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"Learn a Language - or Learn 8 of Them! Learn a language here with Visual Link® Languages. You can learn over 1,400 words for free here! There are interactive audio/visual flash cards to help you learn a foreign language. There's also an addictive Lingo Dingo game to help you on your online language learning journey. As seen above, you can learn any language of your choice. You can also learn important phrases like greetings, survival expressions and slang words in the language of your choice. If you want verbs, there are over 350 verbs to help you with your language study. To our knowledge, this is the most extensive, free website dedicated to online language learning. Be sure to use it and pass it on to others. "

I have found that the "Sharing to Grow" concept is always a lot harder to sell to colleagues than expected.Teaching is after all an essentially individual activity-it is about you and 30 children, isn't it? As we all know, it is and it isn't. As an individual activity, it is easy to rely on habit, recycling activities that we feel work in the classroom. However, with educational technology developing at high speed, the life-cycle of classroom activities seems to be getting shorter and shorter, with more and more needed to get that "wow factor" out of classes. This is when...

As part of a language arts or reading program, students read novels throughout the school year. Some of the novels are assigned, read, and discussed "all class." Others are chosen by the students individually, and they keep individual reading lists. Students may be required to read a certain number per marking period, per school year, and over the summer. Some may be classics; other trade novels, but all contribute to the overall reading and comprehension abilities of the students. This unit can be done as a culminating activity for the school year. Students are asked to choose their two favorite novels from the ones they have read. They write reviews and post them online for students in their own school, in other schools, across the United States, and in other countries to read. The student reviews not only help student readers clarify their own understanding of literature, they also provide a "student-to-student" resource. Other students can choose novels based on opinions of their peers. The students review the novels, write descriptions that will appeal to other readers, and indicate the level of reading difficulty. They do this to help others choose novels suitable for their reading levels.

researchers long thought the window for learning a new language shrinks rapidly after age 7 and closes almost entirely after puberty. Yet interdisciplinary research conducted over the past five years at the University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, and other colleges suggest that the time frame may be more flexible than first thought and that students who learn additional languages become more adaptable in other types of learning, too.

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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

Today the social learning platform is significantly enhanced with the functionality for content creation across all the 188 supported languages. This means that while until now users were only supposed to use what iKnow and its platforms had to offer them for learning (they could only choose the available courses), they can now contribute to content on the site for others to use in the learning process. The social nature of the platform will prevent incorrect language units from appearing on the site as other users will be able to correct or flag them as inappropriate.

The mission of the Skype an Author Network is to provide K-12 teachers and librarians a way to connect authors, books, and young readers through virtual visits. Wouldn't it be great to invite authors into your classroom or library to video chat with students before, during, and/or after reading their books? We are growing a list of authors who want to make that connection with you via Skype. Visit our Skype Overview page to learn more about Skype.

"Building a rich vocabulary, across the curriculum, is one of the main aims for most teachers. Not only does a rich vocabulary help to create strong writing skills, but also can help with improving access to all areas of the curriculum. In his book, Andrew Jennings explains why vocabulary should be a focus in your classroom, providing resources and inspiration to help optimise vocabulary learning. Resources include a focus on SPaG facts, key vocab words that support various popular primary topics, an etymology section to inspire pupils, and looking at various grammatical features that can help build a repertoire of rich vocabulary. Throughout, the book provides other resources that can be copied for classroom use, or be used to take home to help build vocabulary skills away from the school setting."

How to translate main Phrasal Verbs in French, this week: to figure out, to look for, to put on, to run into. Comment traduire les verbes à prépositions en français.

"Second-grade students who read aloud to dogs in an after-school program demonstrated improved attitudes about reading, according to researchers at Tufts Institute for Human-Animal Interaction at Tufts University. Their research appears online in advance of print in the Early Childhood Education Journal. Reading skills are often associated with improved academic performance and positive attitudes about school in children. Researchers wanted to learn if animal-assisted intervention in the form of reading aloud to dogs in a classroom setting could contribute to improved skills and attitudes."

"At freedocumentaries.org we strongly believe that in order to have a true democracy, there has to be a free flow of easily accessible information. Unfortunately, many important perspectives, opinions, and facts never make it to our televisions or cinemas (you can watch movies in our media category if you want to know why)."

Dear Maggie. Thanks a lot for this invaluable link. It is going to take a long while dealing with all these documentaries but they all seem to be worth watching.

Welcome to the Archive's audio and MP3 library. This library contains over a hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download.

FlashMeeting is an easy to use online meeting application, it allows a dispersed group of people to meet from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Typically a meeting is pre-booked by a registered user and a url, containing a unique password for the meeting, is returned by the FlashMeeting server. The 'booker' passes this on to the people they wish to participate, who simply click on the link to enter into the meeting at the arranged time.

Today, we're launching an initiative to help authors and publishers discover new audiences for books they've made available for free under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Rightsholders who want to distribute their CC-licensed books more widely can choose to allow readers around the world to download, use, and share their work via Google Books.

This section aims to support teachers in using assessment to enhance learning in Years 7-8. It builds on the principles of assessment for learning in the Board's Years 7-10 syllabuses and the advice in subsequent support materials on implementing these principles. For each course listed below there are samples of student work aligned to the common grade scale, illustrating standards at the end of Stage 4. Samples of student work are also provided in English and Mathematics to illustrate standards mid-stage (end of Year 7). The common grade scale can be used to report student achievement in both primary and junior secondary years in all NSW schools.