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"ooVoo offers the ability to video chat face-to-face with family and friends, anytime and anywhere. With ooVoo you can have free video chats one-to-one, or have a group video chat with up to 6 people at once!" This might be useful for consulting with students, listening tests, practice with speech and gestures, etc. Requires headset and video camera with broadband connection. Can do 1-way video.

Discusses several good tools for videoconferencing including Oovoo, Facetime and Android equivalents, Hangout, and Skype. Also links to articles about how to get the most out of your video chats and conferences. t/h to Nik Peachey

This chat room tool might be useful for your classes, or as a backchannel if several teachers are working on a presentation together. The interface can be mounted on your own website, ensuring that students don't wander off. You can easily save a transcript of the chat, and it lets students join from home or other classrooms. T/H to H. Dilatush who let us in EVO know about it.

"Caffein is an instant webcam chat service for friends and peers. Create a free video chat room and enjoy talking right now!" Looks like fun, but I don't know how many people can be in one room at a time. V-rooms take bandwidth.

This guide is fairly complete on how to use Google Hangouts, but doesn't mention that you can open a text chat elsewhere on the web, e.g., in your blog or YouTube channel, and thus have a much larger class or group of students join in with text chat, while seeing and listening to the audio-video hangout. Participants take turns dropping in and out. This would be hard to organize with high school kids/teens, but would work with adults or teachers-in-training.

Has lists of online activities, categorized by "pre-intermediate," "intermediate," and "advanced" levels of learners, as well as links to a dozen or so chat groups for English learners, an online dictionary, and a variety of tests and exercises.

Scriblink is a free digital whiteboard that users can share online in real-time. Sorta like pen and paper, minus the dead trees, plastic, and the inconvenience of being at the same place at the same time. Scriblink brings you the power of free hand expression with anyone, at anytime, anywhere in the world. On the homepage you'll be immediately directed to a Scriblink board, which is free and requires no registration.

Scriblink is a free digital whiteboard that users can share online in real-time. Sorta like pen and paper, minus the dead trees, plastic, and the inconvenience of being at the same place at the same time. Scriblink brings you the power of free hand expression with anyone, at anytime, anywhere in the world. On the homepage you'll be immediately directed to a Scriblink board, which is free and requires no registration. Contributor: Sulany dos Santos on 05 Feb 10 Scriblink also has chat and video chat simultaneously.

This is a nice version of Alice. You can have students conduct a chat--they type, and Alice answers orally. There is also a pull-down menu of questions and replies to use. You can allow students to "get crazy," or ask them to try to make a coherent "conversation." A nice way, potentially, to practice "polite conversation" before trying it out with a real human. From EFL Classroom 2.0.

Choice of text, audio, or video chat rooms.

This Etherpad clone allows you to set up a live public text chat on the fly. Enter your name and then invite users to share your pad. Use it as a backchannel during a flipped classroom, or with your lecture or conference presentation on land to receive questions from the audience.

Create a text chat on the fly. Set up a public pad without sign-up, then invite others to join you. Use it for backchanneling questions during a lecture or meeting. Or embed a Google Hangout to allow more than 10 users to follow the audio talk.

"Groupboard is a free online whiteboard and chat app that can be easily embedded into your website. It works on any web browser including iPhone, iPad and Android with no downloads or plugins required." Has drawing tools. Would be great for tutoring or videoconferencing. Write, draw, type, upload documents.

A great follow-on by R. Stannard on how to add content and "see" Moodle from the students' point of view. Includes students' content-uploads, using chats and forums, etc.

A paper describing massively multiplayer online games for situated learning, which give students a chance to operate in a simulated environment and share with other online players through chat. (Second Life has now become the standard for MMOGs.)

Another great talk from Learning2gether Sunday gatherings. Carla talks about the importance of archiving or curation to the teacher and introduces many wonderful tools for gathering and archiving websites. Mobile applications included. You may also find the recording of the live chat at http://tinyurl.com/2012oct07/carlaarena.

Tips by R. Stannard on how to use G-Docs with your students. Includes how to create a Doc in your personal G-Drive. Students do not need a Google account to access your selected documents. For example, students can discuss a question with a table indicating which group students belong to. Students write their answers/discussion within the cell of the table. Once the doc is created, one student can access a computer to put in all the ideas generated by the group, using a shareable link. Google provides an area to shorten the link so it can be written on the board. [Remember, all students could type in the Doc simultaneously, and chat in the margin of a G-Doc.]

I like the idea of "flipped tweeting": topics are posted several hours before live Twitter chats, Thursdays, 3 pm EST. See the whole schedule posted at the Bottom-Line Performance Blog: http://www.bottomlineperformance.com/

"The basic purpose of Huzzaz is to help you create and organize collections of videos. In your account you can make as many thematic collections as you like. To add a video from YouTube or Vimeo to your collections you can search within Huzzaz, use the Huzzaz browser bookmarklet, or copy and paste video URLs into your collections. Once you have some videos in a collection you can organize them by simply dragging and dropping them into a sequence. Your collections can be shared with others. Likewise, you can share individual videos. " Perhaps best of all, you can open a "comments" window while watching a video and it creates a live chat area.

Claims to have over 1 million member from 133 countries, practicing 115 languages. Find a partner for penpals/e-pals, use text or voice chat, and use lesson plans with your students. Also includes group homestay exchanges.