Lingro Language Learner Enter any Website to make all words clickable, as WordChamp does on this site. Lingro remembers all the words you look up, so you can easily review and study them. So does WordChamp.com, once you have become a member!
Top Toolbox for Learning New Words! Cobbs LexTutor Offers English / French Dictionary / Concordancer; Text-to-Speech & Word Learning Tests & Tools.
Hypertext Builder (from LexTutor) Build resource-linked texts for online reading. Wire your own texts so Language Learners can use the support of: E Audio with Text-to-Speech (TTS) sound E Concordance + Dictionary/Dictionary only (Monolingual or Bilingual for Chinese, Japanese, Spanish or French (so far) E Reading-plus: Provides resources to understand every word in any text!
Mr. B's English Learning Links: Cool links for learning English in outline form! I. Reading Links II. Writing and Essay Advice III. Speeches IV. Listening/Speaking V. Intercultural Learning Links VI. Dictionary Sites (Learner- & Other) VII. TOEFL / TOEIC VIII. Technical English & Language Learning Technology IX. Email Keypals X. More English Learning Links
Intercultural Sites InterCultural Insights Using the Internet: Links & Learning Ideas for Internet Intercultural Instruction & Exploring!
World of Reading The Largest Language Learning Software Shop Mention CALL4ALL to get a discount!
Speakaboos provides excellent quality talking stories on video with closed-captioning often read by celebrities. They are also going to add the ability to record stories and other online activities. You can watch the stories without registering, though you will have to sign-up (for free) to record stories.
Slideshare is an easy-to-use site that allows you to upload your presentations, share them with others, and also create a text-based "transcript" of the text on all of the slides. In addition, there are thousands of presentations to search for, preview, download, and edit for use with your classes.
At last years Educause conference, in Seattle, educators pondered what to do about students technology habits. George Siemens notes that The key concept I'm seeing in the use of technology in the service of education is that of enlargement. New technologies are not necessarily replacing existing approaches; instead, they are enlarging the range of options for learners. We're not doing away with email. Or even learning management systems. We're adding blogs, wikis, social networking, virtual worlds, and numerous other technologies to current practices. And that's exactly how it should be. It's difficult to predict which technologies with survive and which will fade. A spirit of perpetual experimentation is needed. Try many approaches. Stick with the ones that demonstrate some promise.
What's Web 2.0 Storytelling? It's "the telling of stories using Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and strategies".
Alan Levine and Bryan Alexander have published an important article about it:
When new faculty or training professionals encounter read/write tools (blogs, wikis, video, podcasts, etc) the initial excitement usually turns to "oh, but how will I use this beyond posting blogs for students?" The focus of this article is on using Storytelling (Narrative) to assist faculty and students to better make use of technology that offers personal control (as noted by G. Siemens)
With Picture Book Maker, you can easily create apicture book (including text). It can be saved online or printed out. It's super-easy to use, plus no registration is required. The url of your creation can be posted on a student/teacher blog or website.
Snapgrades: Student Online Grader
Extremely useful free version with fewer features but option to upgrade anytime to full version.
Online Tutorials from Union County College to help students think about their language learning goals while doing any language learning activity, especially when using software or online. These tutorials are designed to help ESL students and faculty use ESL software, as well as web-based ESL programs, in ways that will be most beneficial for language learning. Included here are suggestions and strategies for improving their listening, grammar, and vocabulary skills.
Seesmic is an asynchronous video messaging system founded by Loic Le Meur, that you can use pretty much like Twitter. Anyone who is registered, can post a video message about anything, and people can then start adding video replies to it. You can choose whether to follow all public videos, or subscribe to the ones you are interested in. The cool collaborative feature is that you can use Seesmic to power your own blog site comments, allowing people to comment back with their own video clips. Free to use.
Reviews seven different screen-sharing technologies selected as being the most representative options for showing your computer screen remotely on the Internet. Companies/products showcased are: Glance, GoToMeeting, Linktivity WebDemo, eBLVD, Netviewer, Seemyscreen.
Plain Language is language that matches the reading level of your audience. Plain language increases comprehension, retention, reading speed, and persistence. All of this reduces costs and improves your bottom line. If you are not using plain language, you are wasting money. It is the best investment you can make.
