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!
WordSift is a new visual tool to learn vocabulary. Mary Ann Zehr has written an excellent post describing it and its benefits for English Language Learners who need to learn academic English. WordSift is on The Best Websites For Developing Academic English Skills & Vocabulary. What's key here for English-language learners is that students can pull up images to illustrate a word, not definitions. The image may be easier to digest than more words that explain the word the student is trying to understand.
Like Jing, Twiddla is also one of the best free, no-setup, Web-based meeting space. You can mark up screenshots of Websites, graphics, and photos, or start brainstorming on a blank canvas. It also includes voice and text chat.
All Widgets available are filed and categorized here.
Netvibes lets individuals assemble their favorite widgets, websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, and everything else they enjoy on the web - all in one place.
Extract basic Frequency Lists from user texts or corpora; download influential Frequency Lists including AWL and Franais Fondamental, for either English/French. Teachers can analyze any text by Keywords (text vs. general frequency) or Range (frequency across texts). Practice guessing the Frequency Level of words in any test using a Quiz Builder. Also you may Sort 10 - 20 headwords into 1-2k, 3-5k, 6-10k, 11-15k categories, and even DOWNLOAD Famous frequency lists for study or teaching!
For teachers/researchers (from Cobbs LexTutor.com for both English and French study).
Most Frequent English and French words including first 1k, 2k, and AWL with both Headword and Word Family Lists. Other Useful list links included here include the Brown Corpus list, Ogden's 'Basic Engish' (Express almost everything in just 850 words!), and word lists based on the British National Corpus from U. Lancaster and from Paul Nation. Finally there are Links to many more lists (from David Lee).
Vocab Profiler will give you a color-coded representation for words in different Levels of Frequency within any inputted text. This helps you isolate more difficult words to simplify or study them.
Cloze Drills for all 10 Sublists of Academic Word Families using Hot Potatoes program.
WORD LISTS
Keep a list of new words and idioms in your vocabulary notebook. Make it a habit to write the definition of some of the new words or expressions that you come across on a regular basis. Always add a sentence as an example to illustrate how to use them in context. Set yourself a target of so many new words a day and review your list often. Most importantly, try to use the new words and phrases in conversations and writings as often as possible. For those of you who may find this impractical, the next best thing is to subscribe to vocabulary newsletters that you would receive in your mailbox every day. You can also make use of vocabulary lists that are well suited to your current level of English. Heres where you can find some of them:
A list of what is believed to be the 100 most commonly used words in English are ranked by frequency. The first 25 words apparently make up about one-third of all printed material in English. The first 100 make up about one-half of all written material. At the bottom of the page you will find links to the following 900 hundred words most commonly used in English.
A list of 5,000 collegiate words presented with brief definitions. Can also be helpful to those preparing for the GRE or TOEFL tests as well as for ESL and English Courses.
Dictionary.com has had an ongoing contest inviting online game developers to design and submit new "word games." They just announced these five winners.
Ross Dawson's Trends in the Living Networks blog offers high-level commentary on developments in our intensely networked world, and how it is coming to life. The blog is primarily intended for a general business audience, in identifying critical technology, social, and business trends and their implications.
This is an exceptional place to learn how to use Web 2.0 tools. Connect, Collaborate, Create was created by Pip Cleaves, and has step-by-step instructions on how to use some of the best Web 2.0 tools out there for educational use. You really need to visit it. If at some point you are prompted to log-in, all you have to do is click "Login as Guest." See The Best Places To Learn Web 2.0 Basics for even more.
WordCount.org produces a Word Cloud of the first 86,800 English words by frequency. THE more common the word, the larger its letters will be. (Ex. THE is #1!)
