Learning Technologies Tools and Sites

Sketch Star from Miniclip is a fun and free tool for creating animated comics. On Sketch Star students can create draw animations from scratch or use pre-made shapes and characters. Students build their animations frame by frame. Each frame appears in a timeline that can be altered by dragging and dropping the frames into different sequences. The length of time that each frame is displayed can be adjusted too. Completed projects can be saved online.

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. 

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.

"Free fonts have met their match. We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We've done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format. "

"the web's most comprehensive site for famous quotes, since 1994. We have over 27,000 quotations online from over 3,100 authors, and more are added daily."

"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.

The Noun Project is an online catalog of free clip art that you can download and reuse for all kinds of projects. The catalog is divided into eleven categories including sports, safety, food, animals, and more. All of the images are either public domain images or Creative Commons licensed images. If the images are public domain you are free to reuse them without attribution without restriction. If the images are Creative Commons licensed, please note the attribution requirements.

Great collection of ELT lessons created by George Chilton and Neil McMillan, English teachers based in Barcelona, Spain. Lessons are divided into categories and include the Level, Aim, Topic, Preparation, Stages, Pictures, and Videos.

"Languageisavirus.com exists to cure writer's block and inspire creativity. You can choose from a multitude of writing games, gizmos, generators, writing prompts and exercises, tips, experiments and manifestoes from infamous avante garde writers and how-to articles on fiction writing and poetry."

"Create Lessons Worth Sharing around YouTube videos"

"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."

Booktrust is an independent reading and writing charity that makes a nationwide impact on individuals, families and communities, and culture in the UK. We make a significant positive contribution to the educational outcomes of children from the earliest age. We work to empower people of all ages and abilities by giving them confidence and choices about reading. And we want individuals of all backgrounds to benefit from the wellbeing that a rich and positive engagement in reading and writing can bring.   Our work supports children and young people, parents and carers and indeed anyone who would benefit from the positive impact that books, reading and writing can have on their lives.   Vision: Empowering people through reading and writing.   Mission: Booktrust inspires everyone to enjoy books, reading and writing and the lifelong benefits that they bring. Our aim is to build a literate, connected and creative society.

Find Words that Express Your Thoughts There are times when you know what you want to say, but you just don't know the right word in English. This can be very frustrating, but it is good to practice explaining the words you want so that you can get the word you want. OneLook Reverse Dictionary can help you with this. You can also practice using the site by doing an online crossword puzzle.

Vidtionary is a video dictionary. It defines and expresses words through images. It is suitable for language learners, both native speakers and students of English as another language (ESL or EAL). Vidtionary is also a good tool for teaching visual literacy and graphic design.

Textivate is an online facility for creating and sharing interactive browser-based activities. Text re-ordering, gap-fills, text re-construction, anagrams, matching, memory, hangman, flashcards, millionaire and lots more - all automatically generated based on any text and/or list of matching items that you put into the textivate text box. Much of the site is free to use, and subscribers can upload resources to share with their students or embed activities on a blog or website. It is browser-based, so it works on desktops, laptops, ipads etc. The activities are ideal for whole-class work with any interactive whiteboard. You can see video tutorials here: http://textivate.posthaven.com/video-tutorials To help you get started, browse the hundreds of public resources on the site, or click on "textivate now" to see the range of activities available.

"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."

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.

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 45,000 interviews with nearly 90,000 participants. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, and millions listen to our weekly broadcasts on NPR's Morning Edition and on our Listen pages. We do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, strengthen and build the connections between people, teach the value of listening, and weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that every life matters. At the same time, we will create an invaluable archive of American voices and wisdom for future generations. In the coming years we will build StoryCorps into an enduring institution that will touch the lives of every American family.

"Are you ready to do some creative writing exercises? Story Spinner is a generator of millions of creative writing exercises. There's a handheld version you can buy so you will have writing exercises wherever you go. And there's a FREE online version on this page that you can use over and over and over again."

Ice Breaker Tags is a simple service for designing simple yet unique name tags. To use the service just enter your desired display name, upload an image to display on your name tag, and type your ice-breaker question or statement. If you need help developing a creative ice-breaker question or statement, Ice Breaker Tags offers some suggestions to get you going. You can print your name tag directly from Ice Breaker Tags.