Smart Language
Readers, Readability, and the Grading of Text with Book Surge: Bill DuBay has just published a work very central to the concerns of ER.
All these lists are connected by simple mouse-clicks to both a speech engine and a large corpus of natural English. So each word can be heard and met in a variety of contexts. Use these lists systematically and your English 1k, 2k, AWL/UWL vocabulary learning will be well under way. You will more readily recognize these words each time you meet them again and learn even more.
Test how well you know the 2000, 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 and UWL lists. Then fill in any gaps you find to build the strong vocabulary you need to be a good English reader.
Tafiti.com is probably the most versatile Search Engine yet designed. This great new search service - Tafiti (built with Silverlight) is built by Microsoft. Use it to quickly search not only the Web but also Halo Blogs, News, Photo Images, RSS Feeds. Then filter, save or share them with anyone, anywhere! Truly amazing! It loads quickly and adds great additional functionality/ interactivity to sites. After a few minutes with Tafiti - saving and tagging searches - all sorts of ideas/options/uses come to mind. Clicking on the tree view gives a visual representation of key areas...and the user can drag the slide bar to "seedling" or "full tree" size.
SEARCH ENGINES FOR CHILDREN AND LIMITED ENGLISH USERS
Simple Search Engines: ones that guide people to sheltered sites are a good way to encourage children or students with limited proficiency in English to use Internet without getting lost or frustrated. As Helgesen writes: By giving our students these URLs, we can make them more independent. They can start to seek out English language sites that they can read and understand on their own. Although the search engines are actually designed for native-speaking children, the sites they find are often suitable for adult and young adult language students. This is especially true for nonfiction topics, since they are often presented in ways that are not particularly childlike. Not only is the information found by these search engines usually presented at a vocabulary level learners can handle, the ideas are often presented more simply and slowly than on sites designed for adult native speakers. (Helgesen in Bamford and Days Extensive Reading Activities for Teaching Language, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pages 40-41).
The kids section of AskJeeves search engine. Although it does not show lists of previously identified Websites, AJKids has three major advantages over other engines. First, the learners can ask ordinary questions rather than just typing in target words. Second, the search engine will forgive spelling or typing mistakes. As long as you type something reasonably close, it will usually understand what you mean. Finally, it gives you a maximum of ten possibilities (along with up to ten from other sites). So you or your students wont end up with an overwhelming list of hundreds of hits (suggested Websites).
At KidsClick! Websites selected by librarians are identified by reading level. At the end of each Website description, a reading level range is given. Your students will soon find which levels they can read easily.
The section of Yahoo.com for kids. Information about cultures and countries is very interesting, useful, and understandable. Topics are broad-ranging. Try the category Around the World to can find things you are learning about in other classes.
Go to the category Cool Spots. Then search for your key words or explore some of the sites theyve already identified. This search engine lets you choose between Find all of my words and Find ANY of my words as you search. This helps students start thinking about how to search effectively.
A great search site for ESL and English as a Second Language Programs around the world, constructed to make navigation easy and stress free - students can contact schools directly through the schools profile page. You can search the site in English the site in five new languages, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and many more.... Search their worldwide directory database or search by school locations, including these:
Australia; Belgium; Brazil; Canada; Chile; China; Czech; Republic; France; Germany; Indonesia; Ireland; Malta; Mexico; New Zealand; Poland; Portugal; Singapore; South Africa; Spain; Switzerland; Thailand; Trinidad and Tobago; UK; USA
The ATLAS project of University College London addresses the decline in the number of students studying languages at university. It has investigated school students' attitudes towards language learning and engaged them in "tasting" languages not previously considered, or available, for study. The aim is to arouse an interest in studying these and other languages.
Worlds largest source for computerized translation products from many companies. Computerized dictionaries, with ability to point at a word on the screen and obtain possible translations in a balloon next to it.
Network of ESL/EFL schools with more than 65 learning centres across Indonesia. Offers a complete range of English courses for all age groups from kids, teens to adults at all levels.
offers free university level religious education via distance learning in 192 countries! Arabic, Creole, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and Thai.
Areas covered are Bible backgrounds, biblical exegesis, church history, comparative religion, ministry and missions, spirituality, New Testament, Old Testament, and theology.
