Geoffrey's ESL Links

Vast archive of free worksheets

Learn or improve your English language skills with Atlanta's only company that customizes English education to your own needs!

MyVocabulary.com offers free vocabulary lessons, word lists, and word puzzles designed for middle school and high school students. The vocabulary lists are based on books commonly used in middle school and high school classrooms. MyVocabulary.com also offers word lists and activities based on SAT vocabulary. Visitors to MyVocabulary.com will find stand-alone vocabulary lessons as well as activities to complement the reading of specific stories. Applications for EducationIf you're planning a series of lessons on one of "standard books" for middle school or high school, MyVocabulary.com could provide you with some good vocabulary lists and lesson ideas to get started. Students prepping for the SAT should take some time to explore the SAT word puzzles offered by MyVocabulary.com

Great online note taking app. Send notes to class afterwards or post on class blog

Online resources any ESL teacher should know about

Scriffon is a simple service for writing and publishing online. Scriffon isn't a blogging platform, it's a writing platform. That means that you cannot edit the layout or navigation on the page on which your writing is published. Each writing that you publish is given it's own url. You can go back and edit your writing even after it has been published. If like, you can use multiple pen names under your Scriffon account name too.  Applications for Education Scriffon could be a good way for students to anonymously post their writings online and get feedback from others. For teachers or students who are reluctant to put their names on the web, using a pen name is a good way to publish without putting your real name online.

I frequently use in my classroom is ViewPure. ViewPure allows you to display YouTube videos without displaying the "related videos" and advertisements that appear next to each video. There are two ways that you can use ViewPure. You can copy the url of your chosen YouTube video and paste it into ViewPure where it will then strip away everything but the video. The other option is to install the ViewPure bookmarklet and click anytime you're viewing a YouTube video.

Digital Dialects offers a nice selection of educational games and activities for learning 55 different languages. Most of the games are designed to learn and practice the basics of each of the 55 languages listed on the Digital Dialects homepage.  Another good website for learning and practicing language basics is Literacy Center.net. Literacy Center offers games for learning and practicing French, Spanish, German, and English. The Literacy Center is a 501c non-profit with a contract from the US Department of Education.  Applications for Education The educational games and activities found on Digital Dialects and Literacy Center are great for students just beginning to learn a new language. The games provide instant feedback to students and parents so that they can monitor progress and choose a skill or set of vocabulary terms to practice. 

Convore Wants To Be The Easiest Group Communication App Yet

Phrays is a simple site that publishes a new word of the day everyday. Each word is published with its definition and part of speech. Visitors to the site are encouraged to write and submit a sentence using that word. Registered users can read the sentences submitted by others and vote for their favorite sentences.

TriciderI used Tricider as my needs analysis tool at the beginning and my action research tool during the course. It's a very simple to use, but very versatile polling tool. You just create a question and add some options then share it with the people you want answers from. The great thing is that they can add extra options and add various pros and cons of each option as well as voting on the ones they like. This makes the whole process of polling much more open, social and interactive.

Beautiful destop backgrounds...

Live Minutes - Free Webinar Hosting Live Minutes is a new service offering free hosting for webinars. It takes less than thirty seconds to set-up a webinar on Live Minutes. To get started just click "start sharing" and a meeting space is created for you. That meeting space is assigned a URL that you can share with the people you want to join you.  Live Minutes offers a good selection of tools that you can utilize to share ideas with others. You can talk to each other using either the Live Minutes audio or by connecting through Skype. Live Minutes offers a collaborative whiteboard for drawing. Uploading images and documents for others to see and comment on is also an option. And in the future Live Minutes will allow you to share videos during your webinar.  Applications for Education Live Minutes could be a great way to quickly host a live online tutoring session with students. The option for drawing free-hand on the whiteboard could be very handy for illustrating concepts that are difficult to type quickly on a keyboard or that lose meaning when someone is just explaining rather than showing.

7 Good Screen Capture Tools for TeachersIntroducing new technology tools to your students or to your colleagues can become a frustrating exercise if you end up repeating the same step-by-step directions over and over again. Not only is it frustrating for you to repeat those directions, it can also be frustrating for the students who want to go ahead but can't because you're waiting until everyone is on the same page. One way to avoid that is to create annotated screen captures of the tools you're introducing. Another way to avoid repeating directions over and over again is to creating screencast videos in which you explain each step of the process. Here are seven tools that you can use to create annotated screen capture images and screencast videos.