m happy to report that WordPress has a feature that allows you to directly paste in text that was originally created and formatted with MS Word.

(NOTE: At present, this feature is not available in free blog accounts hosted by WordPress.com.)

From your dashboard, choose Edit or Add New from the Post menu. If only one row of icons is showing, click the right-most icon to toggle “kitchen sink” mode.

This will open a second row of icons directly beneath the first row. Near the middle of the second row, you should see a little folder-looking icon with “W” (for Word) on it.

Click this icon, and in the new pop-up window, paste in your text from MS Word. Then click on Insert to bring the text into your post.

Finally, publish your post, and you’re finished.

The resulting text should appear no differently than what you would get by manually typing text into the post.