Association of Christian Schools Internationals up-to-date information regarding ACSI and its programs and services to Christian schools and educators worldwide. Most current site available in 8 languages.
Three choices from the most popular homeschool academies in the United States. Teacher-Led The Grace Academy, The Teacher-Led, Accredited and Registered. The MorningStar Academy private Christian school or Parent-Led. The Jubilee Academy. All include all curriculum materials, including traditional texts, e-books, workbooks, CDs, CD-ROMs and more, Special private student homeroom, grade books, teacher comments and suggestions, transcripts, grading system, course calendar, accountability, student social center, private parent entrance, school mail, complete student services access and so very much more. All from a Bible-based world view.
An online language school that brings the English or Spanish language classroom to busy people who don't have the time to attend regular classroom lessons. Provides one-to-one teaching by video link, by telephone or by email.
Learn Spanish language in three different enigmatic places of the Inca Empire in the archeological capital Cusco, Urubamba - Sacred Valley of Incas - and Rainforest of Manu.
Free online web Dictionary and Thesaurus linking reference tool. Transforms any webpage into easy convenient links to definition and word lookups both English and Spanish.
Linc School of Spanish Seville is a professional Spanish language school in the historic center of Seville, Spain. We offer eight accredited Spanish language courses in Spain, along with cultural activities, and accommodation assistance.
"Anacleta's Spanish and World Language and Culture Links and Resources" is a comprehensive source of materials and activities for creatively teaching and learning about the Spanish language and its many cultures, as well as other world languages and cultures. The design and focus of the site are especially suited for children under ten and their parents and FLES and bilingual teachers.
Top 10 Sites/Applications for Creating Screencasts
Creating screencasts has been one of my favorite things to do when working w/ technology. I have used this as a tool for teachers or students to help them w/ troubleshooting or even professional development. Wikipedia states, "Educators are now using screencasts as another means of integrating technology into the curriculum. Students can record video and audio as they demonstrate the proper procedure to solve a problem on an interactive whiteboard." - written by dkapuler
Has the ability to record audio and add subtitles. All you do after you log-in is click on a button, open up the window on your screen that you want to record, and it starts recording your screen. After thats been recorded, you can provide audio or subtitles.
Automatically adapts to your spelling ability. It remembers which words you got right and wrong and quizzes you periodically on words at your spelling level that you spelled incorrectly in the past. A human voice, and not a computerized one, says the words. Plus, it shows you a diagram of similar words. It doesnt give you a sentence example using the word.
This offers some of the latest articles from the World Service, all with written text and the facility to hear them read aloud. There is help with vocabulary, quizzes, a special section for Business English and also a large archive of previous material.
This is another part of the BBC site (not part of the World Service) which provides a lot of their English listening material. Again, topics are contemporary and often have a business flavour. There are quizzes accompanying every article and a large resource bank of previous articles and quizzes.
I suggest trying some of the VOA (Voice of America Radio & Web-Broadcast) or BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) sites. Students can listen and read at the same time and all the articles are contemporary. Not all are business-related, but most are. You need a Real Player plug-in to listen to the news articles, but they can be downloaded directly from the site. Downloading the actual audio is very quick, but will depend on your connection speed.
Radio Programs in simplified, specialized English. Learners can read and listen at the same time. These programs use a simplified form of English to make listening to the radio easier for you.
A video instructional series in English as a second language for college and high school classrooms and adult learners; 50 fifteen-minute video programs and coordinated books.
CONVERSE WITH A ROBOT
More of the worlds best English language learning links chosen by ESL All
Have you ever had the chance to converse with a robot? It is one of the most fun ways to improve your written English. Some online bots can even help you sharpen your listening skills since you can "hear" their answers to your comments or questions. Since one cant always find a real human being to practice with, try befriending and chatting with these friendly artificial intelligence bots online. Each of them has a distinct personality that, thanks to their creators, evolves over time as they become more sophisticated. Bots do not always understand what you write and they do not always answer in a sensible manner. However, you will be surprised at how "artificially" intelligent and funny some of them can be! ESL All selected these ten favourite English-speaking online bots for you to meet and converse with:
A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity): One of the the most popular robots online. She can tell lies, spread gossip and can even ask you to teach her some foreign phrases. She is not always on course but is sure to be lots of fun for students of intermediate and advanced levels.
