NAU CALL

Funded by the NSF, contains digital versions of children's books from all over the world. There are books in many languages, some with translations. Searchable by region, topic, and level. Could be assigned as extra reading homework, or used for projects.

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.

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.

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.

This website allows you to create a free audio dropbox on any webpage where students can record and save audio files for their teacher to retrieve. Could be very useful for speaking homework assignments, rather than relying on a third party website such as voxopop.

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.

We talked about MICASE in class, but if you aren't familiar with the site, you might not realize that they also offer a set of prepared lesson plans and activity ideas that use MICASE corpus data.

This is a free program (for Windows only) that easily allows you to input text and find N-grams and phrase frames. This might be useful for teachers who want to be able to look for these features in the texts their class will be reading, for example. Although concordancing software such as Antconc can do the same thing, this program is nice for someone who doesn't need all the other functionality of a program like Antconc.

Similarly to the Breaking News English website, the Famous People English website features simplified mini-biographies on famous people from all over the world. Each passage also comes with a variety of activities. I have used this site many times for finding level-appropriate reading passages.

I use this website frequently to find simplified reading passages of current events. The passages are ranked as easier and harder and include a variety of activities (though the activities are redundant for each passage). Most passages are 1-2 paragraphs long.

Grammar Girl is a website and podcast with a daily grammar rule or tip. When we listened to Bek's podcast, I was reminded of Grammar Girl. It has a similar quick and fun feel. The podcasts are likely most appropriate for advanced learners. It's useful for teachers, too, as I frequently learn something new through the show.

I use this learners' dictionary frequently when I am trying to come up with a simplified definition for a new vocabulary word for my students. This website's definitions are almost always better and simpler than anything I can come up with. And quicker. It also includes daily words, quizzes, and activities for students.

This website includes already created flashcards for a variety of subjects, including languages. The languages section has flashcard sets for many different languages, the largest flashcard set being English. You can access pre-made flashcard sets, or create your own.

I love this site. Like the Moth, it is a resource for stories from every day people all over the country. It's great for cultural topics, too. The stories are much shorter, usually 1-3 minutes, and are generally appropriate for students (though some aren't).

The Moth is a storytelling program that broadcasts weekly stories told by anyone - famous people or every day folks. It's a great listening resource, especially for getting a glimpse of American life, but would require you to pre-screen the stories (some are not appropriate for students at all). It is also probably best suited for adult advanced learners.

Although discovery puzzle maker is more robust, this website provides another free option for making crosswords and word searches.

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.

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.

This website provides articles and it is updated everyday. You can read articles about current topics that might concern some teachers. They also provide free resources and you can sigh-up for a free e-newsletter.

This website provides digital books, activities, bulletin board ideas, cultural activities and more. Many of them are free and there are some that are paid.