Page W – Word Lists, Word Collocation Dictionaries, Word Counters and Readability Checks; Writing links - Writing and Publishing Students' Work, Writing Websites, Designing Webpages; Web Searching; Weather
Lingro Language Learner Enter any Website to make all words clickable on this site. Lingro remembers all the words you look up, so you can easily review and study them.
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
World of Reading The Largest Language Learning Software Shop Mention CALL4ALL to get a discount!
U.S. Debt Clock. Find real-time Updates on the U.S. National Debt (As it grows Exponentially, 'til hit by D.O.G.E.'s much-needed "Chainsaw Fraud & Budget-Cutting Intervention"!)
OUR GOAL & EXAMPLE SET SINCE 1990s has been to help build an Encyclopedia of C.A.L.L. WEBSITES to help learn, teach/ Translate all written languages, even as Wycliff aims to Translate the Word into ALL LANGUAGES 4 ALL NATIONS OF THE WORLD!
Seeking an APP OR WEBSITE CREATOR THAT CAN ENABLE STUDENTS TO SAVE ALL ONLINE RESEARCH PAGES EASILY? IF SO ITS URL? IF NOT, BEST FREE PROGRAM/s TO CREATE ONE QUICKLY?
Several existing free tools already let students save, organize, and annotate all their online research pages easily, so you likely don’t need to build a new app unless you want something custom. Below are the best existing options, followed by the best free website builders if you do want to create your own tool.
Word Map Shows Where & How An Individual Word Is Said In Multiple Languages. Type any word into Word Map and it will tell you how that word is spoken in many other languages and show you where those languages are spoken. The audio worked fine for me in Google Chrome, but not in Firefox.
Wandoo Planet is a new project that is in beta testing stages right now to help build an app that is kid-powered genome project. The way this works is kids (6-14 yrs old) will play a interest-finding game that will help them choose movies and books through their personalized recommendation engine. Also, the more the student plays the game the "smarter" the engine will get through its "adaptive learning system" algorithm (i.e. Web 3.0 anyone). Here is more info from their promotional email...
"Leveraging children's interests is a powerful tactic when it comes to fighting reading deficiency, but unfortunately, it is not something that has been put into widespread practice," said Rob Cullin, president and co-founder of Evanced Solutions. "Wandoo Planet was created to offer children a platform that lets them choose and discover their individual interests to promote reading success. We welcome the feedback of our beta testers who will help us make the game even better before its official release this spring." [ Written by dkapuler on Jan 25, 2014].
ESL discussion material based on TED talks is a very good resource. I'm adding it to The Best Teacher Resources For "TED Talks" (& Similar Presentations).
Wolfram Problem Generator is the latest tool from the computational search engine (Wolfram Alpha), that I just found out about from the great blog, Educational Technology Guy. This is a wonderful site for Math teachers/students that are looking to solve problems in a wide range of areas (i.e., order of operations, division, calculus, etc.). Also, WPG allows users to create printable worksheets as well as set the difficult of their problems to beginner, advanced, or intermediate.
Word Dynamics is a unique outreach tool to help high school and university students improve their vocabulary and also consider faith. This digital vocabulary builder can help students excel in school and prepare for the SAT and GRE exams. Youth groups, homeschoolers and teachers might find this educational software with a spiritual twist especially useful for study and outreach.
Web of Science is an online academic citation index provided by Thomson Reuters. It is designed for providing access to multiple databases, cross-disciplinary research, and in-depth exploration of specialized subfields within an academic or scientific discipline. As a citation index, any cited paper will lead to any other. Titles included are listed here
The Best Ways For Advanced ELL's & Non-ELL's To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly - REVISED
Ferlazzo's revised Writing WebTools, based on various District content filter-related issues. Even though he had concluded that Check This was the easiest tool for students to use for creating/writing reports (they could be creative and no registration was required), we couldn't get it through our filter. Loose Leaves became my second choice, though it wasn't nearly as attractive or engaging to students. For now, though, I've decided on Glogster Edu. You have to pay a few bucks if you want more than ten student accounts, but I think it's worth it. I have some concerns that it provides so many creative opportunities that students can focus more on looks than content, but, considering the limitations of our content filter, for now it's the best choice.
