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"What is Snappy Words visual English dictionary? It's an online interactive English dictionary and thesaurus that helps you find the meanings of words and draw connections to associated words. You can easily see the meaning of each by simply placing the mouse cursor over it. Why use Snappy Words visual dictionary? Easy to use dictionary and thesaurus. Learn how words associate in a visually interactive display. Get ideas to help write content for your blog, article, thesis or simply play with words! No registration required. No limit on number of searches. Look up as many words as you need anytime. No software installation needed. All you need is an internet connection and a browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and others). It's free and fun! How do I use it? Type words in the search box and click Go or simply hit Enter. Once the words branch off the main query, you can double click a node to find other related words. To explore the features: Place the mouse cursor over a word to view the meaning. Double click a node from the branch to view other related words. Scroll the mouse wheel over words to zoom in or out. This helps you see more associations or view words and meanings more clearly. Click and drag a word or branch to move it around and explore other branches. What dictionary does Snappy Words use? The Snappy Words interface queries the WordNet lexical database developed by Princeton University and made available for students and language researchers. This dictionary groups synonyms into synsets through lexical relations between terms. These meanings and semantic relationships are revealed graphically by the interactive web technology made available by Snappy Words."

With Grammar.net's Grammar Checker you can check and correct grammar and spelling mistakes and use Thesaurus feature to find synonyms. It's easy to check your texts using our Grammar Checker - just download this Free program. Then you need to highlight the text you want to check and press CTRL+G button. Or use Grammar.net's Rich Text for editing and checking your text with rich mark-up, just copy-paste it and then check your text. Grammar mistakes are underlined with a green wave line and spelling errors with a red one. To correct mistakes you just need to select a word from the Suggestions list. The Thesaurus tab is used for synonyms. The words with found synonyms are marked blue. To change the active word to one of the suggested synonyms you just need to select one of the suggested alternatives in the Synonyms list, and then click Change to. Press Finish Checking and corrected text will be returned to input field. Enhance your writing with FREE Grammar.net's Grammar Checker! All you need to do is download and install it on your computer.

"PublicDomainPictures.net is a repository for free public domain images. Download high quality HD photos or upload your own. Make money from your hobby, gain popularity and improve your photographic and graphic skills. If you intend to use an image you find here for commercial use, please be aware that some photos do require a model or property release. Pictures featuring products should be used with care. The pictures are free for you to use and you should feel good about doing so. If you enjoy your visit, please tell your friends about Public Domain Pictures.net."

"EnglishForEveryone.org is your resource for printable English worksheets. On the left of this page you will find an index containing hundreds of quality teaching materials. To open a PDF file for printing, simply click on the topic of your choice then select the desired worksheet from the links on that page. You are welcome to use any of the materials on this website without asking permission, granted that our strict copyright policy is respected. If you'd like to thank us, please tell your friends about this website and consider linking to our web pages (see our Terms of Use to learn how). We appreciate your interest and support, and hope you find our materials to be beneficial for use in the classroom or at home. "

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.

This site contains 23 different search engines which are designed for use by children and suitable for use in the classroom for research projects. Sites include the BBC, NASA, Encarta and Ask Jeeves Kids. The website was set up to support the international school communities (teachers, support staff, administrators, students and families) in 17 countries in South East Asia but schools worldwide would find the site a useful resource.

"PopuLLar is a European Union,  funded, innovative, education project designed to harness music, the primary social interest of secondary school students, in to their language learning. There is a huge need to motivate secondary school students, in particular, to learn languages, focus digital competencies and be creative; and music is the key. The project will ask students to write their own lyrics to songs of their choice. They will then translate their songs in to the target language they are learning, The students will then record their song (audio or video) and share it with students all over Europe. Students will be able to combine their love of music, with creativity, literacy, digital competencies, group collaboration and, most importantly, use LWULT languages. PopuLLar is a project that is 'Owned' by the students, they work autonomously and collaboratively, teachers are guides to the project process. The project will create to enable the project to be replicated autonomously: ■    Sample guides and videos ■    A replicability package for teachers ■    A community space for productions ■     A repository of examples of the use of music in language       education There is no limit to the number of schools that can use the project."

"The Teacher's Guide To Copyright And Fair Use"

This section provides resources and materials for teachers to use with their students in storytelling. It helps students personalize their learning and  perfom better. Students can use these materails to create a movie or interactive slideshow to tell their stories. 

Draw Island is a free online tool for creating drawings and simple GIF animations. Draw Island offers you your choice of four canvas sizes on which you can draw. Draw Island offers two canvas sizes for creating simple GIF animations. To use Draw Island just head to the site and select a drawing tool. You can draw free hand (or should I say free mouse?) or select pre-defined shapes to use in your images. When you're done drawing just click the save button to download your drawing or animation. 

Scholastic Story Starters is a great tool that students will enjoy using to create short, creative fiction stories. Scholastic Story Starters offers four story themes; fantasy, adventure, sci-fi, and scrambler. To create a story on Story Starters a students picks a theme, enter his or her name, chooses his or her grade, and spins the big wheels of prompts. The student can spin the wheels until he or she finds a prompt he or she likes. After the prompt is selected the student can write his or her story using the letter, postcard, notebook, or newspaper format provided by Scholastic Story Starters. When the story is finished it can be printed. 

This page has links to some great resources on teaching using comics. It also has links to lesson plans and classroom activities using cartoons.

Creaza has a nice tool called Cartoonist where students can create their own stories using cartoonic characters. Watch the video in there to learn how to use it.

"Addicted to a website? Wanting to cut down on your visits? Make a bookmark for the website with us and store it in your browser. Using the bookmark will prevent you from visiting the website too often!"

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.

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.

Chogger is a free comic strip creation tool that offers a good selection of editing tools. Chogger allows you to draw images from scratch or use your existing images. You can even connect your webcam to Chogger to capture pictures for use in your comic strips. Once you've added images to your comic strip, you can add effects such as fading and outlining. Chogger also allows you to customize the look of each frame in your comic strip. Comic strips created in Chogger can have as few as three frames or as many as twelve or more frames.

ClassDoJo is a free online service for recording and generating data about your students' behaviors. To get started using ClassDoJo you create class lists and select the behaviors that you want to track. Then assign each behavior as a negative or positive behavior. Once you have created your class lists and selected behaviors to track, actually tracking behaviors is quite easy. To track your students' behaviors just sign-in, select your class, and start marking student names with positive or negative points. When you mark with positives or negatives you can state the reason by selecting from the menu of behaviors that you created while creating your ClassDoJo lists. You can use your computer or your mobile device to make entries in your ClassDoJo account. Students can view their records by signing into their records through secret Clas DoJo codes assigned to them. Parents can have reports about their children sent to them by you.

CreateDebate is a new social networking community built around ideas, discussion and democracy. We've done our best to provide our community with a framework that makes compelling and meaningful debates easy to create and fun to use. Our goal is to build CreateDebate into an incredibly useful learning tool that will help groups of people to sort through issues, viewpoints and opinions so that consensus and understanding can be reached and better decisions can be made.