WordChamp.com, GlobaLinguists flagship product, provides a variety of text, graphic, and audio content along with 11 types of student drills and sophisticated course management tools, allowing teachers to create homework assignments, track students, and quickly determine where their classes are having the most success and difficulty. At the core of the site is a huge database of vocabulary and audio, vocabulary lists and tools which teachers can use or combine with their own class content. Intermediate and advanced students can go to foreign websites and use our innovative web reader allowing them to read authentic texts in the target language without wasting hours of time paging through dictionaries. There are already dozens of high schools and colleges using WordChamp, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Swarthmore, Amherst, Bard, and Bryn Mawr.
Wikipedia is the by far largest publicly available encyclopedia on the Web. Wikipedia editions are available in over 250 languages with the English one accounting for more than 1.95 million articles. Wikipedia has the problem that its search capabilities are limited to full-text search, which only allows very limited access to this valuable knowledge-base.
Vocabulary Cards, Games, Sounds, Languages, Lessons, Sites and Strategies
WordSurfing Boards and Cards, Rationale for their approach (books, boards/cards);
Vocabulary Links and Vocabulary Researchers' World.
WORD LISTS
Most common words listed by frequency; Essential English word lists; Useful vocabulary concordancers / profilers
Recommended use: Use any of these word lists or programs to better focus your study or teaching upon the MOST COMMON AND ESSENTIAL CORE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Teachers or learners can use them to assess the number of words in any given text that come from each of these word level lists.
Expand your English vocabulary with these carefully compiled English word lists. While you may already know some of these words, the definition is often misunderstood or not fully known. There are 13 pages of carefully compiled vocabulary lists currently available here.
in ten separate files for practice. The Academic Word List (AWL) is a list of words which appear with high frequency in English-language academic texts. The list was compiled by Averil Coxhead at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The list contains 570 word families and is divided into 10 sublists. Sublist 1 consists of the 60 most common words in the AWL. Sublist 2 contains the next most frequently used words and so on. Each sublist contains 60 word families, except for sublist 10, which contains 30.
VIEW: Variation in English Words and phrases - Mark Davies Corpus Linguistics-based Frequency Dictionaries for English, Spanish and Portuguese.
This website allows you to quickly and easily search for a wide range of words and phrases of English in the 100 million word British National Corpus. One unique aspect of the corpus is the ability to find the frequency of words and phrases in any combination of registers that you define (spoken, academic, poetry, medical, etc). In addition, you can compare between registers -- for example, fiction versus academic writing. The interface also allows you to input information from WordNet (a semantically-organized lexicon of English) directly into the search form. This allows you to find the frequency and distribution of words with similar, more general, or more specific meanings. This interface to the BNC is fast, free, and easy to use, offering important features not found in any other interface to the BNC (or any other large corpus of English, for that matter).
READABILITY CHECKS
Author's research articles are freely available on this topic to all supporting members of CALL4ALL.US. Just join at our Members Page.
Use AWL highlighter as a core academic vocabulary evaluator (CAVE) to identify AWL at any of 10 levels in any text you submit up to 2400 characters.
Focus on learning how to use these highlighted core academic vocabulary, either by writing your own sentences, creative vocabulary stories, or better yet by using them actively in interview questions practiced with a partner.
Review highlighted words 1-3 days later by means of the AWL gapmaker, based on the text you read and studied before. Uses a section or summary of a text.
Vocabulary website: listing 23,000 articles for related research.
Use Compleat Lexical Vocab Profiler to estimate readability of any text as follows:
Any text inputted will output a Color-Coded Analysis showing you all the words of your text by word frequency levels:
K1 words used (from lst most common 1,000 English words in blue); K2 words used (2nd most common 1,001-2000 words used in green); AWL words (Academic Word List terms) used in brown; and off-list words in red. This way you can focus on learning any academic or off-list words, once most common words have been mastered.
ATOS for Books formula is the first and only readability method based on analysis of actual student reading of entire books. They give comprehension statistics from 30,000 students reading almost a million books. Rennaisance Learning has the world's largest database of words used in actual books - over 30,000 books comprising nearly 500 million words!