The Machine is Us/ing Us is a short video directed by Dr. Michael Wesch that speaks to the implications of digital technologies for our lives.
How to Disable Web-Tracking:
Firefox created the Do Not Track feature to let me tell websites not to track me. Just go to Options > Privacy (Preferences > Privacy on a Mac) and click 'Tell websites I do not want to be tracked.'
Blog maintained by Will Richardson, the "Learner in Chief" of Connective Learning, a consultancy service specializing in assisting educators in understanding and implementing the latest workplace and leadership practices.
The WIDE Research Center investigates how digital technologiesÑsuch as the networked personal computer, the Internet and World Wide Web, and computer-based classrooms and workplacesÑchange the processes, products, and contexts for writing, particularly in organizational and collaborative composing contexts.
Using your smartphone or tablet you should be able to find wireless hotspots using a service such as WeFi, which offers apps for Android and iPhone. With this you will be able to find the free hotspots and avoid the locked ones.
Web of Stories is a pretty cool site that easily allows students to tell their stories or interview a family member or friend about theirs. Here's a description from the site:
"Everyone has a story to tell. Over time many stories become forgotten, but now Web of Stories offers you the chance to tell your story for future generations to enjoy. Web of Stories began as an archive of life stories told by some of the great scientists of our time. As the number of stories grew, it became obvious that some were on related topics and a web was slowly being created of connected stories. After a while we also invited famous people outside the field of science to tell their life stories.
We are now opening up Web of Stories to everyone, inviting you to help make our web of stories grow. We all have wonderful stories to share, and have family and friends whose tales we would like to hear. So tell your stories, and invite others to tell theirs. The great thing about Web of Stories is that you can talk about virtually anything you like; the time you learned to ride a bike, the feeling of climbing a mountain, a conversation you may have had with a late relative.. the range of topics you can talk about is endless!
We have created technology that allows you to either record direct to your computer with a webcam or upload a video you have filmed on your handycam or phone. You can even perform simple edits with our trim tool, and of course you can record as many stories as you like.
Once you have recorded your story (or stories) you will be asked to provide a title, a brief description and keywords that will help others when searching for stories of interest.
We hope to provide lasting first-hand accounts of people's experiences - imagine that in a hundred years' time your grandchildren or great grandchildren will be able to watch you telling stories about your life today. I'm adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Create Online Learning/Teaching Objects For An "Authentic Audience."
WikiBrains is a cool site that allows users to create a brainstorm in the style of a wiki. It's pretty interesting in the way it works like a search engine but starts mapping out terms that you type in, and then connects them. Also, users can browse, share, and edit other brainstorms (hence the wiki feature). For Kapuler's Pinterest board on Brainstorming and Mind mapping click here.
How to Disable Web-Tracking:
Firefox created the Do Not Track feature to let me tell websites not to track me. Just go to Options > Privacy (Preferences > Privacy on a Mac) and click 'Tell websites I do not want to be tracked.'
Word Dynamo is an excellent new (beta) site for creating flash cards. However, there is more to like then just creating flash cards, there are educational games and quizzes as well. Basically, everything uses a word list which users can create or can browse for others, then they search for what they are looking for by grade level or subject. See more great ideas from This Week in Web 2.0.
Graph Words is a great visual thesaurus where all a user has to do is enter a word, click on draw and a web is displayed of your term. Once the web is done, you can then click on any term in that web to watch another one branch out. This is great for seeing how words are related!
Jason Davies has developed a new interactive world cloud generator that lets you use Twitter, Wikipedia or a url address. More at The Best Resources For Learning About Word Clouds.
Using Pinterest it is very easy to create a board and then "pin" anything from the web. Others can view your boards or (depending on your settings) can even "pin" things to them as well. It makes for a nice visual way to share resources in a social network type setting. Dave Kapuler created a board of his favorite web 2.0 resources (44) that you can view by clicking here!