ELBOT: A very nice and funny bot that likes to joke around. It is based on the German-language bot called Charlie. Push Elbot's red button and start a conversation. The English version has been online since the Spring of 2001.
ELLA: The Ella bot is the winner of the 2002 Loebner Prize Contest for "Most Human Computer". You will find her charming, humorous and witty. Her interface uses multiple images and text display boxes. Ella enjoys Atlantic City style Blackjack and spinning her slot machine. She tells I Ching fortunes and performs many other useful functions. Her lexical database contains more than 120, 000 entries (thousands of jokes, trivia, anecdotes, poems, etc.).
John Lennon (JLAIP): More than just another chat bot, here is an attempt at recreating the personality of the late Beatle, John Lennon, by programming an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine with Lennon's own words and thoughts and conversations people had with him.
Cybelle: Cybelle is half-robot, half-woman, and 100% virtual. She is curious, has a good sense of humour and is quite articulate on a number of subjects. Cybelle guides visitors through the AgentLand website that specializes in search agents, personal assistants, shopbots, and other web agents and bots.
CARA (Conversation Analysis Research Avatar): The CARA bot has many incarnations: CARA 100, 300 or 500. These three different bots have varying degrees or artificial intelligence. The bots stream audio to answer what you type. So it is important that you turn on your speakers and listen to and watch them carefully. Requires the Shockwave Director plugin and an active internet connection.
RUBY: Converse with a robot who says it will teach you to dream. You can ask Ruby about all kinds of topics such as life, love and movies. Try to keep your questions short and enjoy Ruby's wisdom.
ELIZA: Converse with Eliza, the computerised psychiatrist. You can talk to her about your personal problems. No kidding! You can also download for free more recent versions of that online bot at:
The Natural Language Question Answering System is part of the MIT InfoLab Group's intelligent interactive software systems. The software system is designed to answer questions that are posed to it in natural language. It helps people access information and solve problems on human terms.
Mr. Mind: You have to prove to MRMIND that you are not a machine. MRMIND is a computer program, not a human! He requires patience as he tries to respond to you. He doesn't think or understand or feel.... but he isn't so sure that you do either. The creators of the program will be reading the logs, so mind what you say and have fun!
offers original song lyrics for many areas of life.
A resource for songs about: peace, justice, compassion, conflict, resolution, nonviolence, anti-bias, fear, grief, bullying, patriotic songs, the global family.
SONGS: USING SONGS AND SONG LYRICS TO BUILD VOCABULARY
Read song lyrics and try to understand the messages contained in your favorite songs. We also encourage you to sing along, which is an excellent way to better your English pronunciation.
Large collection of lyrics of all genres and ages. Its a place where all searches end! They have a large, every day growing universe of lyrics where stars of all genres and ages shine.
Searching for lyrics to a song can be a daunting task, but not with these Top Ten Lyric Search Engines. Find a song lyric, do a song search by lyric, and more. Find the song lyrics youre searching for on the Web quickly and easily!
Get Lyrical is an excellent lyrics search engine. You can search by song lyric, artist, song, or album. And if you still cant find the song youre looking for in their excellent (and sizable) lyrics database, you can check out the Get Lyrical Message Boards and ask the community there to help you figure out a song lyric. Fast and easy lyric search, good, relevant results - I highly recommend Get Lyrical for your lyric search needs.
The thing I like most about Lyrics Robot is their absolutely huge artist directory. Just click on any of the alphabet letters on the Lyrics Robot home page and youll retrieve a wide range of artists. Lyrics Robot claims to have 3 Million Entries - 500,000 Songs - 40,000 Artists, which is obviously a lot. The lyric search process seems a bit clunky, but I was still able to find some good answers. Sort your lyric search results by site to get a more organized lyric search results page.
Search over 100,000 songs with LyricSearch.net. I was able to find good results with my search for what the world needs now, including other songs and albums of Burt Bacharach that I didnt even know existed. All lyric search results for LyricSearch.net open in a new window;I didnt much like this but its a small issue. Good index of lyrics and easily implemented lyric search.