Three kinds of Readability Checks are offered by Renaissance Reader's ATOS Analyzer Program:
The ATOS analyzer provides an ATOS reading level for text you submit for analysis. Submitting text for analysis is quick and easy. First, determine which ATOS option will work the best for the text you want analyzed. There are three different options. Select one of the choices below that best matches your needs.
The ATOS Readability Formula for Books is designed to provide a reading level based on the complete contents of a book. It requires submission of the complete text from a book, and will provide the most accurate ATOS level.
This variation of the ATOS Readability Formula does not require the entire text of a book. It requires submission of three 150-word samples from different sections of a book, and an estimated word count.
The ATOS Readability Formula for Text works well for short stories, magazine and newspaper articles, test items, and other classroom materials. It does not make adjustments based on length of text. This formula requires submission of the complete text.
Analyze text content using this free text analysis tool which gives you statistics about a text including word count; unique words; number of sentences; average words per sentence; lexical density; and the Gunning Fog readability index. More detailed statistics are available to members. This analyzer will accept text up to 500KB in size. Target texts can be typed or pasted in on this page for analysis.
ADELEX TEXT ANALYSER tool is part of the research carried out by the members of the ADELEX team at the University of Granada. It enables the user to analyze the lexical difficulty of written texts in English on the basis of information contained in a 7,000-word frequency list drawn from the British National Corpus, Bank of English and Longman Corpus Network databases. Its two versions (English and Spanish) attempt to provide a more accurate and updated way of analysing texts, by using frequency bands of up to 7,000 words. Once students learn how to use all of these, they should be over the Minimum Threshold Level needed for fluent, independent reading. The analysis divides this list into 7 bands:
For 447 Character Ed. words and 533 Earth Day words, Email jancook@vocabulary.com. Put your themed selection in subject line and include your school name, city and state/country, if applicable.
A large collection of sentences in context, which teachers can use to produce cloze exercises for reviewing, reinforcing and testing vocabulary. The database provides a list of keywords, each of which is linked to a number of sentences which illustrate how the word is used.
Select a reference source and click on any word in a list to get a definition, pronunciation or translation of that word to your language. Take a quiz on spelling.
Explore English Words Derived from Latin-Greek Origins. Experience the wonder of vocabulary words by focusing on the Latin and Greek prefixes, roots, and suffixes used in English vocabulary. An advanced English-vocabulary program for long-distance learners of all ages, everywhere. A program of Latin-Greek Root Word meanings and cross references that will enhance your English-vocabulary skills and word studies!
Includes useful links to: Englishcaster, siu eCampus, VOA e-Learning, reading time, English Breeze and Mobile Phone URLs as well as Quia.com Quizzes on about 1,000 words.
Builds up your automatic word meaning recognition skills in these two languages simultaneously. 1,000 words total may be reviewed in 50 sets of 20 words each.
A large collection of sentences in context, which teachers can use to produce cloze exercises for reviewing, reinforcing and testing vocabulary. The database provides a list of keywords, each of which is linked to a number of sentences which illustrate how the word is used.
Includes 4 Receptive/Recognition and 3 Interactive Productive Vocabulary Tests (at 5 levels); a Word Association Test (both print and interactive); and a Yes-No Real vs. Not Real Word Test (both print and interactive) with the same test in French.
WORD FREQUENCY AND CORPUS ANALYSIS BY WORD GROUP FREQUENCY
Usernames for academic research and teaching: (non-Lancaster academics) A free one-month trial is available for individual academic users, please contact Paul Rayson to set up a username and password. If you are a student, please apply via your course lecturer or supervisor. Once the one-month trial has expired, usernames are available for around L100 (depending on the exchange rate) per username per year from the online secure order page hosted at regsoft. Multiple usernames (or years) may be purchased at a reduced cost. Please ask Paul for details. Further development and external availability of Wmatrix currently depends on licensing its use.