The Week In Web 2.0. is a short compilation of new decent sites that are worth noting, but maybe not necessarily worth a separate post: enThread is a super-simple online tool for photo-editing - drag, drop, edit. More such at The Best Sites For Online Photo-Editing & Photo Effects.
Wondrous Worksheets is a great site for educators for finding worksheets on any number of subjects. Keep in mind to access all the worksheets there is an $11.95 charge for a 1yr subscription. For other similar sites for finding worksheets I recommend checking out: Game Classroom, Study Ladder, Twisty Noodle, Super Teacher Worksheets
WhoTeaches is a wonderful new (beta) social network like Wiziq. This is a network designed to facilitate communication between teachers, students, parents, and even offer high level education to other people (a la Wiziq). Plus, w/ a very user friendly interface and excellent search ability by subject or area, What I really like about WhoTeaches is how easy it is to use and how nice and polished it looks. It allows a user to upload their resume, teaching experience, videos, etc. Educators from every subject area can be found on this site. Another great feature is the ability to create groups sharing and collaborating on documents, files, media, etc.
Words Like is a site similar to Word Hippo w/out the translation. This is a site that acts like a thesaurus and is very handy when needing to find similar words. For a more detailed review check out Free Technology 4 Teachers.
If you're working with students who have very little technology experience, and you just want them to have an easy place where they can paste their work (and where other students can view it, too, after the links to all student sites are posted on a teacher page), Note Pub is a good web application to use.
Dave Kapuler created a slideshow called, Web 2.0 for Schools. Since then a number of new web 2.0 sites have come around that can also be used by schools. Then he made it into a free digital book that people can view/embed/download.
Webdoc is a cool new (beta) site for creating multimedia type blog posts w/ comments. A neat little twist w/ webdoc's is that the comments that others leave are in a webdoc format. This means that a person can create their own little multimedia blog to respond to a post. Another nice feature is the ability to embed a webdoc into your site/blog. Below is their demo video...webdoc in action from webdoc on Vimeo.
Desmos is a cool new site for creating interactive content/lessons for education. This is done all through a browser and is collaborative by nature which makes it ideal for education (web 2.0).
"A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. (Wikipedia)" Wikis are used in a number of different areas for a number of different reasons, education being one of the most popular. The creation of a wiki not only allows users to engage in 21st Century Technology it also helps increase technology literacy. Top 10 favorite sites for creating a wiki:
Top 10 Sites for Creating a Wiki (Written by dkapuler):
A very easy to use site that can create a simple wiki that can be shared w/ others or made private. Also, as w/ most wikis the ability to add comments can be turned on or off.
The Flowing Data blog has created an incredible infographic on world demographics. It's designed to be a poster for sale, but there's an online zoomable version. This is their simple description: "tells a story of how we live and die, and the stuff in between." Though it's "busy-looking," no other kind of graphical representation has this amount of data, which makes it a lot more accessible to English Language Learners than most encyclopedias. See others at The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners.
Reducing statistics to "if _____ were 100 people, then ______" can make them very accessible, engaging, and thought-provoking. For example, there's the well-known "If Twitter Was 100 People" infographic. There are also several sites that use this "gimmick" to illustrate much more important data about the world around us. "The Best..." list for English Language Learners and others. Choices for The Best Sites That Show Statistics By Reducing The World & The U.S. To 100 People: Miniature Earth is a pretty amazing site. It's slideshow that uses statistics to reduce the world to 100 inhabitants, and shows how that plays out demographically, who uses what resources, etc. They periodically update the statistics. USA Today has an article about a book and school curriculum that portrays the United States as one hundred people. 100 People: A World Chart is also accessible. The World of 100 is a series of infographics highlighting various statistics.
Earth Pulse: State Of The Earth 2010 is an impressive effort from National Geographic. It has a number of features, including a photo gallery and interactive quiz. Most impressive, though, is an interactive Vital Statistics Map that lets you compare global trends on many topics. See others at The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners.
Free Web Me is a new way to create free websites. They say you can create one in less than a minute, and you certainly can. Plus, you can grab images off the web to use on your site. It's pretty easy. Others at The Best Ways For Students Or Teachers To Create A Website.
