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website maintained by Judy Shoaf, director of the Language Learning Center at the University of Florida since 1993. She now writes a column on legal issues for the IALLT journal Language Learning and Technology

Project Management for Instructional Designers - an online handbook adapted from Project Management from Simple to Complex written by Russel Darnall and John Preston.

make the most of the possibilities afforded to us by the effective use of the internet in order to raise achievement and participation, as well as to increase motivation and engagement.

I'm a linguist by training, so anything linguistics that talks about language use, language evolution, anything language-nerdy is going to be super interesting to me. :) This might be interesting to my linguistics students! 

Created by a secondary school Spanish teacher, this blog is well organized and most of the ideas are adaptable to other languages and other levels. There are at least 3 things here that I plan to try out within the first month of school.

Interesting look into the future.

I do audio slideshows as an end-of-semester project in my level 2 class, but I have only ever used PhotoStory. PhotoStory is loaded on our language lab computers so that students do not have to register or create any types of accounts. These resources seem to be just as easy, however

Formally assess the extent and scope of the problem within your school district by collecting survey and/or interview data from your students. Once you have a baseline measure of what is going on in your school, specific strategies can be implemented to educate students and staff about online safety and Internet use in creative and powerful ways.

Great resource by Macmillan education with lesson plans, tips, teaching media and much more on teaching ESL. 

Use the Lingt editor to improve and assess spoken proficiency by making online spoken assignments as integral to your homework schedule as your usual reading and writing assignments.

Discussion on how technology is being used and why we're still struggling to give more control of learning to students. A good read!

"A 2014 paper by researchers at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, provides a tangible example: Teachers and students in the small-scale study were found to be making extensive use of the online word-processing tool Google Docs. The application's power to support collaborative writing and in-depth feedback, however, was not being realized. Teachers were not encouraging group-writing assignments and their feedback focused overwhelmingly on issues such as spelling and grammar, rather than content and organization." This really gets to the heart of the idea of combining education and technology: the technology has to serve the goal and it doesn't sound like the teachers' goals were the same as the stated goals of the assignment. So obviously Google Docs is a fantastic tool, but it has to be utilized appropriately for it to be effective.

I must say I have sat through many workshops in my tenure at my university that included the modification of some practices and even included, to my frustration, the basic structure of a lesson from stating outcomes to assessment. The problem with our particular situation is that usually it is directed to a "one-size-fits-all" use of a given technology that may not apply to many disciplines. I have found them somewhat useful for upper-level courses at times, but the language classes often pose the need for a kind of collaboration and interpersonal technology that isn't presented. Hence my desire to take this course. Another difficulty is the overwhelming number of technological applications presented--I can't tell you how many--and the students really become overwhelmed, since they often have to learn new technologies in almost many courses. Some work and some don't, and since they are the guinea pigs and there are no guarantees that everything will work as planned, and given the astounding changes in tech, the newness never seems to end, neither for the student nor the teacher. So focusing on just 1 or 2 to begin with seems like the only way to deal with it. Finally, I think that, at least in our university, the huge courses found often in the sciences reflect the slowness to adopt meaningful change. Many in these disciplines have simply used the tech to deliver more lectures on topics students must memorize, perhaps adding clickers for comprehension checks. There seems to be a great disconnect between what happens in the classroom and the amazing advances in tech they have made for their hands-on work--labs, collaborative work, etc.

I think this Blog is rich with possibility for utilizing social media for the teaching of a second language. Students so much into social media and they also get motivated by change in ideas and activities. The variety of possibilities that this blog offers provides a teacher with a good resource that would work for various language levels.

Rich Internet Applications project helps create tools that engage language learners in active learning.

Mashup is a great tool and the students like it too.

Thanks for posting this; Audio Dropbox would be a useful tool for practicing leaving voicemails, etc.

I thought this was really interesting - especially the "penetration" of the internet by language - and how some languages have exploded on the internet in the past 10 years!

The writer of the "Cool Cat Teacher" Blog was very impressed by a tech integration specialist who won an award - and tells us all to take a minute to thank our "Bob"s, whoever they may be!