VenTESOL Library

"Are you ready to do some creative writing exercises? Story Spinner is a generator of millions of creative writing exercises. There's a handheld version you can buy so you will have writing exercises wherever you go. And there's a FREE online version on this page that you can use over and over and over again."

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 45,000 interviews with nearly 90,000 participants. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, and millions listen to our weekly broadcasts on NPR's Morning Edition and on our Listen pages. We do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, strengthen and build the connections between people, teach the value of listening, and weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that every life matters. At the same time, we will create an invaluable archive of American voices and wisdom for future generations. In the coming years we will build StoryCorps into an enduring institution that will touch the lives of every American family.

Ice Breaker Tags is a simple service for designing simple yet unique name tags. To use the service just enter your desired display name, upload an image to display on your name tag, and type your ice-breaker question or statement. If you need help developing a creative ice-breaker question or statement, Ice Breaker Tags offers some suggestions to get you going. You can print your name tag directly from Ice Breaker Tags.

The Noun Project is an online catalog of free clip art that you can download and reuse for all kinds of projects. The catalog is divided into eleven categories including sports, safety, food, animals, and more. All of the images are either public domain images or Creative Commons licensed images. If the images are public domain you are free to reuse them without attribution without restriction. If the images are Creative Commons licensed, please note the attribution requirements.

Draw Island is a free online tool for creating drawings and simple GIF animations. Draw Island offers you your choice of four canvas sizes on which you can draw. Draw Island offers two canvas sizes for creating simple GIF animations. To use Draw Island just head to the site and select a drawing tool. You can draw free hand (or should I say free mouse?) or select pre-defined shapes to use in your images. When you're done drawing just click the save button to download your drawing or animation. 

Stop Frame Animator from Culture Street is a neat tool for creating animated stop motion movies. Creating your animated stop motion video is a simple drag and drop process on Stop Frame Animator. To get started creating your stop motion video select a background scene then drag your characters into place. While you have nine background scenes to choose from, the only characters you can use are wooden manikins. You can position the manikins' arms and legs in every scene. After choosing your scene and characters you can add some other props like chairs and beach balls. And if you want you can add sound effects and music to your video by selecting them from the Stop Frame Animator gallery. 

Sketch Star from Miniclip is a fun and free tool for creating animated comics. On Sketch Star students can create draw animations from scratch or use pre-made shapes and characters. Students build their animations frame by frame. Each frame appears in a timeline that can be altered by dragging and dropping the frames into different sequences. The length of time that each frame is displayed can be adjusted too. Completed projects can be saved online.

Grammar and Beyond is the newest contextualized grammar series, offering real-world information, a strong emphasis on practice, and clear connections between grammar and writing.

We all have had many years of experience in learning in face-to-face settings in both classrooms and seminar rooms. Although the face-to-face learning environments are often complex and unpredictable, we are very familiar with them and have developed high levels of skill in working in these environments. We cannot assume, however, that the skills, strategies, and techniques that we so effectively use in face-to-face learning environments will also work well in online learning.

In an ideal world, every time your company rolls out a new application or a major upgrade on an existing application, full-time trainers would handle the duties of educating end users. In the real world, however, help desk analysts not only provide support for these applications but are often asked to train users on them as well.

wireWax is a new service (still in beta) that takes the concept of YouTube annotations and makes it much better. On wireWax you can build interactive tags into your videos. Each tag that you add to your video have another video from YouTube or Vimeo or an image from Facebook, Flickr, or Instagram. A tag can also include an audio track from SoundCloud or a reference article from Qwiki. What makes using wireWax different from using the YouTube annotations tool is that clicking on your tags (what YouTube calls annotations) does not send you outside of the video you're currently watching. This means that you can watch a video within a video or view a picture or listen to a different audio track within the original video. When you click a tag in the original video the video pauses and the tagged item is displayed. wireWax allows you to add tags to any YouTube video that is publicly viewable and has not had embedding disabled. I tried wireWax with this five minute video. It took a while (15-20 minutes) for the video to process for tagging, but once it was processed it was easy to create a tag. To create my tag I just advanced the video to the spot I wanted to tag, drew a box around the person I was tagging, then selected the wireWax YouTube app to put a video within the original video. Check it out below by advancing to about the 1.5 minute mark. Applications for Education wireWax could be a great tool for adding new layers of information to educational videos. If you're creating videos for your students or your students are creating videos to share with others consider tagging key points at which viewers might have questions. At those points insert tags that reveal clarifying information in the form of a video, an image, or an audio recording. 

"User Generated Education The Flipped Classroom: Professional Development Workshop"

"Breaking News English An EFL / ESL Lesson Plan by Sean Banville - Speaking English"

"Free fonts have met their match. We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We've done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format. "

"Online resource for FREE downloadable news lesson plans. Lessons include pre-reading activities, article text, vocabulary exercise, comprehension questions, dicussion questions and writing topics and encourage students to develop speaking skills and are perfect to complement your existing textbooks and lessons."

Great collection of ELT lessons created by George Chilton and Neil McMillan, English teachers based in Barcelona, Spain. Lessons are divided into categories and include the Level, Aim, Topic, Preparation, Stages, Pictures, and Videos.

This great blog created by Gareth H. Jones provides Spanish language speakers with clear explanations of some grammar points, concepts. expressions, and vocabulary.

Useful website to create, for example, some listening comprehension exercises from this complete Advertising & Commercial Archive with more than 2,000,000 ads. 

A superb site with lots of engaging activities for kids. They can play Hidden Pictures, read Animated Stories, make crafts, and share their Own Pages and Science Questions.