Just Paste It and Axess are very, very simple ways to create websites. They're ideal for teachers or students who are not very tech savvy, and just want a place to add links or where they might need to collect images to describe. Axess has an advantage over Just Paste It because it appears that you can return to edit Axess. No registration is required for either. From The Best Ways For Students Or Teachers To Create a Website.
Ning community for sharing knowledge of and experience with relevant web 2.0 tools.
WACCHEN (written by dkapuler on Jun 14, 2010)
Wacchen is a site I just learned about from the excellenet blog, Zarco English. This is a place for bookmarking video. However, it's not only for links but a user has the ability to embed a video directly into their Wacchen web page. This is similar to how Fliggo used to work w/out the web 2.0 interface.
Below is a just a number of sites that interacts w/ Wacchen...
Bag The Web lets you easily collect links to multiple websites into "bags." You can leave comments on the "bag" and on each individual web link you include. It would be quite easy for a teacher or student to use it for creating an internet scavenger hunt. Find more at The Best Places To Create (And Find) Internet Scavenger Hunts & Webquests.
"William And The Windmill" is a multimedia presentation from "The Star" in Canada about William Kamkwamba and is story (that is getting more known everyday) of putting together scraps to make a windmill to generate electricity in Malawi. Not only is the video well-made, most of it is closed-captioned and accessible to English Language Learners. Malawi windmill boy with big fans is a BBC article about the same story, just in case you want to learn more about him.
Wallwisher lets you with registration, create a "wall" where you can place virtual sticky-notes. You can allow others to also place notes on the board, or keep it so that only you can do so. The sticky-notes can include images you grab off the web, videos, or websites, and you can add text to them. You can also just include text without adding anything else. Each sticky has a 160 character limit for text. Wallwisher is a most useful Web 2.0 sites because it can be a great place for students to use higher-order thinking by creating categories of images (and descriptions) or short texts they copy and paste (or write themselves). It can also be used as a site for social bookmarking of websites if you just right-click the website you put inside the sticky-note and then click on "open in a new window." Wallwisher can be used by English Language Learners for categorization and website bookmarking applications, one of the easiest and most user-friendly of all.
World Images, according to its site, is a "database that provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains almost 75,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. WorldImages is accessible anywhere and its images may be freely used for non-profit educational purposes." See also The Best Online Sources For Images.
Here are some new additions to The Best Ways For Students Or Teachers To Create A Website. Lifeyo; Weebly and their app just for educators and students, Weebly For Education; Kafafa.
WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
Here are the latest additions to The Best Sites For Learning About Women's History:
The New York Times has created an interactive of "reader submitted photographs from around the world that illustrate the importance of educating girls and empowering women." Women's History Month Across the Curriculum comes from the New York Times Learning Network.
Story Starter is a great place for writers to go to start a story. Teachers can use this as a writing prompt with students and even a way to brain storm ideas. The Story Starter provides 1,007,240,080 creative ideas and writer prompts for writers of all ages. All of the story starters are randomly created. This idea generator can be used for short stories, novels, plays, scripts, or just for fun.
Folding Story is a wonderful new site for collaborative writing that I just found out about from, Free Technology 4 Teachers. This is a site where users can either start their own story and then share with others or join an already existing story to collaborate on. There are other sites that accomplish much of the same thing, but Folding Story might just be the easiest.
Chirpstory is an interesting site that allows people to create a story from tweets on Twitter. This is done with a very easy to use drag-n-drop interface by adding tweets and links to pics, videos, sites, etc. This is a fun/innovative way to share information with others.
Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to: * be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users. * allow people to create engaging content within minutes. * host the user's creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher's website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). With the url address of student creations, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes most url addresses embeddable. * provide some language-learning opportunity (for example, students can write about their creations). * not require any registration. See The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly - 2009.
HAVE STUDENTS LEARN WHO THEY "WRITE LIKE": I Write Like is the famous application that, after you copy and paste a few of your paragraphs, will give you a badge to embed or link to telling you what well-known author you "write like." It might make students are little more motivated to learn about "their" author.
