Group items tagged

"This is one of my favorite websites for advanced sentence-level writing. The exercises on run-on sentences and fragments, for example, have lots of challenging vocabulary and funny situations. The exercises provide immediate feedback with cool (or yucky) "cyber prizes." "One caution: the exercises are only useful for advanced-level students who can understand the vocabulary and appreciate the humor." - by Nancy Overman New exercises appear to be added fairly regularly.

This set of videos from TeachingChannel has observation exercises that would be useful for teacher-training, or self-training. There is a note-taking worksheet downloadable in the Supporting Materials, and Questions to Consider as you watch the video. This is a nice exercise, and also includes a Think Aloud activity.

Vocabularly exercises at many different levels with lots pre-reading (sentence-level), and then exercises with cartoons and sounds for help. Highly interactiv--point and click on an item, drag-and-drop an item to a cartoon figure, listening to the item and type, etc. Despite cartoon/movie figures, adults could use these exercises, too (from Russel Stannard, TeachertrainingVideos.com).

"with listening, grammar, comprehension, dictation exercises, and crossword puzzles" Covers a wide range of exercises and activities for listening, reading, and writing.

Another excellent set of exercises by Mauricio Aldana. This one includes Brain Teasers, Assumptions and Context, and Key Questions to Exercise Critical Thinking. The latter looks esp. appropriate for online reading.

Online exercise creator

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.

"The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. On September 1, 2009, Hot Potatoes was released as freeware."

"What you see here are candid submissions from people who have engaged in a little exercise. Here's how it works. Think about the word Race. How would you distill your thoughts, experiences or observations about race into one sentence that only has six words?" This National Public Radio blog makes the perfect starting point for a multicultural lesson for ESL/EFL students. The entries are sheer poetry and give a great deal of content to think about the issue of race and one's place in society, for better or worse. Each 6-word "poem" makes us, as one contributor said, "Look past race to underlying humanity."

Clever writing games, writing exercises, poetry guide, and ways to publish writing. Nice site to get students interesting and keep them writing. And possibly to introduce writers they may never have heard of.

"Essay Punch takes users through the process of writing an essay. From pre-set writing prompts users learn to develop an idea and write their descriptive, informative and persuasive essays. "The site provides online interactive exercises that guide users step by step through pre-writing, writing, organizing, editing, rewriting, and publishing." Essay Punch offers a free "demo" walk thru of writing an essay (gathering info, etc.) -- and then 9 more lessons for a fee. -- by Nancy Overman

This old favorite has resources, exercises, an advice on writing. It also offers online help with writing.

"Jeez, there are sure a ton of ways to find images on the Web, as well as many places where you can find lengthy link lists to image collections. "I'd lay odds that most people, including myself, just use Google Image Search when they need to find an image. However, there might be instances when you want to use another tool - perhaps you're a language teacher searching for just the right clip art or photography to illustrate a verb, maybe you have very young students and are concerned about what they might find on Google, possibly you're particularly teaching about copyright issues, or you want your students to easily connect an image to a writing exercise and have them send an E-Card. (Google has recently added an option in their advanced image search feature - go to the bottom left under "license" and choose "labeled for reuse")" The list includes many academic sites.

"Many students are struggling with writing assignments, and spend huge amounts of time trying to squeeze words on paper. Even if it's not the case and students just want to improve their writing skills, some writing help services for students may be worth checking out. Includes tutoring services, skill-building exercises, and services for K-12.

R. Byrne: "Creating mind maps or webs is one of my favorite ways to organize ideas and information. I've often had my students create mind maps as an exercise in making visual connections between important concepts, events, and people in a unit of study. The following free tools offer good options for creating mind maps online. "

"You can listen to all the podcasts for free, but in order to download the worksheets and transcripts (except for the ones on this page) you must become a member." For elementary students. Also has worksheets, webquests, vocabulary exercises, transcripts for members.

"The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) with the mission of providing a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Despite being the work of one man, Salman Khan, this 1600+ video library is the most-used educational video resource as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month. We are complementing this ever-growing library with user-paced exercises--developed as an open source project--allowing the Khan Academy to become the free classroom for the World." Though not specifically EFL/ESL, the lessons offered could be very useful in class, particularly math, science, history, SAT prep, Calif Standards tests, etc. Also topical videos, such as the Geithner plan to solve the banking crisis of 2009-10.

A new project by Martin Holmes (creator of Hot Potatoes). You can download software (PC only) for Web versions of John & Muriel Higgins' Rhubarb and Sequitur (close quizzes). Exercises you create can be upload to your own Website, or to the hotpotatoes.net server to be shared. It's fun to see these old programs take on new life.

List for special instances and deals with copyright issues as well.: "I'd lay odds that most people, including myself, just use Google Image Search when they need to find an image. However, there might be instances when you want to use another tool - perhaps you're a language teacher searching for just the right clip art or photography to illustrate a verb, maybe you have very young students and are concerned about what they might find on Google, possibly you're particularly teaching about copyright issues, or you want your students to easily connect an image to a writing exercise and have them send an E-Card."

"This year in February I moderated week 5 of Becoming a Webhead 2009. As a natural researcher I had to investigate these tools and their educational potential. Below you will find a list of the different tools that can make our teaching excel and our imagination grow. Be ready to create quizzes, online sheets, interactive exercises and online surveys." This looks like a set of very useful tools to use online and off.