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"Easy English news can help everybody who wants to understand better. We have been teaching English for many years. After many years of teaching we started to do a new thing. We knew that many students wanted to read news on the internet. They wanted to read something easy. We were looking for short news in easy English on the internet. We found many news sites but we did not find a lot of news with easy reading and listening."

The lessons are free. Each lesson has 26 pages of printable activities / handouts. There is a new lesson every two days. The lessons alternate between pre-intermediate and intermediate (plus). All lessons are based on stories currently in the news - as the world's news breaks, teach it. All lessons are also downloadable PDF format. There are 30+ online quizzes for each lesson. Listening files can be downloaded in mp3 format or subscribed to via a podcast. Classroom handouts are readily reproducible. There are graded listenings with each lesson. Thousands of teachers and students say they love using the news lessons.

"Learn English online with the help of this free website from the British Council with games, stories, listening activities and grammar exercises. You can search for your favourites, or have a look at the site map to find out where everything is. You will find lots of new listening activities and video content in Listen & Watch.  We also have a new Grammar section and new IELTS exam practice materials."

News in levels (http://www.newsinlevels.com/) offers news stories at different levels of difficulty. There are currently three full levels with a level zero for very beginners still being developed. Levels one and two have audio tracks with transcriptions, while level three has videos with transcriptions.

An online magazine of news, politics, and culture. Slate.com combines humor and insight in thoughtful analyses of current events and political news. Have your students read an article about a current event and write their thoughts and impressions.

"The Onion" is home to well-written, fake news articles about contemporary issues and people. It's a great way to introduce your students to satirical writing and to point out that not everything you read is true. Have your students read an article from "The Onion" and then write a piece of their own.

"Knowble stimulates text understanding and vocabulary training by using authentic and recent news articles published on the web, based on the learners' level and preferences. Knowble automatically selects relevant news articles."

Explain the Joke began in January 2013 as a way to explain jokes to folks new to English or new to United States humor.  It also works for folks who laughed but did not get the joke… until it was explained. Enjoy the jokes and enjoy the explanations! 

wireWax is a new service (still in beta) that takes the concept of YouTube annotations and makes it much better. On wireWax you can build interactive tags into your videos. Each tag that you add to your video have another video from YouTube or Vimeo or an image from Facebook, Flickr, or Instagram. A tag can also include an audio track from SoundCloud or a reference article from Qwiki. What makes using wireWax different from using the YouTube annotations tool is that clicking on your tags (what YouTube calls annotations) does not send you outside of the video you're currently watching. This means that you can watch a video within a video or view a picture or listen to a different audio track within the original video. When you click a tag in the original video the video pauses and the tagged item is displayed. wireWax allows you to add tags to any YouTube video that is publicly viewable and has not had embedding disabled. I tried wireWax with this five minute video. It took a while (15-20 minutes) for the video to process for tagging, but once it was processed it was easy to create a tag. To create my tag I just advanced the video to the spot I wanted to tag, drew a box around the person I was tagging, then selected the wireWax YouTube app to put a video within the original video. Check it out below by advancing to about the 1.5 minute mark. Applications for Education wireWax could be a great tool for adding new layers of information to educational videos. If you're creating videos for your students or your students are creating videos to share with others consider tagging key points at which viewers might have questions. At those points insert tags that reveal clarifying information in the form of a video, an image, or an audio recording. 

"New tools and materials to help you in the classroom and with your development, so be sure to come back and find out what's new! Across the site you can find free classroom materials to download, from short activities to full lesson plans, for teaching kids and adults. There are also articles on aspects of teaching, and free teacher development and teacher training materials."

Someries is a fantastic  storytelling site . It has  a continuous flow of new stories, read aloud by kids . The stories are all made by kids and for kids,  learners of English can benefit a lot from this site too . Some of the videos in Someries are subtitled so that kids can both read and listen to what they read .

Meograph is the easiest way to create multimedia stories. With no training you can quickly create stories about the news, history, travels, life events, and more by combining video, audio, pictures, text, links, maps, and timelines. Then share by embedding anywhere on the web, or though your favorite social network. Meograph is being used by major media organizarions, companies around the world, thousands of schools, and tens of thousands of storytellers. We are domocratizing multimedia expression and are building an entire suite of easy-to-use creative tools.

Published April, 2015 Project IDEAL by Jerome (Jere) Johnston, Sheryl Hart, Destiny Long and Jenifer Vanek, is a new professional development resource for adult educators from Project IDEAL (Improving Distance Education for Adult Learners). The vignettes include: 1. Creating an ESL Classroom Online 2. Developing Independent Learning Skills in a GED Prep Class 3. Preparing for College: Mindquest Academy 4. Independent Learning Skills For ESL Students 5. Broadening the Academic Horizon for GED Students 6. Expanding the Writing Curriculum Beyond GED Prep 7. Technology-­‐Rich Writing Instruction for ESL Students 8. Vocational Education in an ESL Class

Glossy is a new web service that allows you to create your own digital magazines .These magazines can include video, text, images, and audio. You will also be able to embed your generated magazines into your blog or website.

"Use Learnist to share what you know and learn new things. Create Learn Boards on topics you understand and add learnings by pointing to videos, blogs, images and documents on the web."

"webcamyou is a new service that lets you add effects to your webcam photos...save it and send it to friends!"

Wouldn't it be great if you could be a different person everyday? Maybe you want to know how you would look like with a different hair cut, in a famous picture or in a cd cover...  Many of us have tried to manipulate pictures in order to try something different or just to have fun but not only it takes loads of hard work but also the results aren't usually all that great. Well, not anymore. With FACEinHOLE.com you can easily and in a matter of seconds create a totally "new look" for you and your friends. You just have to select a scenario, upload and adjust a photo (or use your webcam) and there you have it; a great FACEinHOLE that you can send to your friends, post in your blog or make available to the world.

SoundCloud is a free tool for creating and sharing sound tracks. On Monday I included it in my list of alternatives to Aviary. Today, I showed it to some teachers at the Bancroft School in Massachusetts. When I showed the option for inserting text comments into the sound tracks a teacher spoke up with an idea for using Sound Cloud in a world languages course. The suggestion the teacher made was to have students record spoken tracks on Sound Cloud and share them with her. Then she could use the comment feature to provide feedback that is tied directly to each student's recording. The comments could be tied to the exact second at which a student pronounces something incorrectly, uses the wrong verb form, or to praise a student for pronouncing a new word particularly well. SoundCloud allows you to have up to two hours of recordings stored in your account at one time. After that you need to either delete an old recording or upgrade to a paid plan.

"GigaDial is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters."

"Welcome to the first ever intercultural podcast. 'absolutely intercultural!' is its name and, as far as we know, this is the first podcast in the world to deal with intercultural issues. We'll be releasing a new episode every second Friday evening, looking at all intercultural aspects of human intercultural communication. For example, we'll be hearing from students on foreign work placements, asking how teachers can make use of intercultural exercises and simulations in their classroom and sharing with you any intercultural gossip we come across. 'absolutely intercultural!' won't be so much about passing on information but more about starting an intercultural dialogue between the makers, and you, the contributors and listeners."