MetroLyrics features over 262,000 music lyrics (thats quite a few), but even better than MetroLyrics lyric search are the various music categories that they have available, such as list of artists by music genre, Top 100 Most Popular lyrics, and Christmas music, which at the time of this writing spanned over 20 jam-packed pages.
Simple and uncluttered, MLFinder delivers fast and relevant results with a few little extras: look at your lyric search results and youll see when that song was added, an opportunity to buy the song lyric (sheet music), buy posters of the artist, or send that lyric to a friend. MLFinder has 10,000+ artists - 1,000,000+ song lyrics & growing. Dont forget to check out the Billboard Hot 100; click on any of the song URLs and youll be taken to that songs lyrics.
Rock Wisdom features an immense database of song quotes-the main purpose of this collection of quotes from Rock and Roll music is to celebrate and provide a documented reference to an under appreciated form of literature. You can search by subject, search by artist,browser through popular artists, get a random rock quote, or look up the full lyrics (this links to outside sites). Over 70 categories of Rock Wisdom goodness; this site is an online archive of sorts for rock and roll history.
Search lyrics by artist, song, or keyphrase with Lyrical Discord. The most popular songs are featured right on the front page. heres an example of what I liked most about Lyrical Discord-I did a search for hard days night and not only did it bring up the classic Beatles song, but also other song lyrics in that album, all song lyrics by that artist and other albums by that artist. A nice touch for anyone whos not looking for song lyrics alone.
A to Z Lyrics Universe features over 50,000 searchable song lyrics. You can browse by artist or band name in their alphabetical directory, or you can just type in a lyric snippet. Song lyrics results will open up in a new window. A to Z Lyrics Universe features mostly newer songs from the year 2000 and up; lots of hip-hop, Top 40 kind of stuff here.
In addition to a strong lyric search experience (over 74,000 songs indexed at the time of this writing), Songme.com also offers some unique user features such as artist birthdays displayed on the front page, DailyKeys, links to the most popular song requests by day, and a list on the far left side of the Top 20 Albums (with links to these albums lyrics) on Songme.com.
Lyrics Spot not only has a sizable database of lyrics-over 160,000 at the time of this writing-but they offer CD cover images of whatever artist youre looking for as well. Search by artist, album or song, browse the alphabetical directory, check out Lyrics Spots top songs, or check out the Billboard Top 12 albums, with links to song lyrics.
SCIENTIFIC MAGAZINE ARTICLES FOR AUTHENTIC READING:
(Read critically. Everything you read may not be scientifically correct or true!)
Screencast.com is an easy and affordable media hosting solution for business and academic professionals who want to share multimedia content on the Web.
Great CALL4ALL recommended language learning programs at a reasonable price. All programs are hybrid CDs, for use on either Mac or Windows computers. All of these Language Learning Software Programs have been tested and approved by CALL4ALL.US for their effectiveness in helping with language learning.
Dictionaries, word lookups, computer terms, (European languages) text translator, web page translator, and more language tools, such as specialized dictionaries and thesauri, crossword and scrabble solvers, more translators, etc.
Webopedia is an online computer dictionary for computer and internet terms and definitions. As such, its the only online dictionary and search engine you need for computer and internet technology definitions.
The searchCrystal Widget visualizes the overlap between the result sets of five major search engines. The Full Version of searchCrystal also supports image and text analysis techniques that can be used to detect duplicates and topical relationships. SearchCrystal lets you search and compare multiple engines in one place. It serves as a HUGE Search Visualization Tool that enables you to compare, remix and share results from the best web, image, video, blog, tagging, news engines, Flickr images or RSS feeds. You can embed searchCrystal as a Widget on your site or blog to share personalized crystals, or use it to find out what is popular on Wikipedia or use the Search Analytics Toolbox in your browser as a powerful competitive intelligence tool. A searchCrystal application is also available in Facebook.
The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners 2008, its simplicity makes it very attractive for English Language Learners. After you type in your query at Mel Zoo, you see what appears to be more or less the typical kind of text results youd find in other search engines. The key advantage the engine has for both ELLs and others is that as you move the cursor down the text listing on the left side, the website itself is shown on the right side. This capability makes it very accessible to English Language Learners.
