i will be answering question 1 and 2
1- one of my favorite and most fun activities that i do in my class is telling the students things about me , or some funny situation happened with my friend for example , it always catches their attention because they feel it is more realistic, not like some prerecorded tape they hear and they cannot interact with it. we can go further and tell students anecdotes even if they were not real, we can relate that to us or to someone we know because the idea here is to interact with the activity not about personal facts ,by doing that i notice that students start to ask questions, for example about the meaning of a word or a location of a city or even about a specific type of food.
2- in a lesson , all ways and methods must be used for more variety of learning , in my class i use both interactive and non-interactive listening activities , why ? the interactive activities teach them how to make conversations and how to give their opinions in some topics.the non-interactive activities help them strengthens their listening sense if they were watching the news or listening to the radio or if they were in an airport or a metro station , the balance here is dividing the lesson time in half , one for each type of activities.