# Difficulty :
Rating 1 (easiest) to 5 (hardest) of the difficulty of learning the language for an English speaker. Many additional factors will affect the difficulty you will experience when trying to learn a given language, especially the other languages you already speak. Such a rating system has obvious limitations but I take great care in assessing the difficulty of each language. Many of these ratings have been discussed on the language forum (see for example the discussion about Korean). People always complain that the rating given to their native language is 'too low' - I wonder how they would now since they never had to learn it as a foreign language. If you can make a case for a different difficulty rating for a specific language you are welcome to bring this up in the language forum.
# Popularity :
Subjective rating of how popular the language is with Western learners. This obviously varies a great deal from country to country, but is a good overall indicator of the availability of learning material for the language. I visit many physical language bookshops as well as some online ones and think I have a rather objective basis for establishing 'popularity' of a language with foreign language learners in the number of courses and books available for each language.
# GDP :
Nominal GDP of the countries where the languages is spoken. This gives an indication of the economic importance of the language on the international scene. We have not used PPP GDP as it emphasizes non-tradable goods. When a country uses several languages we used the percentage of speakers of the language multiplied by the country's GDP. If you feel that economic factors are meaningless in language learning, please disregard this column.
# Countries :
Number of countries where the language is an official language or where there are important communities who speak this language at home. This gives you an indication of the spread of the language across the globe. Some languages (English, Spa
"Twurdy is actually based on Google, but it analyses Google results for readability, so it can help you to find more lower level texts for learners without you having to read through every result from Google to see if it's simple enough.
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Twurdy is actually based on Google, but it analyses Google results for readability, so it can help you to find more lower level texts for learners without you having to read through every result from Google to see if it's simple enough.
Latest update 4th June 2013 - These are some of the best free internet resources for education. This page is constantly updated; every time the author comes across a new piece of software or an exciting website, the author lists it here. This list is in alphabetical order which makes it easy to use with a short explanation of what each software, website, or app does.
Wizer is a fantastic free tool for creating simple digital worksheets that enable learners and teachers to do some pretty complex things. When I first discovered the tool a few months back I was really impressed by how easy it was to create really engaging blended learning content for class or homework, so it's great to be able to publish this Q & A with Nira Mayorchik Sheleg the Co-founder & CEO.
Headway elt books have been helping English language learners for decades. Now, they have joined the 21st century with Headway iTools for smartboards to compliment your lessons.
So, if restricting access to these devices isn't the answer, how do we address their presence in the classroom and use these devices to engage rather than disengage students' attention? Here are a few suggestions…
Are you looking for a way to use Skype beyond simply making a call? Jeff Dunn, through Ededemic, created a list of 50 ways to use Skype in the classroom.
There is an assumption that persists in the educational community that more mature teachers are much more difficult and reluctant to be trained on the effective use of educational technology. To some degree, I think this assumption has been built on by the digital native vs digital immigrant myth. But as someone who has trained teachers of all ages all over the world I would say that, from my own experience, this hasn't been the case.