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Explore the website of any school, and you will undoubtedly find a page dedicated to their Mission and Vision. Here you will find carefully crafted statements of purpose couched in the vocabulary of educational excellence and reflecting the pinnacle of human possibility. A blend of educational philosophy and marketing speak designed to promote student achievement and enrolments. The question is, to what degree does the lived experience of the typical student align with the stated purposes? Does the product do what it says on the tin?

The Next Web has developed this quick and handy guide to Twitter's most stalwart phrases. From the basic beginner to a tweet-savvy expert, this cheat sheet will help you navigate the perplexing and concentrated language that often appears in the stream, and

Digital lessons by song and video in HipHop

Useful site for studying idioms. It gives simple and accurate definitions to a good range of idioms.

Graphics to represent many words, organized by concept. it can aosl be a visual reference source for finding copyright free sharable images. Also available in Spanish and French.

"While some education conferences are genuinely inspiring, others serve mostly to demonstrate how even intelligent educators can be remarkably credulous, nodding agreeably at descriptions of programs that ought to elicit fury or laughter, avidly copying down hollow phrases from a consultant's PowerPoint presentation, awed by anything that's borrowed from the business world or involves digital technology. Many companies and consultants thrive on this credulity, and also on teachers' isolation, fatalism, and fear (of demands by clueless officials to raise test scores at any cost). With a good dose of critical thinking and courage, a willingness to say "This is bad for kids and we won't have any part of it," we could drive these outfits out of business -- and begin to take back our schools."

Very clever site that creates a word cloud from text, and finds images for the most frequently occurring words.

Confusing Words is a collection of 3210 words that are troublesome to readers and writers. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused.

WordSift is another visualisation tool that was created primarily for teachers. It works just like Wordle but just a bit better. All you need do is paste in the text and then sit back. The sifted words then show up in orange or green and the fun really begins. This tool would be lots of fun on an IWB as well as on your own computer. Don't miss checking out the About section for more thoughts on using it.