Shahi Dictionary is a dictionary that combines simple definitions with quite a few Flickr photos. The combination of the two makes it pretty accessible to English Language Learners.
Dogpile.com makes searching the Web easy, because it has all the best search engines piled into one. So you get better results from more of the web. More engines. Better Answers. Metasearch engine offering search of the general web, or images, audio, video and news. Also offers search of Yellow Pages and White Pages.
A unique web directory targeted for the education industry. A list of good educational websites; from high school to masters degree colleges and distance learning programs.
(Chinese:?? Hanyu Pinyin:Sougou) a Chinese search engine which can search text, images, music, and maps. It is owned by Sohu, Inc., and is one of the fastest growing search engines in China.
My Language provides access to News Sources, Search Engines and Web Directories in over 60 languages! MyLanguage is a portal providing access to Search Engines Web Directories and other online information resources in 60 community languages in Australia. MyLanguage is a partnership between the State Libraries of NSW, QLD, SA, VIC, and WA and the NT and ACT Library and Information Services. They are very useful Printer-friendly Websites, Community-based language resources, Online Email Services. Information includes Local History and Entertainment, Government Departments in Australia, Current Affairs and News, Online Directories and other Library Catalogues. World News free full-text news and weather around the world. Top Online Email Services using GMail (free web-based Email from Google). MSN Hotmail free web-based Email from Microsoft Network. Yahoo! Mail free web-based Email from Yahoo!
SEARCH ENGINES (GENERAL) - MOTORES DE BUSCA (GERAIS)
Applications designed to protect you from outside threats, such as adware and spyware, are becoming so rigid in their default settings that they can block you from accessing useful content online...
Fourier portable data logging devices and handy science kits make learning Science exciting by taking kids out of the classroom and into the real world. Students can explore ideas and concepts relevant to their everyday life, such as effect of global warming on the climate, the dangers of pollution, how oxygen and pH levels can affect plant life in a pond ecosystem, how temperatures change with the sun's position in the sky, and a whole lot more. Tedious and time consuming data collection tasks are made easy with our data logging devices, leaving students free to focus on more engaging activities such as planning the experiment, thinking about the concepts, linking the new scientific facts they are learning about with what they already know.
With Earth's new Sky feature, you can zoom in to distant galaxies and nebulae, view constellations and the movements of the planets, learn about the lifecycle of a star and different kinds of galaxies, and create and share your own imagery, placemarks and more.
Sky in Google Earth lets you explore the heavens like never before, showing about a hundred million stars and two hundred million galaxies. You Tube Demo.
Sites that promote social interaction between people who have never met can be dangerous. Some most popular with young people to monitor very carefully are www.MySpace.com.
Has a reportline link for victims of cyberbullying, their schools and parents where specially-trained volunteers assist victims of cyberstalking, harassment and cyberbullying without charge. Contact abuse@myspace.com. Cyberbullying is a growing problem. You can learn more about it, as well as how to prevent and handle cyberbullying incidents, at WiredSafetys StopCyberbullying.org and InternetSuperheroes.org.
If schools are looking for a presentation or program to address their students posting inappropriate profiles or using these websites while underage or other parent concerns, they should visit any of these three. Schools may find many of their students using a particular website. Working together with schools and parents, we may be able to keep our kids off of websites that are inappropriate for young children (or for decent adults as well!) and teach them to make good choices online and offline.
Ning allows you to create the profile questions, upload all types of media, and more. Use a private social network to create an interest inventory for the students in your class!
Students tell Universities Get out of MySpace, Get out of my Face(book)! Social Networking sites could soon replace the student union bar as a venue for meeting and chatting, effectively making online distance learning more user friendly. Phipps: "The challenge for higher education is to learn how to integrate the social networking sites with traditional academic practice and traditional ICT systems."
With a simple browser plug-in, Diigo allows you save, share, and organize your favorite site lists. This URL leads you to a collection of Web 2.0 tools.
