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This site has ideas, printable materials, discussion forums, and employment opportunities. It shows how to teach Film and Video, teach with the Internet, and using songs and music. You can sign up for free and download a limited amount of worksheets per month from www.education.com/worksheets. You can select by Grade or Subject. These are mostly useful for homeschoolers or in regular children's classrooms. It offers content-based ideas with integrated skills including conversation, listening, speaking, reading, writing, and Vocabulary. The Grammar is practiced in communicative settings. ESL PartyLand is a nice home base for Internet tools including up-to-date addresses for Dave's ESL Café, EF Englishtown, Kent's ESL Wonderland, On-line TOEFL Materials, and Randall's CyberListening Lab. It funnels all these sites into one page for easy reference. Other sites it observes as interesting include The All Music Guide, The Discovery Channel on-line, Earth Alert, and Lonely Planet On-line.

The quizzes on this site make use of concordance lines to help learners practice vocabulary in the K1 & K2 frequency bands.

I read about WebCorp in Dubravac's chapter 3, and it is definitely worth checking out. You search for words or phrases, and the website pulls up concordance lines (key word(s) in context) for the words as they are found on webpages. The search results also include links to these websites.

This site offers on-line instruction for ESL students moving into academic writing. Most of the information is free, but you can also take an on-line class and get feedback from the teacher/website owner. There are quizzes and examples for self-instruction. From the site: "This web site is for non-native speakers of English who want to write in English for academic purposes. The material in this site is aimed toward high intermediate or advanced English learners who have never taken a formal English writing course and whose TOEFL score is about 500 or more. The main objective of this site is to help non-native English speakers write for an English speaking academic audience which necessarily includes organization of ideas, the single greatest weakness among many non-native English speakers."

English Daily is an interesting site for English learners because of its vast array of resources. For learners who have an interest in learning about English idioms, learners can discover the definitions of idioms and read examples of them in context. To learn about English language culture or for practicing reading fluency aloud, the Movie Lines section of the site contains portions of dialogue from popular movies. To practice comprehension questions, the comprehension section allows learners to read a passage and to answer questions about it. While the website has many advantages and may appeal to younger learners and business professionals alike, the presentation of the content is not very aesthetically pleasing, and the site is full of advertisements that may distract learners from the content they are attempting to learn. Additionally, the site is not very interactive beyond the news section that allows learner to listen to a news story and to complete cloze exercises. Furthermore, the answers to exercises are presented on the same page as the exercises themselves, so clearly a learner would need to be rather autonomous to use the site effectively. To fully incorporate the site into a classroom, a teacher would benefit from creating supplemental materials such as a learning log in order to track student learning.

ESL Video is a website that pairs authentic videos with comprehension questions. The user selects a video at a particular level and about a particular topic, views the video, and answers questions about what was said in the video. While such a resource could be used in a listening and speaking class, some, or at least one, of the videos could be used in a class focused on reading. To explain, the video only had music for the soundtrack while simple text appeared on the screen for the viewer to read. Of note is that many of the videos feature popular culture, so conceivably these videos would contribute both to language learning and to learning about the culture of English speaking countries. One interesting video features Jimmy Fallon, the Roots, and Carly Rae Jepson playing "Call Me Maybe," and the related quiz asks learners to fill in the blanks in lines of lyrics. Also, teachers are able to create their own quizzes for the website.

Brainstorming is an important part of the writing process. Bubbl allows students to draw mind maps on the computer. In class we talked about creating mind maps in Google Draw, but Bubbl might be easier to use in the sense that you don't have to create the structure for the mind map itself. By simply clicking the tab key, you can add another idea bubble. By clicking enter, you can add a new "level" of ideas. You can also click on the line connecting idea bubbles and hit delete if you would like to separate the ideas. These mind maps can be saved, printed, or exported. I have used mind maps in my writing classes before (with paper and pencil), but sometimes they can get a bit messy and hard to read. One benefit to using this website is that students can edit their maps and keep them fairly organized and easy to read. My students also appreciate opportunities to practice typing in English, so they may be more motivated to type up their idea maps. However, brainstorming activities in class are often fairly short. Sometimes it is a quick 10-minute activity at the beginning of class to get ideas flowing. Using the computer to create mind maps may not be ideal for these quick warm-up activities since time will have to be spent familiarizing students with the website itself.

At ESL Video, you can create your own quizzes and use other peoples quizzes. You can access beginning, intermediate, high Intermediate quizzes for videos. It was free to sign up, but it is a limited source for borrowing quizzes. These are the guidelines for making quizzes: - If you suspect the video or thumbnail-image violates copyright law, don't use it. ( - Read the "Top 10 Distractors" article by Sharon Yoneda. ( - Read the "Real (Teacher) World Application of ESLvideo.com" article by Sharon Yoneda. ( - Base your quizzes on shorter videos rather than longer videos. ( - Create your quiz first in a Word or text document, then copy / paste into the quiz builder. - Create quizzes with more than five questions. - Check your questions and answers for typos. ( - Music video quizzes - don't skip lines in the lyrics and be sure to add the transcript (often easily found with a Google search). ( - Design distractors that demonstrate mechanical, structural, phonological or othographic relevance. When you create your quiz, you add title, description, tags (past tense, WH questions, Directions), Question for Comments, Thumbnail Image, Video Embed code, level, language, and quiz type.

The BBC put this website together to help individuals learn languages on their own time. The site offers 12 week on-line language courses for free as well as links to other useful resources for learning a second language. It is an easy website to use and very useful for students who want to do some extensive listening in the language they are trying to learn because it provides links to movies, children's show, news feeds, etc. that the student can listen to.