Online Vocabulary Expansion (MOVE) and Language Learning System
Provides these functions: a) Basic Word Meanings; b) Generates Word Lists and Tests from any Text; c) Combines Common Collocations, Corpora and Concordancers; d) Tracks Student/Teachers Writing and Reading Texts. Lexi-Studys major features for guiding online vocabulary development may be seen in its three prominent aspects:
LexiSounds is a multimedia package that focuses on helping learners to develop their listening and basic writing skills, with an emphasis on dictation practice.
LexiPatterns is the only concordancing package that offers parallel Keyword in context (KWIC) concordancing in combination with functions not only for making research and study notes, but also for generating tests and worksheets. With LexiPatterns it is possible to explore and compare up to 3 corpora at the same time.
The LexiSpace function makes it possible to specify a list of verb endings that can be removed from words automatically. A test or worksheet, typically based on a passage of around 300-500 words, can be generated and printed with an accompanying answer sheet in minutes; at the same time it can be used by students for computer practice with automatic feedback and scoring, all of which the teacher is able to see and store in a database. For students studying independently, any number of word lists can be used in combination with any number of reading passages to create study materials. Students can paste in materials from internet or work with pages from their texts.
The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English Word Combinations, by Benson, Benson, and Ilson. (1997) This revised edition is based on comments and suggestions from ESL learners.
The Collins COBUILD ESL Dictionaries: COBUILD is one of the pioneers in collocational use in ESL learner's dictionaries. They continuously put out new dictionaries. Try Collins Cobuild English Collocations (CD-ROM)
This dictionary is written by EFL teachers for EFL learners, intermediate level and above. It lists the collocations, much like BBI, and it provides information on how to combine words into collocations. The Dictionary includes over 50,000 collocations.
CLOZE BUILDER routines create cloze passages of different types and some allow links to learning resources (dictionary, audio file, video file) on user specification. One can create such Cloze Quizzes in English or French, either by a Nth-word and Rational Deletion Cloze, orVocabProfile Clozes, which are Frequency-Based (from LexTutor).
Subtract one text or list from another; find the degree of word repetition between two texts, or over a set of texts (news articles, book chapters, etc). Text Lex Compare. See Comparison demos
A concordance gives a list of several words, phrases, or distributed structures along with immediate contexts, from a corpus or other collection of texts assembled for language study. Those offered by LexTutor include 1) Corpus-based concordances in English or French Clean Sentences Conc (Eng); Multi_Concordance (English) 2) Text-based concordances: English or French (output is concordance-linked frequency index for entire text); 2) Story concordancers: in English or French (Every word in a full length story is click-linked to concordances from rest of the story + other works by author.); and 4) Related: Range (En/Fr) and Phrase Extractor (Eng or Fr) are other types of concordances.
Excellent for Japanese and those wanting to learn English or Japanese.
WEBSITE REVIEW FORM
to file and organize sites you find useful
What do I do when I find a good website?
Firstly, don't forget to bookmark the site or add it to your favorites. Then, write a short review of the site for your colleagues or students - this will help them find what they are looking for. A good review can be far more useful than an obscure entry in your favorites or bookmarks. Sample site review form:
1) Description: Add a short description of the site.
2) Content Summary: Give a brief summary of the contents of the site.
3) Information: Is the site content correct, reliable and accurate? Is the writer an expert in this subject?
4) Currency: Is the site up-to-date? When was new information last added? When were the pages last updated?
5) Content: Is the content interesting, relevant, funny, useful or entertaining? How would you describe it?
6) Presentation: Is it attractive and easy to navigate? Does it use a lot of graphics, sound or multimedia files?
7) Functionality: Does it all work? Are there any brokenlinks or missing pages? Does it take a long time to display pages?
A tool that measures the proficiency level required to read and understand a text. With Texamen you quickly find out if the level of your text corresponds to the level of your readers. Fine tuning is necessary to achieve the right effect of your text. For English, Dutch or Spanish.
Includes BLOGS, such as Edublogs or class blogs where students write comments. In addition, the ability to have Edublogs Forums (basically a chatboard) is another real benefit.