CREATE A NATURAL SYMPHONY: Identify 4 nature sounds at Nature Sounds For Me, compose into a "symphony," post a link to it on a student/teacher website or blog.
MAKE YOUR OWN WEBSITE: Orbs is a very, very easy website maker. You can just copy and paste images on it. You don't officially have to register to use it but, if you don't, they'll delete it after 24 hours. Registration is a cinch. See more of The Best Ways For Students Or Teachers To Create A Website.
Web 2.0 is a term that is used to describe the 2nd generation of the web that focuses on collaboration and evolution of the internet. Wikipedia describes Web 2.0 as a, "site that allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as consumers of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (prosumers) are limited to the active viewing of content that they created and controlled. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies."
Web 2.0 has greatly affected education and the way teachers and students teach and learn. I've decided to compile a list of my favorite Web 2.0 sites for education. However, I'm focusing strictly on sites that have an educational portal/instance. What I mean by this is that each site has a section for teachers or a way of controlling the content that students produce. This can be done either by educational accounts, monitoring by teachers, filtering, etc. Most of these sites are free but can offer more services via paid subscription...
Top 25 Web 2.0 Sites for Education
1. Google/Gaggle - Google Apps are some of the most popular services for document creation and collaboration. Gaggle (for a small fee) filters Google Apps (Zoho as well) to make it an ideal choice for education. Also, Gaggle allows for filtered blogging, chatting, messaging boards, and filtered videos in You Tube, etc.
2. Edmodo - A wonderful free site that creates an educational environment for students that focuses on skills such as blogging and collaboration.
3. Glogster - A great multi-media site for creating interactive posters that can be viewed online. Plus, student accounts can be created by an educator without the need of a student email!
4. Voice Thread - One of the most popular web 2.0 sites around. An ideal site for creating interactive presentations/slide shows.
5. Myths & Legends - A free site that is wonderful for digital storytelling. All a teacher has to do is get approval from a school administrator to sign a school up for this great service.
6. Animoto - Create dynamic slide shows with one of the most popular slide show creators on the web!
7. Mixbook - A great way to create a safe & secure environment for students to create online or real books (for order).
8. Prezi - The evolution of presentations has arrived with this zoomable presentation creator. Also, there is an educational portal in the works.
9. Aviary Education - A safe secure way that offers a lot of different services for students such as: photo editor, audio editor, and movie creator.
10. Diigo - An ideal site for social bookmarking that allows teachers to create student account for sharing and annotating links.
11. Weebly - A fantastic site for creating a student or teacher websites with the ability to blog.
12. ToonDoo Spaces - One of the best online comic creators that allows for student accounts.
13. Kidblog - One of the top ways for students to create blogs in a safe environment.
14. Primary Access - A nice site for digital story telling that allows students to use a variety of different resources such as video, audio, photos, etc.
15. Zoho Wiki - Similar to Google Apps, this online suite offers a secure way for students to create docs and share.
16. Kerpoof - A multi-media site for creating stories, games, lessons, etc.
17. Zimmertwins - A fun site for digital storytelling that is done by creating one student account for a class.
18. SymbalooEdu - A great visual way for teachers to share sites and resources w/ students.
19. Pixton - An excellent way to create online digital comics that is moderated by a teacher.
20. Zunal - A fantastic webquest creator for teachers.
21. Alice Storytelling - One of the best ways to learn about the basics of programming as well as digital storytelling (a free pc download).
22. Story Jumper - A great way for students to create real or online stories and then have the ability to order a book.
23. Storybird - A fun site for collaborative and digital storytelling.
24. Magic Studio - A wonderful site for teachers to share multimedia resources w/ students.
25. Museum Box - A great historical site for teachers and students to create multimedia projects.
Having a website for a teacher is an ideal way to share information with parents and the community. Not only does this facilitate collaboration but it can help teachers improve their own technology proficiency. Most districts have some sort of preset application that staff uses for creating a website but for those that do not I have compiled my top sites for creating a website. Keep in mind that most website creators are free but for a fee can increase the options that they have as well as the ability to eliminate ads etc.
