Group items tagged

"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.

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.

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

"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.

Webinar with dozens of ideas for using online tools to teach young learners writing. Offered at the 2012 EVO. Shelly Terrell offers free webinars every Friday at 21:00 GMT. go to tinyurl.com/ELTLinks to see a list of recent offerings. Recordings are also available for this free online professional development series.

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 resource from the University of Victoria offers a set of advisory files primarily on writing about literature. It has basic information about types of essays, essay organization, basic steps in writing process, types and function of paragraphs. The website also offers guidelines on writing clear sentences, and introduces rhetorical and literary terms. -- From Lena Shvidko Very, very complete OWL.

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.

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.

Listen, create and share FREE geolocalized audioguides. Share your voice and make the world a more interesting place.

This might be a great tool for an extended project, e.g., have your students create an infospot audio guide to their local community. Lots of examples are linked on the front page, and there is an iPhone app to scan, listen, and record wherever you happen to be. There are currently over 1300 guides created by users, and more coming.

"Drawing and recording your voice is not an easy task. What I've discovered is that once you start drawing, and your focus shifts to the image, there are few barriers to speaking. "The tool I'd like to share today is EDUCREATIONS (http://www.educreastions.com). I haven't explored it to its full potential but what I've seen so far is good enough. The free tool allows you use your mouse or your finger (ipad) to draw stick figures while you record your voice. You can also upload an image and draw and record your voice at the same time. Once finished, look at the right side below the twitter and facebook buttons for the URL and the embed code which allows you publish the recording." This tutorial shows how to sign up and use the tool, and there is an example from an EVO participant.

"How- to... get the best shots, explore styles, pick the best camera, editing and photo manipulation, and whatever else I think will help you and I learn more about creating photography that speaks volumes!! " Great tips for the budding student artist. I would recommend this to any student who shows artistic promise with photography. Let the creative juices flow. You can send your direct learners directly to this page for a visual feast, plus good advice from professional photographers.

This video shows how to use Feed Marklet to create a button on your browser toolbar to add an RSS feed. Takes about 1 minute. You can use an RSS feed to keep track of student Webpages, and have them use it to keep track of each other's work. For instance, they might add all the pages they are making, or their blogs, and so be able to read them quickly when new content is added.

"City College of San Francisco ESL students explore the Living Roof at the California Academy of Sciences with its 1.7 million native plants and exciting green technology which controls the building's temperature. Instructor: Cora Chen (visit Cora's ESL Page)" This is a nice example of how a day-trip can be combined into a media and reading-writing project for adult students.

"A free online Talking Dictionary of English Pronunciation Just mouse over the pink words to hear them spoken " This tool also links to Google Translate to translate your entry, and you can select from dozens of languages.

Stannard's training video on how to use Windows Movie Maker (Windows 7) is very detailed and complete. Subsequent parts give directions for XP and Vista. He first suggests downloading the free classic version, which has more features than WMM for Win 7.

Stannard gives a quick overview of http://www.rhymes.net, which helps you find words that rhyme with other words. But he doesn't mention that the site speaks the word too! There are also many other tools, such as a dictionary, words with multi-syllables, quotations using the word, phrases, abbreviations, etc. Great for vocabulary work, pronunciation, and writing poetry.

Shows how you can use Xtranormal to make 3-D characters. Your students can create a movie scenario, write the script, make the characters, select camera angles, add voices (in several languages) in quite long dialogues, and share the movie by email. Stannard takes you through the entire process (about 10 min.) using a Camtasia screencast.