At last years Educause conference, in Seattle, educators pondered what to do about students technology habits. George Siemens notes that The key concept I'm seeing in the use of technology in the service of education is that of enlargement. New technologies are not necessarily replacing existing approaches; instead, they are enlarging the range of options for learners. We're not doing away with email. Or even learning management systems. We're adding blogs, wikis, social networking, virtual worlds, and numerous other technologies to current practices. And that's exactly how it should be. It's difficult to predict which technologies with survive and which will fade. A spirit of perpetual experimentation is needed. Try many approaches. Stick with the ones that demonstrate some promise.
What's Web 2.0 Storytelling? It's "the telling of stories using Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and strategies".
Alan Levine and Bryan Alexander have published an important article about it:
When new faculty or training professionals encounter read/write tools (blogs, wikis, video, podcasts, etc) the initial excitement usually turns to "oh, but how will I use this beyond posting blogs for students?" The focus of this article is on using Storytelling (Narrative) to assist faculty and students to better make use of technology that offers personal control (as noted by G. Siemens)
An add-on to Google Earth which allows astronomers to glide through images of more than one million stars and 200 million galaxies. Optional layers allow users to explore images from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as animations of lunar cycles.
A free open source tool that gives people a chance to access more than 210 million stars, in addition to planets and moons. Used in many planetariums the project was launched in 2001 by Fabien Chereau, formerly a research engineer at the Paris Astronomical Observatory who now works at the ESO (European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere). Like WorldWide Telescope the software allows users to record and play their own tours of the Universe.
SKWRL is a Learning Management System that Andy Johnson created. With SKWRL, teachers can create various tasks including audio- and video-based ones. There are currently over 8 different activities that can be created. Additionally, there is an advanced gradebook feature that lets teachers keep track of computer-graded activities as well as non-computer graded items such as attendance and classroom participation. While not as eloquent as Moodle, SKWRL does have some distinct advantages.
Second Life is not a Web site, but a MUVE (Multiple User Virtual Environment).
A client piece of software runs on your computer, but the rest of the time you are on one of 3000+ servers hosted by the company that runs Second Life, Linden Labs. The environment will remind you of the computer program, The Sims, but it is so much more! Working in Second Life (SL) you can collaborate with ed-tech leaders in Real Life (RL), and learn how to do some modeling and scripting with a 3-D modeling language.
www.fonetiks.org provides online pronunciation guides to 9 varieties of the English language and 9 other languages Instant sound Pronunciation samples by over 40 native speakers All 1,000+ pages free Just click on a flag to open a dictionary!
Warning Labels, Signs and Tombstone Generators also available here. Great Writing Idea: Make up your own Tombstone or Epitaph and tell what youd like to be remembered as/for.
Storyspace is a hypertext writing environment that is especially well suited to large, complex, and challenging hypertexts. Storyspace focuses on the process of writing, making it easy and pleasant to link, revise, and reorganize.
schMOOze U. is a small, friendly college known for its hospitality and the diversity of the student population. It was established in July, 1994 as a place where people studying English as a second or foreign language could practice English while sharing ideas and experiences with other learners and practicers of English. Students have opportunities for one-on-one and group conversations as well as access to language games such as Scrabble and Boggle, an on-line dictionary, a virtual library and a grammar maze. Although schMOOze U. was founded with ESL/EFL students in mind, it welcomes all people interested in cross-cultural communication.
The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to develop the SeaMonkey all-in-one internet application suite. Such a software suite was previously made popular by Netscape and Mozilla, and the SeaMonkey project continues to develop and deliver high-quality updates to this concept. Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey appeals to advanced users, web developers and corporate users.
Semantic Web is about two things: 1) Common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents; and about 2) Language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.The vision of the Semantic Web is to build a global information space consisting of linked data. Mashups combine data from a number of sources. See ProgrammableWeb for an overview about the different APIs and mashups. RDF book mashups goal is to show how Web 2.0 data sources can be integrated into the Semantic Web, meaning that Web 2.0 data can be browsed using generic RDF browsers like Tabulator and can be crawled and cached by Semantic Web search engines like SWSE, SWOOGLE or the Semantic Web Client Library, to eventually make it possible to query the complete Web using the SPARQL query language.
PLoS is a on-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public at large.
Second Language Acquisition (SLA), teaching methods or writing systems, References to straightforward published books and articles can be found in SLABIB. Other extensive materials on SLA and language teaching can be found in SLA Topics, on writing in Writing System Topics. A complete bibliography of her published work is on VCpubs.