1. Weebly - A excellent site for creating a classroom website or blog that has a secure educational environment. Also, very easy to use (drag-n-drop) and the ability to password protect your site as well.
2. Wix - Is a flash based website creator that a wonderful user interface that is all drag-n-drop.
3. Google Sites - A great way to make a collaborative/group website w/ a polished look. Very user friendly and lots of nice look templates to choose from.
4. Yola - A nice website creator w/ lots of features. However, more features can be unlocked via a paid subscription.
5. Webs - A great site to either create a personal website or a group one as well.
6. Moonfruit - A fun way to create a simple and elegant website that has lots of social networking integration.
7. Webstarts - Another nice drag-n-drop site for creating websites w/ all the fixings: ability to add photos, video, audio, etc etc.
8. Edicy - Fast and easy way to create a wonderful looking website.
9. Jimdo - Fun and easy to use site to create a nice website w/ lots of features.
10. Sitekreator - Mainly a paid website creator but lots of nice visuals to choose from.
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.
Extract basic Frequency Lists from user texts or corpora; download influential Frequency Lists including AWL and Français 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 Cobb’s 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.
Words Steps is a great site for trying to learn a foreign language. On this site a user can create a word list that they want to learn. This list can contain images to help the person learn, as well as audio to help pronunciation. WS also has a mobile app to help people learn on the go.
Dolch Word Practice is a very good site for sight words. The recording quality could be better, but it seems to be the best place out there thatÕs free and covers most of the words.
Web-ESL has lots of great resources. It links to other sites, but has many of its own exercises, and they are excellent. Their literacy exercises stand-out in particular. Their exercises on sight words are perfect Ñ too bad they only teach ten of them!
Big Marker is a free web conferencing community ideal for educators and students. This is a great place to create a private room to collaborate by: chatting, sharing documents, etc. There are three categories of attendees: participant, presenter, and moderator. Holding a web conference is very easy to do and is a great way to facilitate online learning.
Phraseup is an interesting site that can be used for curing writers block or those who just can't seem to put into words what they are thinking. This works by typing in the start of a sentence and clicking complete which then gives the user a bunch of different sentences to choose from.
Whiz Kid Games is a fun site for kids to play games and listen to stories. These games are geared towards younger students and is still under construction so check back often.
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. Here’s where you can find some of them:
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.
Merriam-Webster Word Games is an impressive collection of about twenty different games accessible to various levels of English Language Learners. More at Word and Video Games.
Here are some new additions to The Best Resources For Teaching & Learning About World Water Day: GOOD Magazine has several resources: An infographic showing water conflicts around the world. These next two are a little different, but readers might still find them useful: 1) Absence of Water is an interesting slideshow. 2) Crowdsourced Picture Show About Water is another slideshow.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
Learn any language in 10 days. Our quick easy method is guaranteed.
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.
MICRO-BLOGS
Micro-blogs are designed for users to write short posts, and to easily add multimedia to them.
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.
WRITING ONLINE BOOKS
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 student’s creation can be posted on a teacher or student blog or website.
One of “The Best…” for slideshows, that’s 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.
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.
SITES OFFERING FREE WEB SPACE TO PUBLISH STUDENTS' WORK
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.
Scholastic has a good Internet Scavenger Hunt on Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. It's accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners. Also see United States History blog, which contains a year-long interactive curriculum for the subject.
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, it’s 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.
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.
There’s 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 aren’t 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:
3 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.
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.
GoClass is a wonderful educational tool that allows educators to create to student accounts and then create courses/lessons that they can assign to students on mobile devices (iOS/Android). This allows for educators to flip their classroom and assess student's learning in real-time. Also, the GoClass interface is highly intuitive and easy to use and allows teachers lots of options to to adjust for different learning styles.
The Answer Pad is one of my favorite all-in-one mobile learning solutions for a classroom. Not only does it allow a teacher to become paperless by doing all testing/assessing on a iPad (or mobile device), it can turn a iPad into a student response clicker system. A educator can use Answer Pad in a number of different ways and push out assignments that they can grade and assess in real-time, which allows them to differentiate instruction, guide instruction, and even flip their classroom.
