Group items tagged

This website will email or text you at designated intervals to remind you of whatever text you choose. Good for learning vocabulary. Limitations: You need to install a bookmarklet to use this. When you use the bookmarklet, it appears not to work, but it is actually working.

This French website created for native French speakers is full of dictées - dictations. This site is divided into grade levels based on the French school system. (For a brief run-down of the grade levels in France visit the blog from Transparent Language entitled À l'École!: French and American Grade Levels Compared at http://blogs.transparent.com/french/a-lecole/) Since the ladictee.fr website is targeted toward elementary aged children, the language level works well for beginner and intermediate French L2 learners. Even though a dictée isn't what people would call a "communicative" activity, it does serve the purpose of helping students make connections between spoken language and written language, especially since French spelling is not phonemic. The site includes various dictées for each level, along with a PDF of the written text so student's can check their work. Doing dictées can help students improve their spelling, recognize spelling patterns, and learn to listen for cues in spoken speech that indicate whether the person is speaking in the plural or singular (often tricky in the French language). Note: When doing a dictée, students are focused on writing down what is said word for word, and NOT on comprehension. It would NOT be effective to give a student a dictée and then immediately ask them specific comprehension questions about what they just heard.

Word cloud generator. Creates visually appealing word clouds with features like rollover text and in HTML 5. Limitations: As of 3/4/2013, the service was working extremely slowly.

Take notes (saved in Google Drive) as you watch a YouTube video. Video on left, notes on right. Use keyboard commands to pause & play video. (Keyboard commands do not work in Firefox.)

Speech to text. Speak, and this site transcribes. Works in a wide variety of languages.

Simple web-based whiteboard for drawing and collaborating. Does not require registration. Also works on smartphones and tablets.

A Google+ Game for Hangouts. You and others (your Google+ contacts) race with each other to find famous works of art within Google maps (indoor street view). Currently, the Palace of Versailles is the only available game.

Online word processor that allows students and teachers to work together in real-time.

An App for Teachers to Create Educational Portfolios of Student Work with an iPhone, iPad, or Android Smartphone

Create a simple timeline. Limitations: Does not work with non-Latin scripts. Requires Flash.

Counts word frequency in a text. Limitations: Designed to work with English only.

Acceso is intended as a complete, interactive curriculum for intermediate-level learners of Spanish. The materials on this site are provided freely to the public and are intended as a replacement for commercial textbooks, which are generally ill-suited to the learning outcomes now considered crucial to successful language study. These materials are supplemented by an online workbook built on the MySpanishLab platform of Pearson Education, Inc., as well as detailed lesson plans, rubrics for the evaluation of student work, and reliable instruments for measuring student progress and learning outcomes.

Tool for scaffolding, managing, organizing, and assessing student projects in Google Drive. Doctopus gives teachers the ability to mass-copy (from a starter template), share, and manage grading and feedback for student projects in Google Drive. The Goobric Chrome extension works alongside Doctopus to enable rubric-based grading of Google Docs right in a browser popup window using the rubric of your design.

Collaborative online text editor. What makes this different from Google Docs is that you can edit as though you were using pen and paper. You can export your work as .txt.

An encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world's 6,909 known living languages.

Listen to audio recordings of prominent Hispanic writers including Nobel Laureates Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz, and renowned writers Jorge Amado, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar reading from their works at the Library of Congress.

Generate a fake newspaper clipping. Limitations: Does not work with non-Latin scripts.

Create and share presentations. Works in your browser, including mobile devices.

Multilingual speech-to-text application. I tested English and Japanese. It works surprisingly well! Limitations: Only works in Chrome.

Create lists of vocabulary and definitions by uploading a document. As of 1/15/2015, this only works for English. Can export to PDF or Quizlet. As of 1/15/2015, I could not get this to properly export to Quizlet.