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This website gives learners an interactive way to work on noticing and correcting spelling errors and other types of errors. For one activity I tried(there are three different types ), a sample writing is provided that learners must try and correct using editing symbols. This could be a good way to have learners develop their editing skills outside of class on their own. There are also different types of activities, including spelling and reading, spelling and writing and spelling and thinking. So it seems there is some integration of different skills into the interactive activities. Learners can also choose their level, so with some experimenting teachers could recommend an appropriate level based on learners' proficiency level.

I like this. It can be used to train students on how to comment on their peers' papers. Very interesting

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."

This is another digital storytelling website where you can make your own movie. You get to pick the scene, the characters, and the music, and then once you have a scene, you can write dialogue for the characters. It's easy to be really silly or really funny with this, so it would be a fun activity for students to practice writing.

Is there a way to get the characters to speak aloud, or do they just mouth the words silently when their speech bubbles appear?

Not that I could find, so it's a better writing/reading activity than listening/speaking. It's kind of hilarious, though.

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.

This is a quirky website that I used in my high school creative writing class. I think that ESLers could use this page to talk about syllables, pronunciation, and of course rhyming. Through a simple search, students could discover a very wide variety of new words from the suggested rhymes on this site. The attention to phoneme-grapheme association (spelling vs. pronunciation) will reinforce emerging literacy skills. Overall, I just find this to be a fun site for generating ideas and word knowledge.

Live Mocha is an online multi-language community that can be used in a number of ways: Members can write and/or video chat to speakers of their target language, complete practice exercises in all skill areas, and record themselves speaking so other members can review submissions and offer suggestions (if they do not want to do a live video chat). As a teacher, I believe this website is a great resource, especially to supplement in-class materials. Students can sign up (membership is free) and communicate regularly with native speakers of their target language. For a reading and writing class, this website would be a fairly easy one to use in order to set up pen pals. For a listening and speaking class, the role plays and video dialogues could be useful.

Livemocha is a site I personally use to improve my L2. You can learn for free through an exchange program of helping others and in return they help you. On the other hand you can sign up for a personal tutor for a fee.

Even though I presented on Flickr, I thought I'd share it here, too. I had never thought of using Flickr for second language teaching purposes, but it has a lot of potential as a teaching tool. I particularly like the mapping option which allows you to search for pictures of a particular item or concept in a particular city/region/country. This would be great for writing or speaking classes that have a compare/contrast component.

Instagram is another photo sharing program that, like Flickr, lets students upload and describe their own pictures, and browse other users' photos. Although not targeted towards L2 learners, it lends itself to the creative side of learning by letting students find pictures they're interested in and describing or writing about them.

A (currently) free site hosted by Michigan State University that allows users to upload multimedia files, create portfolios, and share them with others. This could be useful for having students create a portfolio that includes presentations, audio files, and writing. Also includes sample lesson plans with project ideas.

Some of us discussed pecha kuchu last semester in Dr. Stoller's foundations course. It's a method of presentation that literally translates to "death by power point." The idea came about because people were getting so bored at large conferences when presenters were going on and on about there research. This style of presentation allows each slide to be up for 20 seconds and the total time is 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Presenters were not allowed to go over this allotted time. Students in Dr. Stoller's class last semester were given 5 minutes to present on the research we did all semester. Personally, I found it difficult to present all the information I wanted to, but I also was surprised by how much I could actually fit into five minutes. So how does this relate to language learning/teaching? Pecha Flickr is a program that allows you to type in a tag word, like fish or dog. Then, it will pull up different pictures on Flickr that are tagged with those words for 20 seconds at a time. Students could give a mock presentation or even be writing sentences for the 20 seconds each picture is shown. This is a creative and fun way to get students to think on the spot using random pictures. Although I feel this would be a fun and creative way to get students thinking, I would be cautious using this because some of the pictures are tagged inaccurately. For example, I typed in fish as the tag and the second picture was a couple kissing. However, this might be a unique way to bring in slang and informal language. Kissing with a fish face?

