CALL_IS_VSL

A really interesting site for listening practice based on current issues and news events. Has a nice non-commercial ad-free look, also. Would be useful for a culture class as well.

This seems like an interesting way to present (and solve?) problems with your students. I could imagine it being used to solved behavior problems, but I'm not sure how practical this would be in real life. How it works 1. You enter a problem. 2. You enter ideas that could solve the problem. 3. Some ideas lead to new (hopefully smaller) problems. 4. When a problem is solved, the tree gets green. A problem is considered solved, when you found an idea that does not lead to a new problem. The URL is the key * The URL is cryptic (no two URLS are alike). Nobody can access your Solvr without its URL. * However, you can skype, mail, twitter or even blog the URL to give others access. Everybody who knows the URL can do everything.

This article talks about how 5th graders use electronic portfolios to document their work in school.

A blog for the young and young at heart (middle-highschool). This blog-makr really focuses on the visual, so your students can get very creative. Not for the visually impaired--or the impatient. It can take a while to load as an embedded widget. But it is fun to use their graphics, and you can upload your own photos and videos. Good for project advertisements.

"Explore the YUDU library to read online magazines, free eBooks and other digital content. Browse thousands of free digital magazines or buy your favourite titles in the YUDU Store. Self publish your own digital magazines, eBooks, digital brochures and more with our free publisher software. Simply upload your PDFs and other documents to create search engine friendly page-turning publications that can be added to your website or sent out on email. Create your own personalised library to store and share your digital magazines and other content. " Looks like a good way to "publish" things for your students to read, or for them to publish their own projects as a class magazine.

"Instead of listing my goals for 2010, I would like to invite you to accomplish some short-term goals I am setting for myself for 2010. Each day this month, I will challenge you to accomplish a goal for the day. I will be accomplishing these tasks myself, then blogging about the entire experience when I am finished. I welcome you to do the same! I am hoping this will inspire me to begin working towards my long-term goals. Join the Challenge To be part of the challenge, do the following: * Accomplish the goal- Don't worry if you just began reading this, you can accomplish these goals whenever you read about them. This is set-up to be 30 goals in 30 days so you can do this at anytime of the year! If you don't accomplish all the goals, then just do what you can. * Tweet the link, what you learned, a thought, or just kudos to yourself for accomplishing the task! Please use the hashtag #30Goals! You can subscribe to the hashtag to keep track of your accomplishments! * Add a comment, so we can share your excitement or learn about a new resource, link, or website! For support: * Post with others using the Twitter hashtag #30Goals! * Each of the goals will be listed in the sidebar widget under 30 Days, 30 Goals!" This looks like a fun way to re-charge your teaching--and you can use it over again next year!

Another of Nik Peachey's excellent blog entries, this one included ideas for teaching and an example activity for students: "I've found that in class most students enjoy lessons based around songs or music. More recently I've been trying to discover and develop activities that students can do online to actively engage with the vast variety of resources that are available. "These are six things that I have discovered so far. Each one links to an example activity that I have developed for students."

"Go through this great collection of documentary movies and watch free documentaries on-line. Please do share your thoughts with the rest of us." Documentaries are often useful for support of content-based projects. Language is authentic, although it will be in a journalism, rather than informal or academic style.

"The old-school model of passively learning facts and reciting them out of context is no longer sufficient to prepare students to survive in today's world. Solving highly complex problems requires that students have both fundamental skills (reading, writing, and math) and digital-age skills (teamwork, problem solving, research gathering, time management, information synthesizing, utilizing high tech tools). With this combination of skills, students become directors and managers of their learning process, guided and mentored by a skilled teacher."

"Students need motivation to learn. Integrating technology into the classroom by means of WebQuests is a great way for students to get involved in real life learning. Nellie Deutsch has developed WebQuests for students and teachers. Feel free to use them in your classroom." These are examples of WebQuests made by students ages 5-18 and include many science and history/culture projects. There are also some for teachers.

An online translator for several dozen languages. Translators are interesting for students to learn how/why direct translation is not always valuable. Learning to use a translator, and what to be wary of is an important lesson.

I will analyze three common strands of current thought about education and the Internet. First is the idea that the instant availability of information online makes the memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary. Second is the celebration of the virtues of collaborative learning as superior to outmoded individual learning. And third is the insistence that lengthy, complex books, which constitute a single, static, one-way conversation with an individual, are inferior to knowledge co-constructed by members of a group."

Nice online tutorial explaining all the features of Diigo social bookmarking. A must for teachers to view before setting up research groups with their students.

This one page has more ideas than you can use in a school year, and includes all kinds of technologies, e.g., iPod and Wii, as well as computers and the Internet. Genius.

Stannard's training video on how to use Windows Movie Maker (Windows 7) is very detailed and complete. Subsequent parts give directions for XP and Vista. He first suggests downloading the free classic version, which has more features than WMM for Win 7.

"Knowitall.org is ETV's educational Web portal, a collection of fun, interactive websites for K-12 students, teachers and parents." Has culture snapshots (eg, Gullah Net), how-tos, history-related features (Road Trip through Civil Rights History). jobs, health, career development resources, etc. K-12 with an emphasis on younger kids.

This site is a geat resource for content-based learning for teens and adults. You can browse by categories (right-hand column) for topics in history, nature, people/biography, science, etc. There are no lesson plans or other educational apparatus.

"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 very extensive wiki with links to a huge number of Web2.0 tools, such as presentation programs, mindmapping, comics, image sharing and editing, search, etc.

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are "visual learners" and others are auditory; some are "left-brain" students, others "right-brain." . . . . "The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing," the researchers concluded. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding. "What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting," Testing helps memory: The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call "desirable difficulty," is evident in daily life.