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I'm saying that when it comes to current events, Google is nowhere near Twitter's speed and scope.

" Multilingualism is an undeniably powerful tool in today's world-in more ways than one. Not only can the knowledge of one or more foreign languages assist in boosting one's resume, it also opens communication with an entirely new world."

"A strategy to support pupils improve their spelling strategies, by circling words which they think require attention. The Standards & Testing Agency have in some ways made the marking of spellings more problematic than it's ever been. They state quite clearly, that individual spellings should no longer be pointed out to children if you wish to mark it as an independent piece. This, coupled with Ofsted's move away from heavy amounts of marking needing to be seen in books, could make the marking of spelling seem tricky."

This site offers an easy way to create your own virtual flashcard to study anything. You can also use other users' cards or share your own to help students. It supports many non-European typing scripts, like simplified Chinese and Japanese to help learn languages. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Il portale a servizio della letteratura italiana!

This is a wonderfully designed site to learn Mandarin Chinese. It uses a huge collection of Chinese TV programmes and movie clips with interactive and dual-language subtitles. Click on a Chinese character is see the translation and hear the pronunciation. You can set your ability level and also what sort of media you are interested in. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

This is one of my favorite sites to find out what's new in tech for our use.  The April 11th blog post discusses typing accents in other languages.  It also presents 2 virtual keyboards for WL students. Also presented are links to learning languages, activities, and image-based language lessons.  The Pictolang games could help students study languages on their own. The CAPL galleries could be helpful in locating images to use in developing your own language learning activities. You could also have students use CAPL to create language learning games to use to study

Flipping Blooms Taxonomy. Great article. Every time we ask students to use a new structure to talk about themselves and then let them figure out why the sentence order is what it is, we arepracticing this. We see greater results as they move to higher levels of production making more errors but experimenting and learning from their mistakes in production.

Create an interactive online lesson with this brilliant site. Upload and curate all the resources for a lesson in one place and access them with one click. The site works with Office files, PDFs, flash files, small videos, images and internet links and even connects to Google Drive and Dropbox. Then simply share the link with anyone who need to use view it. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

An amazing language learning site which helps learners of MFL remember words for over 200 languages by associating them with visual clues/mnemonics and score points by showing you remember the language in a variety of ways. You can listen to audio of the words you are learning. The site tracks your progress and analyses where you need improvement and it will adjust the words you are shown accordingly. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Languages%2C+Culture+%26+International+Projects

This page shows all the previous activities.\n * Play Games and Improve Your Vocabulary\n * Write a Music Video Review\n * Improving Your IT Skills and Vocabulary\n * 1 Minute Listening Activity\n * Learn a Song in English\n * Try a TOEFL Reading Test\n * Listen and Write the News\n * Improve Your Vocabulary and Make Friends\n * Exercise Your Ears With Authentic Film Clips\n * Record Yourself Reading a Poem\n * Using a Word Cloud to Remember Words and Texts\n * Take a Quiz Adventure Journey\n * Create an Online CV in English

"PopuLLar is a European Union, funded, innovative, education project designed to harness music, the primary social interest of secondary school students, in to their language learning. There is a huge need to motivate secondary school students, in particular, to learn languages, focus digital competencies and be creative; and music is the key. The project will ask students to write their own lyrics to songs of their choice. They will then translate their songs in to the target language they are learning, The students will then record their song (audio or video) and share it with students all over Europe. Students will be able to combine their love of music, with creativity, literacy, digital competencies, group collaboration and, most importantly, use LWULT languages. PopuLLar is a project that is 'Owned' by the students, they work autonomously and collaboratively, teachers are guides to the project process."

Folk music in many European languages http://folkdc.eu/ The Digital Children's Folksongs for Language and Cultural Learning (Folk DC) project is a European Union project designed to motivate young language learners to engage with language learning through using Folk songs, and activities around the songs. The songs are in 10 European languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish). The project will be producing a complete package for schools (Autonomous Teacher Training Tool kit - ATTT) so that schools all over Europe can take part in the project. The project culminates in a simultaneous, live concert in 5 countries, streamed over the Internet to audiences all over Europe. School choirs will sing folk songs in non-native languages that will be streamed to the other concert venues and also made available to an Internet audience. Schools can take part in this project by: Using the resources produced by the project Suggesting your own language, culture and music activities, inspired by the project Watching the live concert (at the venue or online) - see how you can join Adding folk songs of your language - see the project Wiki You can ask more information about how you can take part here. The project will introduce an understanding of the number, richness and culture of other languages when children start to learn a foreign language and begin to understand the meaning of additional languages. It will engage children in fascinating and engaging activities that will resonate in to the future and answer the need for materials that can directly engage and motivate children to enjoy their learning.

"Posteljooni - The postman played by a class of 9 - 10 years in Finland as part of the FolkDC project. Finnish subtitles: made from the transcript in http://lirama.net/song/143122 - the subtitles between square brackets about the teacher are Google translations English -> Finnish]"

Subtitled in Finnish - it would be nice to have a translation in English and possibly in other languages: you can do it from the linked page.

Infographic about the speed of languages, that is: how fast languages are spoken. Why do some languages sound like they're going by so fast, whereas others seem more slow and pronounced? A study was performed to find out why this is, and, it's more about the language density rather than the actual syllables per second. Slower languages tend to have a much higher information density, and the faster languages have less information transmitted per syllable; so it all evens itself out.

We teachers like to shake things up a bit and how better to begin than by adding a little randomness into your lessons. This is a great site that creates custom cubes which you can use as dice in class. They are easy to create and great for children make for a range of subjects and activities. Give it a roll. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Cross+Curricular