Xnote is an innovative i-OS app for geo-caching that takes going on a scavenger hunt to a whole new level. For educators that are used to doing QR Code scavenger hunt this will be very familiar as this app allows educators to create virtual messages (that includes text/image) that will only open when a user goes to the "correct" spot/location. Talk about a fun way to integrate technology and outdoor activities! "Teachers, parents and students can use Xnote to create and hide virtual messages outdoors at any GPS-location. Students can be sent on treasure hunts close to school or home to find hidden assignments with images, texts, links etc. A way for parents to use technology to take kids from indoor screen time to fun, healthy activities outdoors. It is as easy as sending an SMS/email. Xnote teaches children to understand maps, navigation and spatial relations. Finding hidden assignments can teach communication, cooperation and the value of an active outdoor life. It is possible to link messages into tours and send treasure hunts to others using social media or by posting them on blogs or websites."
Sometimes storytellers need a spark. This iOS & Android app contains 600 creative writing prompts to set their inspiration ablaze and activate their imaginations!
Kien Lam quit his job and spent a year traveling around the world, shooting time-lapse videos in 17 countries. Time Is Nothing is his five-minute compilation of these moments. EFL students may be asked to describe people, places and countries they see.
Welcome to the Web is a fantastic resource about teaching "how to" use the internet. WTTW is broken down into 7 sections building upon each other. It starts out about an introduction to the internet and then goes through internet safety, browsing, etc. While users explore this site, they will have activities to do to reinforce what they have learned.
SchoolRack is a nice site for teachers to create a free website or blog. There are some nice features as creating a student or parent portal for sharing information. Also, a teacher can create a mailing list which is nice when wanting to send an email to a group of people. A teacher even has the ability post and monitor classroom assignments. For Kapuler's top 10 Website Creators click here.
Protagonize is a cool site where users create collaborative stories (ie, Folding Story). They can also create choose their own adventure style books. This is very innovative and sets Protagonize apart from other similar sites.
Try this software to make virtual people who speak your text in a computer voice. Use the demo for fun, or learn the pronunciation of English, French, etc...
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.
Quiet Write is a new and simple application that lets you write online in a no-frills environment and then publish your work and are given a unique url for your creation. Registration is equally as simple Ñ your email and a password. Unfortunately, unlike other somewhat similar apps, you can't add images to your page. It's no "great shakes," but it could be another option for a super-easy place for students to publish their work online with no hassle. Also see A Few Simple Ways To Introduce Reluctant Colleagues To Technology (where there are similar apps that do let you use photos) and The Best Places Where Students Can Write Online.a2
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 you’re 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 I’ve come across. It’s 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 doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that other slideshow creators have, but it seems to work well enough. It’s 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 don’t 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 you’re given your own url. You can’t just copy and paste images. However, you can embed objects. Rombla gets an honorable mention. It’s not quite as easy to use as the ones I’ve already mentioned, but it’s 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. There’s 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.
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?
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.
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."
includes 1 year of Practical Training: 11 months studying on lovely Chejudou, Korean exotic island. Then 1-2 weeks in both Israel & Thailand for ministry experience!
Our original Summary of “The Architects of AI” (Wired Word Lesson – Jan 11, 2026). This lesson explored how rapid advances in artificial intelligence challenge Christians to discern truth, evaluate technological power responsibly, and anchor their trust in God rather than in emerging digital authorities. Taking as a Springboard TIME’s “Person of the Year” selection—of AI innovators such as Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg—as a chance to discuss truth, falsehood, and spiritual discernment in a tech driven world.
Marcel Dubois helped resistance fighters in Belgium incapacitate 40 NAZI JEEPS IN 1943? It's BELIEVABLE SINCE MY OWN Dad served Czech Resistance from age 15--ALSO as their Medic in Praha uprising to expel Nazis from Czechoslovakia !
Deaths directly caused by the war (including military and civilian fatalities) are estimated at 50–56 million, with an additional estimated 19–28 million deaths
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.
“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.