A great blogging application. Users can just email what they want posted on their blog and it is automatically posted with the subject line as the title and the body of the email as its content. You can copy images off the web and paste them into email, along with a written description, and it all immediately appears in Posterous. You can email attachments and some embeddable applications. You can also post directly to your blog without emailing.
You can only type in 140 characters per entry, but You Are stands-out because it lets you easily send the URL of an image as well. Having that ability enhances its use with English Language Learners, who can use the tool to also describe photos.
A new site that is a real find for English Language Learners (and lots of other students). Users can create Online Books that they write and illustrate (they can also use lots of images available on the site). Various features really make it stand-out: You can make a book from scratch, or you can use one of their many story frames that contain prompts to help the story-writer along. In addition, you can invite others to collaborate online with you to develop the book. Once the book is done you can email the link to a friend, teacher, or yourself for posting on a blog, website, or online journal. You can create the online version for free, but have to pay if you want them to print a hard-copy version.
It has two great features: 1) It has 1,000 simple books with audio support for the text immediately accessible to Beginning English Language Learners and 2) It makes it as simple as you can get for students to create their own talking books using images from Flickr. Anybody can read the books on the site. However, in order to have your students create talking books using their easy as pie (and free) process, you need to register and have to have a code. Theyre rightfully concerned about publishing the code because of spammers. Gary Bishop from the site, though, is happy to provide it to teachers. Just write him at gb@cs.unc.edu and hell send it to you.
E-CARDS
Three E-Card sites provide students excellent images and good opportunities for writing. No registration is required for any of these three sites, and the link to the students creation can be posted on a teacher or student blog or website.
One of The Best for slideshows, thats so easy to use, used effectively for writing - another great tool for anybody, including Beginning English Language Learners. You just type in a tag to search Flickr for images, drag them into a book and write about them
WRITING AND PUBLISHING STUDENTS' WORK, WRITING WEBSITES, DESIGNING WEBPAGES.
Finding material for writing practice on the internet is always a problem since it's hard to get anything students write checked and corrected. Here are some tips and ideas to give to students plus model answers which they can look at. There are hundreds of sites available, but these are some worth looking at:
Here you will find a really handy set of example letters with lots of useful business vocabulary included. The only problem is that they only deal with one topic - saying thank you - though there are plenty of different contexts.
A useful site with information about punctuation, with lots of examples and explanations. Try it to learn how to use a colon and a semi-colon properly.
Seventy pages of advice and free worksheets on spelling used by many parents, students and teachers in North America and the UK - help, free worksheets and advice from an experienced English teacher. The site is for: (1) parents who are concerned about their children's spelling and are keen to help them improve; (2) children who are reasonably capable readers and can work through the spelling exercises without help from their parents; (3) adults who find spelling difficult and want to learn to spell correctly.
SITES OFFERING FREE WEB SPACE TO PUBLISH STUDENTS' WORK
Writing Den is designed for students Grades 6 through 12 seeking to improve their English reading, comprehension, and writing skills. Publish childrens writing online safely.
Glossaries of Multi-Syllable verbs and English grammar terms, writing tips, rules of grammar and punctuation, online tests, and sample resumes, as well as proofreading/copy editing services.
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.
Australian Journal of Computers and Language Education, Centre for Language Teaching and Research, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
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.
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.
Bring the world to your website! Put your company on the map in each country. Global online marketing, multilingual Web promotion and Website translation will develop your international sales. With multilingual Website promotion program, it's like having your own international online marketing office in every corner around the world.
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.
Free whiteboard tool by the name of Talkandwrite. It is not open source, but it is free. You can buy the pro version ($29.00), which allows you to save a document and print a document. But the BASIC version is free. It works in conjunction with Skype for audio or text chat. It may be limited to just two people working in the environment at the same time.
