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Shelly Terrell offers FREE webinars every Friday at around 21:00 GMC/UTC at americantesol.adobeconnect.com/terrell/. This page gives a list of topics for upcoming webinars. Get somefree prof development with inspiring examples of how to use Web tools with your students.

"In the month of March 2012, an International team of 4 elementary school classrooms are conducting Action Research about quality writing through blogging. You can support them by giving them an authentic global audience and modeling quality commenting on their posts. " A great way to collaborate internationally with blogs.

Penzu was a nice and easily managed blog space. Now they have created Penzu Classroom that lets a teacher manage assignments, make inline comments (highlight/pop-up) on writing, tag student work, and share entires with students online and with email; students can give feedback and discuss each others entries. This look to be highly functional and would be well worth a try, especially for a teacher just getting into elearning.

The targeted audience of this website is high intermediate and advanced ESL learners, and in particular TOEFL test takers. This website focuses on teaching how to write an argumentative and opinion essay. It provides information on argumentative essay structure, teaches about two different essay layouts and supports them with examples, explicitly describes steps of argumentative essay writing process, gives a number of model argumentative essays, demonstrates two sides of an argument, and has 70 argumentative essay topics, and 155 TOEFL writing topics. -- From Lena Shvidko

A video about pedagogical theories created for a Curt Bonk class. May not last long, but give it a try. Illustrates Behaviorism, Vygotsky, and Social Constructivism with clips from contemporary movies. Clever and memorable.

Nik Peachey demonstrates a wonderful tool, SafeShare.tv that can be used to crop YouTube videos, stripping ads, and shortening them, to make them more useful for ESL/EFL classes. Nik gives a number of suggestions, with accompanying video examples, and an instructional video of how to use the tool.

Carla Arena's blog entry describes a great lesson she set up to use QR codes for classroom discussion. This should give you some ideas for getting students into talking.

A nice teacher training video on this free tool, by R. Stannard. Get Jin for free at Jing.com. Jing also gives you a place to post your videos and share them with a URL.

"Until recently, devices that help children like Enrique speak used modified adult voices. The effect can be startling to those listening because it doesn't sound like a child's voice. Most existing children's voices sound "like adults on helium," said David Niemeijer, chief executive and lead developer at AssistiveWare, which developed the software Enrique tested. "

"As one of the largest producers and owners of educational content in the world, the BBC has created a global classroom for teachers, students, and passionate life-long learners. " This is really an eye-catching site with wonderful resources from the BBC laid out with visual links. Too many different ideas to even begin to catalog them. Give it a try. Learnist, the host site, is like Facebook but with a more serious leaning (almost wrote "learning" there...)

Adobe Captivate 6 is"a solution which can help you track how learners have been interacting with your Adobe Captivate courses. It gives you insight on aspects such as: how much time learners are spending on slide which interactive items they are interacting with how much time they are away from slide, on which slide they are dropping out of the course how many times they are visiting a slide how they have been performing on the quiz." Sounds like a useful program to have.

"We all know Google Presentations is a great tool for making multimedia slideshows. But did you know it can also be used to make interactive quizzes and "Choose Your Own Adventure" style stories? With Google Presentations ability to link to specific slides you can build a non-linear slideshow that allows the user to make choices and go to different slides depending on their choice. Learn tips and tricks to make this work best, and see how this can be used for you or your students to make interactive quizzes and stories." This looks like fun. Users warn that some of the links to help files don't work, but give it a try.

These sites include RAS Animate with thought-provoking videos about education and other subjects; Problem Attic with a bank of 80,000 quetions from the NY Regents exams, review tests, quizzes, and flash card; Learners TV with thoughsands of video lectures, tests, and animations in various disciplines to support classroom instruction; Sketch Toy which lets you draw and share pictures; Daily Infographic, where you can search topics and subscribe; and Google Tutor, which gives you news, tips, and tutorials about Google. Thanks to M. Sheehan at Learning Never Stops for the info.

Easily create images, write on maps, place markers, draw shapes, share,and export to Google Earth. A great way to give student presentations some real backgrounds.

This is a good article because it gives you the details of each engine and the good and the bad in a systematic way. Be sure to ignore the ads at the top and go to the content. Mind-mapping is a great way to visually brainstorm and encourage connections, whether for a written project, a presentation, or a video storyboard.

A terrifically useful article by R. Byrne on making and using QR codes. He describes the tools that can be used and gives good examples of what to do with them, including QR Voice, which allow you to create a short audio message that will come up when the QR is scanned. Links to other useful articles on using QR.

Eventually, schools and colleges are probably going to fall in step with the trend toward digital portfolios as a way to assess applicants. Schools of art, music, and writing are already using them. Give your students a chance to learn this valuable skil.

R. Stannard's colleague gives us a screencast of how to use COCA. The training video also explains what a corpus is and how to use one, so this has a far wider application than just for CoCA.

A nice set of lesson plans for middle-school to high-school students using Diigo to explore content areas. You need to sign in through a Purdue University portal to access the lessons. "Diigo is an awesome tool to use in the classroom. Teachers across the globe have used the social bookmarking tool to motivate and engage students in collaborative learning projects. This section will give you the opportunity to explore numerous lesson ideas on how to incorporate Diigo into your subject area. Diigo will help students develop and improve skills in communication, organization, and classification. Feel free to use these resources. We are sure it will make teaching easier and more exciting, while enhancing student academic performance."

A. Kohn: "it's not really possible to motivate anyone, except perhaps yourself. If you have enough power, sure, you can make people, including students, do things. That's what rewards (e.g., grades) and punishments (e.g., grades) are for. But you can't make them do those things well....The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as a matter of fact, the less interest students are likely to have in whatever they were induced to do. "What a teacher can do - all a teacher can do - is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that everyone starts out with: to make sense of oneself and the world, to become increasingly competent at tasks that are regarded as consequential, to connect with (and express oneself to) other people. Motivation - at least intrinsic motivation -- is something to be supported, or if necessary revived. It's not something we can instill in students by acting on them in a certain way. You can tap their motivation, in other words, but you can't 'motivate them.'" Another take on the idea of motivation -- it's easier to kill than to foster. Kohn gives some good advice on how to create NON-readers, and then some ways to get around the traditional approaches to teaching and learning that dominate the field of education.