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My English Lab by Pearson is a supplemental site to the North Star Listening and Speaking and Reading and Writing textbooks. With an access code provided in textbooks, students can access a class website. Similar to BlackBoard Learn, My English Lab provides students with a calendar for assignments and enables teachers to upload content. More than that, My English Lab has many related and supplemental resources pertaining to each unit in the corresponding textbooks. For example, when covering unit one in NorthStar 3 about Advertising on the Air, My English Lab gives students access to all of the recordings from the unit that a teacher might use in class. It also gives students flash card decks with the vocabulary for the unit and sometimes has extra exercises for the students to complete. Depending on the exercises, My English Lab will score these exercises to give students grades. The disadvantages of the site primarily relate to logistics. When students by used copies of their textbooks, the books might be missing the access code. Also, students must have access to computers to make use of the site outside of class time.

The Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) is an organization that helps people create short, first-person narratives that educate and/or inspire positive change. The organization hosts a number of workshops on digital storytelling, and distributes stories in a number of traditional and media formats. The website provides information about the organization's mission, features selected digital stories, and connects to a textbook, blog, and newsletter. If you plan to include digital storytelling you your classroom, whether ESL or any other type of class, the CDC looks like a great resource. I was able to review portions of the textbook, and it looks great!

Found this interesting blog post about how you can pretty easily use corpora to validate claims about idiom frequency. I think this could be a useful technique for evaluating certain kinds of textbooks as well as selecting fixed expressions for your own teaching content/materials.

"ESL, English as a second language, teaching materials and resources for speaking, study and learning. TESOL teachers, schools, and programs." This source is useful for both students and teachers. Students can practice their skills. They can do anything from talking to someone in English or studying for the TEFOL exam. For teachers, this site is an excellent resource. Teachers can find anything from sample lessons to specific textbooks to use in the classroom. I used this site last semester for my practicum, and it almost always had something useful or lead me in the right direction. It's truly a great resource to take advantage of!

If you were in listening/speaking last spring, you may remember this website I shared. It has lots of videos for learning American English pronunciation. I used it all the time while I was teaching pronunciation classes in Nebraska. At the time I didn't have any background in phonetics and was trying to teach myself. I found this site to be helpful for students as well as for novice teachers like myself. I used the videos to supplement our textbook (Clear Speech or Pronunciation Pairs). Students who had access to the internet could practice at home too. The videos show some close-ups of her mouth while making the sounds, so I brought small mirrors to class for students to use and watch their own mouths (not all students were comfortable doing this though). The site is well organized and you can easily find the sound/topic/skill you're looking for. You could also use the videos to create Grockit activities.