Exploring Web 2.0 October 2011

Here we start with some very easy origami for kids, and build our way up to some slightly harder models for older kids, or children that need an extra challenge... Show Off Your Origami!!If you have made a piece of origami that you want to share,everyone would love to know about it!

Grammar, listening, vocabulary, and reading activities 

Beautiful site to study Human rights. It offersvideos to watxh and discuss, games, cartoon and a lot more funny and reflective excersises. Videos are really simple and appropiate for discussion.

This site contains FLASH animated libraries of the phonetic sounds of Spanish and English. Available for each consonant and vowel is an animated articulatory diagram, a step-by-step description, and video-audio of the sound spoken in context. It is intended for students of phonetics, linguistics, and foreign language.

I like this page because it has a lot of useful examples in grammar, vocabulary and others

A Channel to improve listening skills

Excellent reccomendation I really enjoy discovering real world related listening activities for the students because tney can be able to understand language in original contexts. This is an innovation because I just use videos about news or alike but the work done by a colleague eases our teaching.

Cool link! What a good idea.

This is a very interesting website. There are reflecting videos that talk about human rights. In this website, you can also know about the non-governmental, intergovernmental, governmental and human rights commision worldwide with individual websites.

I have a cousin who contributes to this group and I often recommend articles to other teachers from the site. I find that it can help teachers who have gotten stuck in a rut to break out of it. Most of the perspective are a bit liberal for Salem, OR but they still help colleagues look at issues in a new way.

Great lyrics and words for children

This website provides extensive resources on the topic of a living wage. There is a wealth of information contained on the site, which provides comprehensive coverage of many issues surrounding the idea of a living wage and its impact on workers, communities, and businesses.One particularly interesting article discusses the impact of Walmart, not only on workers, but also on shoppers. I think the information on this site can be used in the discussion of how to balance the issue of how big retailers can contribute to communities by providing jobs and affordable goods while at the same time providing a living wage as opposed to simply low paying jobs that provide little or no benefits.

Jerry, this topic is a HOT one right now with the economy not only producing few jobs, but with people working 40 hours a week and being nowhere near meeting their financial obligations. Nice choice! M.

I've always been a supporter of Walmart - one of the few I think! If it wasn't for Walmart I'm not sure I'd be able to get by. The interesting thing though is that after reading one of the articles at the UC Berkeley labor center website, I realized that Walmart could pay more to its workers if they chose to and the impact on their profits, as well as the price increases passed along to consumers, would be minimal. The article discusses what would happen if Walmart was required to pay its workers $12 an hour and concluded even if Wamart were to pass on the entire wage increase to consumers, the increased price cost to the average shopper would only be about $12.49 a year. If Walmart offered a minimum wage of $12 an hour I can't help but believe there would be less resistance to them opening new stores in hard hit economic communities.

ESL go is a free English community of ESL students and ESL teachers. We help ESL students learning English as a second language through free ESL classes and free English practice message boards. ESL go.com also provides free teaching ESL activities for TESOL, TESL, and TEFL.

That's a new site for me Fatima. I hope to check it out in more detail soon. Thanks, M.

Teachers these days need to organize great presentations and this is an awsome tool. Explore it! You can use old PPTs presentations, zoom important areas and update them by using Prezi. Regards EMMA

Halloween - time to scare is almost there. Our HorrorScope tells you how horrible this month will be. We will also provide you with interesting facts on the history of Halloween and Jack O'Lantern. And you can make your own Jack or send a virtual one as an ecard.

Good page to practice different English skills

This is a collection of listening practice materials designed for ESL learners. It is part of the ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE Website (http://www.rong-chang.com/), the best ESL Web directory.

I really like to use this activity in my classroom because it helps students to listen to native people talking about any topic related with the material seeing in class, and it can help to reinforce some vocabulary, not just by listening but also practicing it.

Great, I going to put it into practice!

My favorite poet to use when teaching students about non-traditional/non-rhyming poetry and my favorite in general. He also spent the last 40 years of his life in Lake Oswego teaching at Lewis & Clark College.

Reading levels of many children's books

Although this is a "store" of quizzes for many children's books, I primarily use it when determining a book's reading level for students. Many books are in this database. It is helpful when setting up a library for elementary students, but also for a parent who is curious about a book their child may be reading...is it appropriate? too hard? too easy? When you search for a title, and it is in the database, you are given its reading level.

CDC website concentrates really useful information about health issues in different parts of the world (including my country, Peru). I've read it and found it accurate and useful for people who want to travel internationally.There are also Podcasts with great listening material.

This is an interesting websites because it offers enjoyable activities. For example, there are several info gap activities. These information gaps usually come in twos. You will need to print both the A and B sheets. You can print them directly from the browser if you want, but they will look better if you save them and open them in any graphics program and print from there.

I like to use this site for teaching kids about reading charts and graphs; side benefit is making them more aware of the world they live in.