Web Tools for Language Learning & Teaching

Generate word clouds that also allow you to see KWICs (key word in context). Limitations: No embed option.

Upload Word and PDF documents and add comments, highlighting, drawings, and annotations.

Multi-Genre Writing Prompts for Kids. Spin to get an interesting writing prompts.

Free Visual Dictionary & Thesaurus

Download YouTube videos. Just add "pwn" before the youtube.com address.

Create interactive digital documents or print documents. Collaborate simultaneously with others, and communicate via text chat. All features are free as of 10/2/2013.

Visual English dictionary and thesaurus. Shows relationships between the word you search for and other words/phrases using a diagram. Hover the mouse over a word to see its definition.

Turn Google Spreadsheets into Online Flashcards.

Create mindmaps or multiple outlines/task lists.

TESOL CALL Interest Section's list of CALL resources.

TESOL CALL Interest Section's list of software, organized by skill area. Limitations: Last updated in 2011.

Create digital lessons for use in class or at home using web content, images, videos, documents, questions, etc. Add tags for Common Core standards. Students have opportunities to provide feedback.

Continuously updated corpus of American English with useful search interface. Genres are spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, and academic.

This site allows you to see detailed information on the top 60,000 words (lemmas) of English, based on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). You can see the overall frequency for each word, as well as the frequency of words in different kinds of English -- spoken, fiction, magazines, newspapers, and academic writing. For each word you can also find the 20-30 most frequent collocates (nearby words) and see 200 or more concordance lines (words in context). You can also see a list of synonyms and (from WordNet) words with more specific and more general meanings, and in all of these cases you can click to see the entries for those related words as well.

You can enter any text that you would like in the form at the left -- for example, a paper that you've written, or a newspaper article that you've copied from another website. After inputting the text, you can then see useful information about words and phrases in that text, based on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). First, it will highlight all of the medium and lower-frequency words in your text and create lists of these words that you can use offline. This frequency data can help language learners focus on new words, and it can allow you to see "what the text is about" (i.e. text-specific words). You can also have it show you the "academic" words in your text. Second, you can click through the words in the text to see a detailed "word sketch" of any of the words -- showing their definition, and detailed information for the word from COCA -- collocates (which provide meaning into the meaning and usage of the word), re-sortable concordance lines, and the frequency of the word (overall, and by genre). Finally, you can do powerful searches on selected phrases in your text, to show related phrases in COCA. In this way, this resource is like a "collocational thesaurus" to see what related phrases are most likely in different styles of English. For example, if you click on the words potent argument in the text that you enter, it will suggest alternate ways to express this (e.g. powerful or convincing argument), and it will show you the frequency of those phrases in COCA -- overall, and by genre. This will help you use "just the right phrase", based on a huge collection of native English texts.

Remix YouTube videos.

Upload a PowerPoint presentation, then add narration using webcam or microphone.

Dictionary that offers definitions, synonyms, antonyms, example sentences, pronunciations, and translations between English and several languages (German, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish). Many other options.

Japanese-English dictionary with authentic examples.

Japanese-English and kanji dictionaries. (Inauthentic?) example sentences.