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"Google Input Tools is a very good Chrome extension that allows you to type using any language you want.This is especially helpful for multilingual people who would like to navigate the web using languages not supported by their keyboards.With one simple click, Google Input Tools enables you to switch to typing in a different language and switch back just as easily."

The noun project has as its aim the creation of a global visual language through symbols and icons. This could be used for all kinds of vocabulary activities in Communication Arts, Foreign languages, ESOL, etc. Not only can teachers and students use the icons for things like flashcards or presentations, they can create new one and upload.

share with your CA & World language teachers

Share this French and Spanish teachers. We are having a difficult time finding informational texts that are age appropriate while being skill level appropriate with content that is engaging and interesting in the target languages. This could be a great way to solicit materials/resources in the target language. Also, it is a great way for our students to connect globally with an authentic audience!

The Digital Dialects website features free to use online games for learning languages. Language resources include games for learning phrases, numbers, useful words, spelling, verb conjugation and alphabets. Games use Macromedia Flash Player. : audio has been added to extra quizzes in the Chinese Games and Spanish Games sections.

"Researchers have long known that the "classical" language regions, like Broca's area and Wernicke's area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive."

On this page you can try to solve the shown google map quiz. In the upper part of the page you see a satellite picture. Drag and zoom the map in the lower part of the page until it shows the same location as the upper map.

Place Spotting is a website of geographic riddles. Place Spotting is based on the Google Earth platform. Place Spotting users can create their own geographic riddles or try to solve riddles created by others. The search feature on Place Spotting lets users search for riddles based on level of difficulty, language, region, or creation date. 

create an account, take a learning preference adventure, customize your profile, explore learning pathways, create a playlist of tutorials, create a group, and invite your peers and colleagues. This could be used with students. Students could become the teachers! Curate content, decide how to teach it, create the tutorials and share. This would work well with foreign language, science, and social studies! Just about anything would work!

HelloSlide transforms your slides into a rich audiovisual format, recreating the experience of a live lecture. Simply upload your presentation, type the speech for each slide, and HelloSlide automagically generates the audio. HelloSlide gives more exposure to your presentations, making them searchable, editable, and available in 20 different languages. It's simple to get started: Upload a PDF of your presentation to our website. Type the speech for each slide using our editor. Press play to hear your presentation.

GitHub has compiled this excellent list comprising more than 500 free books on programming and coding. The books cover different topics from programming languages to software architecture.

With Tellagami, begin by creating and customizing a character. Although there is not a great deal of variety in virtual appearance, just enough options exist to personalize your character. From there, you choose a background either from a few in the app itself or your camera roll. I love to take a picture at the front of the classroom and have my character introduce me to the class. I have worked with teachers where they introduce the classroom to students or parents with their character in different spots around the room, even on a bookshelf. After you customize your character and background, you can choose how you want your character to talk, either by recording your voice or typing in text. If you record your voice, you have 30 seconds. If you choose text to speech, there are male and female voices with a few different accents. Some quick ideas you might try: * Have your character tell a story. * Pick a person in history and have them introduce themselves * Use a plant cell as the background and have the avatar name and discuss the function of each part of the cell. * Recite a famous poem or speech * Read a poem they wrote * Take a trip or go back in time and describe where the location/time period * Speak in Spanish, French, Mandarin or any language When you are all done, Gamis can be emailed, posted to Facebook, or Tweeted, which also generates a link to share. You can also view your movie online and get the embed code. I could see embedding a whole bunch of these on a class wiki or blog. You can also save them to your iPad Photos, which is what I like to do. From there, Gamis can be combined together in iMovie or incorporated into other apps like Explain Everything. (Greg Kulowic has some great examples of this, as "appsmashes.") Your only limit is your imagination! Using animation with your students can have a profound effect on how they participate in a project. Their work can be liberated when they have the opportunity to separate

What it is: Inklewriter is a great digital tool that lets students (and teachers if you are so inclined) write and publish interactive stories. Inklewriter lets students create choose-your-own-adventure type stories, story lines can come with choices and then be linked back together. Inklewriter makes this process easier by keeping track of which story paths have been finished and which still need work. There is no set-up required, no programming language to learn and no diagrams. Inklewriter is free to use and easy to share with the world when it is published. When a story is finished, it can even be converted to Kindle format!

How to integrate Inklewriter into the classroom: Inklewriter is a great digital tool for creative writing. Students can explore multiple plot lines and what-if scenarios in their fictional writing. I also like the idea of using Inklewriter to ask kids to explore the "what-ifs" in history. What if we lost/won this war/battle? What if the other guy (or girl) had been elected president? What if the Berlin wall hadn't come down? These types of stories are fantastic opportunities for students to explore their curiosities and, in the process, learn more about the event they are exploring. After all, you have to know something about how an event actually went in order to write alternate endings. Inklewriter would be a fun way for students to come up with alternate endings to a novel they are reading. Our students wrote a variety of endings for The Giver. Each student wrote a different ending that picked up from the last chapter of the book. Inklewriter would have been a great tool to use for all of these endings to be available in one place. Students could copy/paste the last paragraph of the actual book and then offer their alternative endings as options. In science, students could use Inklewriter as a tool to record their hypothesis. Students can write out the objective and steps in their experiment and make a new "alternate ending" for their various hypothesis. In math, students could create story problems where they lead others down the path to discover the correct answer.

To use the service, you first must create an account. Users will then upload their slides and arrange them to build a story. These slides will need to be images. For each slide users need to type some text to explain what is in the slide. From there, in 20+ different languages and 70+ different voices, the service will convert the text into a voice over speech. The images and audio are turned into a video and automatically published to YouTube, or can downloaded for personal use.

written by Kevin Hodgson is a must-read for anyone interested in the use digital storytelling and games in their language arts lessons. Kevin also regularly posts book reviews. Take a look at his recent post about using Stykz for creating stopmotion movies.

"Meanwhile, Sandra Zelno of the Education Law Center shared school library initiatives from other states and pointed out that while Pennsylvania doesn't require librarians for public schools, it mandates them for private schools and prisons."

PA looks at school libraries and librarians

Text Complexity

Simply type the speech for each slide, instead of recording it, and HelloSlide automagically generates the audio. It gives more exposure to your presentations, making them searchable, editable, and available in 20 different languages.