Group items tagged

"Find flashcards to study or create your own flashcards. "Study flashcards or use the other activities such as matching, crosswords, hangman, scrambled word, or bug chase. "Study flashcards anytime/anywhere by printing your flashcards or by using a flashcard app. " -- Subjects include geography, business, math, science, languages, medical subjets, and varies tests, such as GRE. Not specifically for ESL/EFL. Nice that you can use the flashcards on- or off-line.

Publishes weekly articles on practical approaches and lesson plans for teaching EFL online. Here at the ELT Newsletter teachers of English can * read weekly articles on topics of interest to ELT professionals - updated every Friday * gather teaching tips from the weekly articles * find links to other sites of interest to English teachers (and learners) Every week we publish a new article on ELT. We cover a wide variety of topics - young learners, adults, general English, business English, exam classes, modern concepts and ideas such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Multiple Intelligences, and more. If it's of interest to English teachers, it's of interest to us! --EHS

TEFLclips is a site dedicated to the possibilities for YouTube and other video sharing sites in the classroom. Every week a new lesson plan is uploaded. This looks like a good site for online lessons, esp for business English.

CoPs as related to business, workplace, and community organizations.

Web 2.0 Tools for EFL ESL Teachers This has been a pretty busy week for me, mainly because I delivered my first online technology training presentation (8th September 2009) using the Adobe Connect Pro platform. I have to thank Jürgen Wagner and Verena Heckmann, e-learning specialists at the Landesinstitut für Pädagogik and Medien in Saarbrücken Germany, for offering me this opportunity to get online and promote and share some of the technological tools and activities I believe can be so helpful to EFL and ESL teachers.

Distance Consulting group -- this is a definitions page. "One of the best-known examples of a CoP was formed by the copy machine repair technicians at Xerox Corporation. Through networking and sharing their experiences, particularly the problems they encountered and the solutions they devised, a core group of these technicians proved extremely effective in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of efforts to diagnose and repair Xerox customers' copy machines. The impact on customer satisfaction and the business value to Xerox was invaluable. Yet, for the most part, this was a voluntary, informal gathering and sharing of expertise, not a "corporate program" (however, once the company realized the value of the knowledge being created by this CoP, steps were taken to support and enhance the efforts of the group)."

"In the original 2004 article I stated: "The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today. A real challenge for any learning theory is to actuate known knowledge at the point of application" (Conclusion section, � 1). I find Verhagen�s (2006) critique falls at precisely this point. The core of what I wrote in the initial article is still valid: that learning is a network phenomenon, influenced (aided) by socialization and technology. Two years is a lifetime in the educational technology space. Two years ago, web 2.0 was just at the beginning of the hype cycle. Blogs, wikis, and RSS�now prominent terms at most educational conferences�were still the sandbox of learning technology geeks. Podcasting was not yet prominent. YouTube didn't exist. Google had not released its suite of web-based tools. Google Earth was not yet on the desktops of children and executives alike�each thrilled to view their house, school, or business in satellite images. Learning Management Systems still held the starting point of most elearning initiatives. Moodle was not yet prominent, and the term PLEs (personal learning environments) did not exist. In two years, our small space of educational technology evolved�perhaps exploded is a more accurate term."

This is an incredibly useful resource for language classes. In combination with news syndicates like ABC, Fox, AP, and AFP, Mapeas collects video news and locates it on a Google map. Students learn geography, read news in English or an FL, and can specify business, entertainment, science news, etc.

"Visual Writing Prompts is a great source for engaging writing prompts. You can browse their collection of writing prompts by genre, grade, or subject area. The prompts are written directly on each image. "While it's a great source of writing prompts already, it is a site in-progress. They are in the process of adding additional information to each prompt. The prompts that have already been completed include a prompt explanation, an explanation of any relevant vocabulary and language, and a convenient one-click download button." I always used a set of images, culled over years of browsing magazines and newpapers, as writing prompts for various types of writing. This site has the prompts built-in, which can be an advantage for the busy teacher, or a disadvantage if you don't want to find something that precisely fits your assignment goals. You can also have students create their own portfolio of images and prompts to share with other writers. T/H to Nick LaFave.

Famous actors read from children's books. Nice place to be read to if parents don't speak English, or are too busy. Stories from many lands, in English.

Ann Burns offers some very useful advice for using YouTube successfully with your classes. Still to be overcome: the tedious video ads that accompany each video. One of the best points: Create your own YouTube channel for great stuff. "YouTube is one of the most underused teaching resources on the web. It offer millions of hours quality viewing made by some of the biggest names in the industry for free. "

Use Flickr or Picasa to place photos in a Yahoo or Google map.

"Engage, Entertain, Train, and Collect Data. Sticky & Embeddable." You can make an interactive, multimedia quiz and embed it on your Website. One of the most slick looking interfaces, and it's free at the present time.

This cross-platform app -- iPhone and Android -- lets students create their own games and instructional programs. Free for teachers and students, you need to sign up for an account, but you can work on a computer to create the HTML5. Learning games can be dreary, but creating them can be very interesting for students. The frontpage shows middle school learners working away, so this might be good even for younger learners.

This lesson plan is very detailed and revolves around a blog assignment to discuss students' hobbies. Nice combination of writing and high student interest possibilities.

Has an interesting business letter generator.

A database of 14,000+ worksheets for use in the ESL classroom. Many of these will be useful for your classes, K-12 and adult.

This easy storyboard maker could be used for students to create their own cartoons, digital story, or storyboard a video production. Students can collaborate online within the application.