Assign or Choose 1 per student. See how much information each one can find in one class period. Have them try to a) Summarize his life history; b) State their contributions to the development of Science and Technology; c) Give their own impressions about their life; and d) Note any new vocabulary learned, with some example sentences if possible.
Curriculum: English / Language Arts, Foreign Language.
In this Webquest you will find activities designed to help English language learners gain skills to read on grade level. This site was designed with the intention of helping ESOL and second language learners maximize their proficiency in reading in their L2 language. Grade(s): K-2, 3-5 Language: English; by Sharrine12/01/2006.
Theres no way around it at each stage of learning a new language, studying vocabulary is an unavoidable, critical part of the process. Beginning students need a core of words and phrases just to get started, intermediate students need to start expressing more complex thoughts, and advanced students need to learn idiomatic expressions and specialized vocabulary. So why arent there any good tools to help with this time-consuming, mechanical process? Now there are here at CALL4ALL.US, especially these top 3 sites are recommended for rapidly expanding your English vocabulary:
4 Use CALL4ALL.us Semantic Field Keyword Approach to use and remember groups of related words having similar meanings at http://www.call4all.us///misc/sfka.php.
WordChamp.com, GlobaLinguists flagship product, provides a variety of text, graphic, and audio content along with 11 types of student drills and sophisticated course management tools, allowing teachers to create homework assignments, track students, and quickly determine where their classes are having the most success and difficulty. At the core of the site is a huge database of vocabulary and audio, vocabulary lists and tools which teachers can use or combine with their own class content. Intermediate and advanced students can go to foreign websites and use our innovative web reader allowing them to read authentic texts in the target language without wasting hours of time paging through dictionaries. There are already dozens of high schools and colleges using WordChamp, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Swarthmore, Amherst, Bard, and Bryn Mawr.
Enter WordChamp
Customized to fit the specific needs of your class, the WordChamp Vocabulary Builder helps with all aspects of the vocabulary learning process. Students practice words and phrases using a variety of different drills, listen to native speakers to improve pronunciation, and read foreign websites and text using the innovative web reader.
And since its all done over the Internet, theres no software to install or compatibility issues between PCs and Macs. Isnt it about time to retire those stacks of 3x5 cards?
Many Ways To Learn
Each drill emphasizes a different type of knowledge or skill active and passive understanding, listening comprehension, pronunciation, reading, etc. Recordings of native speakers are played every time a word or phrase is practiced, so students dont waste time learning incorrect pronunciations which have to be corrected later. Wouldnt you rather spend class time teaching your students to use vocabulary, rather than chasing down words for students who hadnt prepared?
Making WordChamp Work For You
Because every language program is different, we customize all drills to match your specific needs. We record native speakers for every word, phrase, and sentence you want your students to learn, and organize the vocabulary according to your specifications. Then, we give you complete control, so that you can make modifications at any time through an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
Helping Students To Read
One of the most exciting and frustrating parts of studying a new language is learning to read primary texts. Exciting, because the materials are interesting in their own right frustrating, because of the sheer volume of new and challenging vocabulary. The web reader helps students read virtually any foreign website (or block of text) without
translating the site into English simply by rolling the mouse over a word or expression, a student can learn a definition, tie a verb conjugation to its infinitive, listen to a native speaker, or add the word to a list for later study. This is a great feature, and really has to be seen to be believed!
Tying It All Together
Using our course management tools, you can assign vocabulary drills and readings, verify that your students are completing their homework, and track which words your students are finding most difficult. We save the results of every drill, so its easy to see where the problems lie, both for individuals and for the class as a whole.
DESIGN is an ever-growing, all-encompassing field that accommodates a plethora of different disciplines. How would a contemporary hierarchical tree of Design look like? The proposed challenge is simply to visualize the contemporary Design landscape.
An online version of a widely used web style guide, useful for designing CMCL materials. It looks systematically at process, interface design, site and page design, typography, graphics and multimedia.