Intelligent Design or Creation versus Random Chance Evolution: Where does the evidence lead?
Explore the evidence for design and purpose in the universe. Discover the truth about the origin of life and the universe. Does the design of the universe and life point to a Designer, a Divine Engineer or Architect?
Great site, full of ideas, tips, examples, and resources for using technology to combine "photographs, memorabilia, and written narratives, poetry, quotations, stories, or other textual content into a scrapbook-style album."
Sinorama magazine (recently renamed as Taiwan Panorama) for Online Reading practice.
The Sinorama articles are mainly about issues in Taiwan in such areas as politics, economics, arts, society, culture, and ecology. An electronic corpus consisting of 10,000+ texts!
Smithsonian Images provides hundreds of photographs from the Smithsonian Office of Imaging and Photographic Services which can be used by teachers and students.
Features of Google Scholar: Learn about key papers in any area of research; Search diverse sources from one convenient place; Find papers, abstracts and citations; and Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.
Sumo Paint is a browser-based drawing tool that is vector-based and does not even need a registration to use and save the creation locally Quick question: What hardware, software, Web-based tool, or other tip or trick do you use to manage information overload?
This may be the world's largest EFL / TEFL social network. Here are a few good places to start:
ESL General English Grammar Questions, Make Friends, Meet Friendly People, General, Business & Formal Letter Writing, Puzzles, Riddles, and Word ESL Games, Teaching English (TEFL), English Vocabulary and Idioms. Don't forget to join their Facebook group here!
Designed for semantic classification and keyword extraction, Trop software is very easy to use and can help with the content analysis in interaction logs, self-report accounts or open-ended questionnaire responses. (French site, giving access to English, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese versions)
Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English is a searchable collection of transcripts of academic speech events recorded at the University of Michigan. There are currently 152 transcripts (totaling 1,848,364 words) available at this site.
Online version (2004), free access. El perfecto simple y el imperfecto en la narracin y la descripcin. CD-ROM version, Mac/PC (2005), available at info@ccdmd.qc.ca
Collect websites, enter them into TrackStar, add annotations for your students, and you have an interactive, online lesson called a Track. Create your own Track or use one of the hundreds of thousands already made by other educators. Search the database by subject, grade, or theme and standard for a quick and easy activity.
Storybird is a neat new site where users can choose artwork from a specific artist and then add text to create a storybook. See others in The Best Places Where Students Can Write Online. Also check-out the new issue of Literacy Lava, "a free pdf ezine for parents, offering tips on ways to incorporate reading, writing and communicating into family life." (At http://thebookchook.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-edition-of-literacy-lava.html).
Planet Quest is a pretty amazing multimedia timeline of space exploration that begins at 500 B.C. In addition, it provides audio support for the text. See also The Best Sites For Learning About Planets & Space.
ESL Lounge Free ESL Lesson Materials for teachers. Grammar, worksheets, song lyrics, board games, pronunciation and more. All free and printable.
Online Conference/Classroom Nellies English Projects is an educational website for students and teachers whose aim is to motivate students for lifelong learning. It provides resources for teachers on how to integrate technology into the classroom by means of project based and experiential learning using WebQuests. The site provides many educational resources, articles, lesson plans, evaluation rubrics, reading practice and collaborative writing ideas.
IP2Phrase IP2Phrase allows you to insert dynamic customizable welcome messages to your web page with geographical information.You can either design your own phrase or use one of their defaults.
This site uses WordChamp to automatically translate words on this page into about 140 languages! CLICK for a free account so you can also SAVE new words into files. Change Target Language Here:
Get in the Sandbox & Play with Us Kids!Eby using Twiddla Co-Browsing Tool Here:
Top ESL/TESOL Programs Find top online and local ESL/TESOL programs and request free info. Learn more about starting an exciting career in bilingual and ESL teaching today!
FREE ONLINE VOCAB TESTS Free Test of your vocabulary in English, Chinese, German, Japanese, Spanish or Turkish. Test Preparation free for GRE, SAT, TOEFL Tests. Speed-Reading Practice and Word Games.
Vocaboly.com offers many FREE Vocabulary Tests online.
Click on the V to check how many words you know in English.
