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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

Will the Chinese people rise above cyber-vigilantism and use the Internet to build a just and fair society governed by accountable leaders? Or will the majority be be happy to wield their new-found powers of online speech in random fashion? That's really up to them. People like Liu Xiaoyuan and Yang Hengjun and a number of others have been raising such questions. It's hard to know whether people beyond the elite intelligentsia will pay attention to such concerns. This is why the suppression and censorship of Cultural Revolution history in China is so dangerous. If people could freely write and debate about what happened under Mao, history would have less chance of repeating itself.

Five Card Flickr "This quasi experimental web site is designed to foster visual thinking. It is based completely, or more loosely... copied, from the Five Card Nancy game devised by comics guru Scott McCloud and the nifty web version at 741.5 Comics. However, rather than drawing from a hand of randomly chosen panels of the nancy comic, my version draws upon collections of photos. You are dealt five random photos for each draw, and your task is to select one each time to add to a selextion of images, that taken together as a final set of 5 images- tell a story in pictures. When you are done, you the option to save the story so you can put a link in your resume or send to your Mom (she pay print it out and tape it to the fridge, or she may criticize your creativity, your mileage and mom may vary)."

Advice for language learners General warning: what follows may or may not apply to you. It's based on what linguistics knows about people in general (but any general advice will be ludicrously inappropriate for some people) and on my own experience (but you're not the same as me). If you have another way of learning that works, more power to you. Given the discussion so far, the prospects for language learning may seem pretty bleak. It seems that you'll only learn a language if you really need to; but the fact that you haven't done so already is a pretty good indication that you don't really need to. How to break out of this paradox? At the least, try to make the facts of language learning work for you, not against you. Exposure to the language, for instance, works in your favor. So create exposure. * Read books in the target language. * Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.) * Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things. * Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it. * Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself. * Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it. * Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make new friends. * Seek out opportunities to work using the language. * Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language. * Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language. * Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people want you to know their language-- they don't want to teach it. Also, this strategy is tricky for multiple languages.) Taking a class can be effective, partly for the instruction, but also because you can meet others who are learning the language, and because, psychologically, classes may be needed to make us give the subject matter time and attention. Self-study is too eas