The ESL Reading and Writing Resources Forum was created for sharing ESL syllabi, lesson plans, handouts, teaching tips, and more. It is a place where you can share your ideas and find out what others are doing as well.
WRITING ONLINE, PROGRAMS TO CREATE ONLINE CONTENT:
Screencast.com is an easy and affordable media hosting solution for business and academic professionals who want to share multimedia content on the Web.
Flowgram is an amazing screencasting, link-sharing tool. It lets you show one or multiple pages on the Web, and, when youre making this screencast, you can move the screen up-and-down to focus on particular areas on the page. You can show videos or images. You can provide an audio commentary, and people can leave comments.
The first automatic text correction tool that corrects entire sentences with a single click. With Ginger in the mix, users produce error-free text with unmatched quality and accuracy.
Using Ginger you'll see firsthand how this software helps to build stronger, more efficient writers: fixing multiple spelling errors with a single click; finding and replacing misused words; correcting grammatical errors*; identifying and fixing severe spelling mistakes; providing text-to-speech capabilities*; tracking user mistakes and progress; *feature available SUMMER 2009. A Beta version of Ginger Software is available for download free of charge at http://www.gingersoftware.com/registration.htm.
All of these programs allow you to grab images directly off the web for inclusion in a website. This list is focused on tools accessible for English Language Learners and non-tech-savvy computer users. The other features also had to be very easy to use. Finally, the service had to be offered free-of-charge.
FOR STUDENTS: Webon appears to be one of the easiest website-builder Ive come across. Its very easy to grab images off the web and write captions. One of its features that I like a lot is that your images automatically become a slideshow. It doesnt have all the bells and whistles that other slideshow creators have, but it seems to work well enough. Its an excellent place for students to display their online work. Go Hoster and Notaland are also very easy to use, though Notaland is not quite open to the public yet so you have to request and invitation. Jottit is an extraordinarily simple and easy way to create a webpage. All you do is start typing you dont even have to register. You can create a password that you, or anyone else you want to be able to write in it, can use, and then youre given your own url. You cant just copy and paste images. However, you can embed objects. Rombla gets an honorable mention. Its not quite as easy to use as the ones Ive already mentioned, but its pretty close.
FOR TEACHERS: Wix is a fairly easy site that lets you use Flash to create a website or content that you would like to embed into a website or a blog. The final product can look pretty neat. Theres so much you can create that I think it would be a little too overwhelming to English Language Learners. I also suspect that my mainstream students would want to spend far too much time using it to make their creations look cool and spend less time on the actual content. However, teachers, I think, might want to use it to create content their students would then access. Synthasite is another website-building application and seems very similar to Wix, but appears to be just a little less complicated to use.
Flickr slide shows sure do make it easier to view all those images being shared on a given Flickr Flickr stream, and the ability to do so has even spurred a healthy-sized third market from developers that offer Flickr slide show tools as well.
Web Concordancer, Unique Words Text Profiler, Word Frequency Text Profiler, Net Dictionary, Chinese - English Parallel Concordancer, Teachers' toolbox, etc.
An easy-to-use online word processor and spreadsheet editor that enables you and your students to create, store and share documents and spreadsheets instantly and securely and collaborate online in real time. If you know how to use any word processing or spreadsheet editing program, you can easily use Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and even upload older documents and spreadsheets. There's no software to download, and all your work is stored safely online and can be accessed from any computer. Sharing features enable you and your students to decide exactly who can access and edit documents, and it's all recorded in the document revisions history. It helps promote group work and peer editing skills, and that it helps to fulfill the stated goal of The National Council of Teachers of English, which espouses "writing as a process" and encourages multiple revisions and peer editing. Use spreadsheets to keep track of grades, attendance, student projects and assignments. Maintain multiple spreadsheets, each for a specific purpose, and easily import data from other spreadsheets.
World by Radio gives dynamic information about each country in the world, including Flags, Population, Maps, Major Cities, Languages & Radio Broadcasts available in them.
