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"Students love to write fiction, and the short story is a good way to get them going. This page outlines a quickie lesson plan for writing a short story using the 5-way story starter, which plunges the reader (and the writer) into the action quickly."

A great example of a clearly defined lesson in guided reading and thinking in an historical context (Ghandi v. Ho Chi Minh as protest leaders). Ms. Duvoor models how to think like a historian as you read original documents.

A clearly explained lesson plan for introducing the concept of Google+.

"What you see here are candid submissions from people who have engaged in a little exercise. Here's how it works. Think about the word Race. How would you distill your thoughts, experiences or observations about race into one sentence that only has six words?" This National Public Radio blog makes the perfect starting point for a multicultural lesson for ESL/EFL students. The entries are sheer poetry and give a great deal of content to think about the issue of race and one's place in society, for better or worse. Each 6-word "poem" makes us, as one contributor said, "Look past race to underlying humanity."

This is a great site to teach adult and high school learners more about how to use the web and sift false info from true. Something like a WebQuest, but with varied levels of understanding implicit in the lesson plans and activities.

Despite the explanatory text, this app is indeed ready to download for iPad ($0.99). This is a nice use of technology to explain other technologies. You go through a browser screen to a Website, then draw on the iPad screen to demonstrate functionality while the app records what you do. Publish to Evernote or YouTube. You will have to do your own audio over, however. What a cool app.

A helpful guide to using Wikipedia and other resources for beginning researcher-students. Also mentions EducationWorld and the use of search engines.

Includes a list of useful links to help teach students digital literacy search skills.

You can set up an audio discussion board for your students. Very teacher- and student-friendly site. Great for practicing conversation online. (Formerly Chinswing.) See Russell Stannard's training video at http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/voxopop/index.html Stannard has also set up a teacher's discussion board for this tool: http://www.voxopop.com/group/8620c8e6-7839-4f55-842e-fce721d9eea2

"Despite our best efforts as teachers, there simply is not enough class time for working adults to learn English as a second language in the classroom at the speed that many of them need to meet their personal language learning goals. " Article by Alexandra Lowe on learning outside the classroom.

" The printables encourage writing and thinking in a quick and fun way. A student's efforts to complete the printable can then become the first step in writing longer essays, poems or stories on the same subject. The printables also can be used with students enrolled in literacy and English-As-Second Language (ESL, ESOL) programs and provide an educational resource for teaching language arts." Over 250 printables that can be used for writing prompts.

Update your KWHL Chart to KWHLAQ: What do I know? What do I want to know? How do I find out? What have I learned? What action will I take? What new questions do I have? Includes two sample charts.

"The idea here is to create a simple menu at the top of your Moodle course page that allows your learners to click and have only the relevant unit or cluster appear on the page. Essentially, this removes the 'scroll of death' issue if you find your learners are having to wade down through dozens of units to find something."

This brief article by Tom Robb outlines a great new Moodle application that is free if your school already uses Moodle, or accessible online where you can have your own page for quiz access. The add-on offers a short quiz of 10 randomized questions for almost 2,000 commonly read books used for extensive reading programs with the major graded reader series. See the http://MoodleReader.org site.

This article has a thorough discussion of the reading-writing connections for ESL primary school, and includes a nice reading response worksheet in the appendix. Article by Annmarie Jackson, GSU.

This web resource is for teachers of high beginning and intermediate writing courses and intermediate ESL learners. The resource provides 8 units that 1) teach about paragraph structure and paragraph elements: topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence 2) introduce transition words and coherence in a paragraph 3) provide the opportunity to learn about and practice basic writing skills such as making an outline and staying on topic. Clear explanations are supported by examples; therefore, teacher can use this resource for class preparation, and ESL learners can use it as additional material to learn about paragraph writing. Practice activities provided by the website are not interactive; however, most of the assessment tasks have answer keys. In addition, each unit provides lesson in a PDF format that can be used by a teacher as a handout. -- From Lena Shvidko For ESL K-12 learners, but would be useful for adults as well. Focuses on the paragraph, rather than the essay, so makes a good beginning set of lessons.

Mailvu is a free video messaging system that looks simple and easy to use. R. Stannard's video helps you get started quickly, and he also discusses how he uses the tools with his students for language learning: you can have students send you video recordings and then comment on them, have students do interviews of each other, describe something, talk about a holiday or their weekend, etc. Mailvu also has apps for Android and iPhone.

This site combines the best of a thesaurus and a concordancer. A word search produces loads of combinations in actual usage, with a red or green bar to indicate good and bad connotations. An alternatives link shows other words that can be substituted. Should be a nice accessory to non-native more advanced writers. Also connects to Wordle, so that students can see visually what kinds of usage are most likely.

This remarkable concordancer has many quick and easy features, such as seeing visually with a graph the frequency of occurrences of a word, quick links to the word embedded in a concordance, a thesaurus of alternative vocabulary, and indications of "good" and "bad" uses of a word. Stannard doesn't talk much about the pedagogy of the tool, but it is well worth exploring, esp. with your more advanced students.

Very short videos--36 sec--may be good for low level students to practice initial speaking/listening. Also has apps for various smart phones. Might be good for a quite pronunciation quiz, for example. The teacher can then send back a short video message with corrections, modeling, etc.