Nov 5

A Random Human. A Ready-Made Lesson?

communicative language teaching
An Unusual Website with Loads of ELT Potential...
What would your life have been like if you’d been born somewhere else... or several thousand years earlier?
I’ve just discovered Any Human Ever, a fascinating website that generates imagined life stories informed by historical and demographic data. And I think there’s loads of potential here for language teaching.
In this short video, I share some ideas for using it - one randomly generated person could give your learners plenty to talk about.


Video transcript - Any Human Ever

I’ve just discovered a fascinating website that I think has loads of potential for language teaching.

It’s called Any Human Ever, and the idea is really simple. More than 100 billion humans have lived on this planet and the site lets you randomly select one of them.

It chooses when they were born, where they lived and it creates a story of what their life might have been like, based on real historical and demographic data.

And for a language class, there’s so much you could do with this.

You’ve immediately got an interesting reading text, but you could also use it for vocabulary work, comprehension, discussion and comparison. What would your life have been like if you’d been born then? How different is this person’s life from yours? What surprised you?

You could even get different groups to generate different people and compare them.

Have a look - anyhumanever.com. I think this could make a brilliant little classroom resource.

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