A state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. To get started with WordPress, set it up on a web host for the most flexibility or get a free blog on WordPress.com.
World Challenge is a program sponsored by BBC to help support innovative self-help economic development projects in developing countries. in association with Shell, is a global competition that seeks out projects and businesses that not only make a profit, but also put something back into the community. World Challenge 2007, brought to you by BBC World and Newsweek, in association with Shell is all about rewarding individuals or groups that truly make a difference through enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level.
WordNet (and related databases) is a lexical database for English; an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets. See also EuroWordNet: a multilingual database with wordnets for several European languages (Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German, French, Czech and Estonian), MultiWordNet (Italian WordNet is strictly aligned with Princeton WordNet 1.6.), and BalkaNet (for six Balkan languages: Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Czech and Serbian).
An alphabetic version of WordNet 2.0 has now been prepared and is available here. There are 143,991 entries in this dictionary, with a sense for each occurrence of an entry in a distinct synset. Virtually all information in WordNet has been captured, including the new domain relations, verb groups, and derivational forms.
WebQuest: After reading this article, list in order the countries having the most billionaires. See if you can find the names of the richest 100 or of all these billionaires by doing a Web Search. Discuss: Where is your country on this list? Where would you like to be on this list? What would you have to do to get there?
An innovative cyberspace architecture firm creating 3D models for use in visualization and online applications. Models can be licensed for use in commerce, communication, entertainment, electronic gaming, travel, education, navigation and GIS applications. Webscape creates interactive 3D environments including real world cities, so that users and content creators have well-known and understood physical points of reference.
Provides a series of 8-week, teacher-led courses for elementary, middle school and high school students. Starting with sentence writing in the elementary levels and working up to writing for standardized tests in the high school level, Time4Writing has courses at just about any level of skill.
FictionFactor.com is about Writing Flash Fiction. As described by G. W. Thomas:
With the advent of the Internet, editors are looking for shorter works, more easily read on a computer screen. The current term is "flash fiction", a tale between 300-1000 words long. Longer than micro-fiction (10-300 words) but shorter than traditional short stories (3000-5000 words preferred by most magazines), flash fiction is usually a story of a single act, sometimes the culmination of several unwritten events.
This article offers several strategies for writing flash fiction. Used by themselves or in combination, a writer can focus his/her story on that brief, interesting event.
The online Virtual Classroom on WiZiQ is a free alternative to expensive conferencing tools selling as online teaching/learning software. Distinctively, the prime focus of WiZiQ has been to create a user friendly online teaching and learning platform for the educational community. A minimal but useful feature set always works better to keep things simple. Thus our virtual classroom requires no download or installation and integrates perfectly in Moodle.
An evolving community intended for the collaborative:
planning of education projects linked with the development of free content; development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning; work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs. networking on funding proposals developed as free content.
WiZiQ offers free online e-teaching and e-learning using web conferencing with document and whiteboard sharing, teacher resumes and presentation sharing.
Shows WiZiQ.com as an online teaching platform, which provides a free virtual classroom environment for teachers to interact online and teach students in real time. Teachers can also build a profile, keep an availability schedule, and maintain a content library, which is associated with their profiles, by uploading PowerPoint presentations and PDF Files.
Zotero runs in your Firefox web browser, which must be open in order for you to access your research collection. You do not have to be online, however to use Zotero; features such as notes, search, organization will work perfectly well offline, although obviously you will not be able to view some online items in your collection or to acquire other online materials. The Zotero window contains your entire collection: bibliographic references and whole documents and files, your notes, and other items like images and snapshots of web pages.
Handouts from ELT Podcast.com - Bill Pellowe, Nicolas Gromik and Robert Chartrand took part in WorldCALL 2008, presenting on "Teaching approaches towards the integration of iPod technology in the EFL classroom."
Currently in its infancy, this website aims at developing a wiki community for teaching yourself a foreign language and helping others along the way. It hopes to bring together language students, instructors and native speakers from all over the world.
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.
