VenTESOL Library

Phillip Martin offers a site with FREE art for your classroom, newsletters, or wherever you can find a non-profit use.

"ABRACADABRA is a free, interactive web-based literacy program designed for early elementary school-aged students, their educators, teachers and parents. The Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) continues to develop ABRACADABRA in an effort to help battle the alarmingly high percentage of low ability readers in countries throughout the world."

With Grammar.net's Grammar Checker you can check and correct grammar and spelling mistakes and use Thesaurus feature to find synonyms. It's easy to check your texts using our Grammar Checker - just download this Free program. Then you need to highlight the text you want to check and press CTRL+G button. Or use Grammar.net's Rich Text for editing and checking your text with rich mark-up, just copy-paste it and then check your text. Grammar mistakes are underlined with a green wave line and spelling errors with a red one. To correct mistakes you just need to select a word from the Suggestions list. The Thesaurus tab is used for synonyms. The words with found synonyms are marked blue. To change the active word to one of the suggested synonyms you just need to select one of the suggested alternatives in the Synonyms list, and then click Change to. Press Finish Checking and corrected text will be returned to input field. Enhance your writing with FREE Grammar.net's Grammar Checker! All you need to do is download and install it on your computer.

CreateDebate is a new social networking community built around ideas, discussion and democracy. We've done our best to provide our community with a framework that makes compelling and meaningful debates easy to create and fun to use. Our goal is to build CreateDebate into an incredibly useful learning tool that will help groups of people to sort through issues, viewpoints and opinions so that consensus and understanding can be reached and better decisions can be made.

Spider Scribe is an online mind map creation service. Spider Scribe can be used individually or be used collaboratively. What jumps out about Spider Scribe is that users can add images, maps, calendars, text notes, and uploaded text files to their mind maps. Users can connect the elements on their mind maps or let them each stand on their own. You can embed your interactive Spider Scribe mind map into your blog or website. If you would like to see how Spider Scribe works, check out Russell Stannard's series of how-to videos or watch this two minute demo. Spider Scribe has a free product for students and educators.

Creaza Education is a great suite of tools that includes a video editor, an audio editor, a cartoon creator, and an excellent mind map builder. To access all of these tools create an account on Creaza Education then select "tools" after you sign in. Creaza Education's mind mapping tool is actually an installation of Mindomo. Mindomo is one of the most feature-rich mind mapping tools that I've used. The user interface is clear and intuitive as every important function happens through clearly labeled drop down menus. Mindomo allows you to include videos, pictures, and audio files in all cells in your mind map.

Realtime Board is a free tool for hosting online, collaborative brainstorming sessions. Realtime Board provides a blank grid on which you can type, draw, and post pictures. You can connect elements on your boards through a simple linking tool. The boards that you create on Realtime Board can be shared publicly or privately. To help you communicate with your collaborators Realtime Board has a chat function built into every board.

Text 2 Mind Map offers a great way to turn your typed outlines into mind maps. To create a mind map on Text 2 Mind Map type out an outline in the text box. After typing your outline click "draw mind map" to have your mind map created for you. If after creating your mind map you need to add more elements to just add them into your outline and click "draw mind map" again. Your mind map can be downloaded as a PDF or PNG file. The mind maps that you create on Text 2 Mind Map can also be shared via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

Popplet is a great service that combines the best of online sticky note services like Wallwisher with collaborative mind mapping functions. Popplet allows you to create a wall of multimedia sticky notes that you can share with others. Your stickies can include videos and images that you pull from other online services. You can also upload media from your desktop to your sticky notes. Popplet offers a browser bookmarklet that you can use to add content from other webpages to your Popplet pages. Invite others via email to collaborate on your wall of sticky notes. The mind mapping element of Popplet is the option to connect your notes. To do this just click one of the small circles that hovers near your note (Popplet calls them "Popples") while you're editing. Click those small circles will launch a connected blank note that you can edit. Popplet is available for iPads.

Story Map is a free interactive story planning tool from Read Write Think. Story Maps provides four templates for outlining stories. To use the templates students title their stories then choose one of four templates to outline their stories. The four template choices are conflict, setting, character, and resolution. Students can print their completed templates.

"The Teacher's Guide To Copyright And Fair Use"

Resource for writing stories which can give students opportunity to create different endings within story.

The wrong and right way to learn a foreign language By Valerie Strauss

Learning site for students of English.

The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. It is not open-source.