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.

Not sure if someone's already posted this, but this is a great tool for getting an idea about text difficulty for reading. We regularly use this at the PIE for developing reading passages for Reading and Writing classes.

This is a beta version of a program developed by Eric Friginal at Georgia State in conjunction with their computer science department. In includes a variety of useful functions, including identifying POS, readability measures, comparisons with texts in MICUSP, and more.

A very cool free app! It's basically an interactive whiteboard and you can record as you draw/write. Designed to let you create video lessons. You can then either embed the lessons in your own web page or create a course where your students can view all your lessons. Students can also register and create their own lessons.

Free site that matches you with a penpal from one of 133 countries. Could be used to help students find someone to practice their language skills with.

Dipity is a tool for creating timelines. Students could create timelines and view each other's timelines, as well as practice citing sources with this software. Photos can also be view as a flipbook, list or map (if geography is important in your class). I think this tool would be great for teaching history in CBI, or for having students tell their personal story. Students could create a timeline for a loved one, or maybe follow their favorite celebrity. A word of caution: many of the users on this site have created timelines that are NOT classroom-appropriate.

I found this article on NEA's website (which I recommend on it's own). The topic is using social media to enhance the classroom. We've talked about most of the technology in here, but the applications of the resources are focused to younger learners and flipped classrooms. Google Docs are used with middle schoolers to prevent them losing track of the documents. Google forms are used to speed up quiz grading, and cell phones are used to help facilitate meaningful (and safe) field trips. If you are considering a K-12 career, this article might help you be on the cutting edge in interviews and in the classroom. Finally, at the end of the article, you'll find links to other online technologies to try. Happy tech-ing!

Here's my blurb: This website, hosted by the University of Houston, explores the educational uses of digital storytelling. The site contains practical information regarding different digital storytelling programs, and provides "how to" activities for writing scripts, designing storyboards, and recording audio. There is also lesson planning information, copyright information, and a discussion of rubrics for assessment and evaluation. Here's there blurb: About this Site The Goals of this Website The primary goal of the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling website is to serve as a useful resource for educators and students who are interested in how digital storytelling can be integrated into a variety of educational activities.

If you do a digital storytelling project with your students, the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling site linked to a contest for K-12 students to submit their stories and win cool awards such as iPods and has contests for the best stories, and your students could potentially win awards, such as iPod Minis and iPod Nanos, and scholarships up to $8000. Pretty cool motivator, don't you think? Here's the link: http://www.distco.org/

I'm not sure if anyone has posted this already (so forgive me if this is a repeat!), but basically Tumblr is like a blog hybrid that allows you post just about anything (as the site states: "Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme's HTML."). The site is very creativity-oriented, and seems like a potentially very useful online resource for students to express themselves creatively, to write and publish for a real audience, to gain exposure to cultural dimensions of the target speech community, and to enhance their digital literacy.

Wordle isn't necessarily ESL focused, but it does do fun things with language. Teachers can use this application to create vocabulary word splashes that are visually appealing to students, or teachers can let students play with their own words. For example, students can input an essay and world will pick out the most frequent words and put them into a cool design. It's a simple and easy way to manipulate language.

Jena, I'm glad you posted this. I think that this has some great potential for introducing vocabulary in the pre- or -post phases of a lesson for different skills or content classes. I like that you can choose different fonts, # of words that can be displayed and the direction of displayed words. You can also embed this into blogs and wikis. For a good blog post on using word clouds in the classroom, you might want to check out Nic Peachey's post on this subject: http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/09/using-word-clouds-in-efl-esl.html As an aside, in my opinion this guy is perhaps one of the most active technology/CALL ESL people on the web. I get a lot of great ideas from reading his blog posts and other resources.

This is very interesting.. It can be used by teachers of vocabulary and writing.. I like the fact that it can be used ina number of ways. Thanks Jena