Many free sites for portfolios. A wonderful way to measure student growth through oout the school year. It gives students a way to measure their own learning and identify weaknesses and strengths
This site tells how to participate in the weekly online Twitter chat with #langchat, foreign language teachers sharing ideas about a pre-determined weekly topic. This is very useful for building your PLN, and will provide links and ideas for your classroom lessons and units.
20 uses for Wordle in the classroom or out of class. Useful for a variety of purposes and a variety of ages. Wordle also used in a study for analyzing student writing samples, to show overused words and suggest broadening vocabulary.
Blogger is a free site for blogging. It is incorporated with Google, so if the user has a Google account, he automatically has a Blogger account.
This site (as well as any simple blogging site) can be used for students to publish their writing and receive a world-wide audience. Additionally, students can keep a reflection journal of their own progress, feelings, and questions regarding their learning. Finally, instructors can use blogs to communicate important information to their students as well as share their voice in an easily-accessed, asynchronous means.
Comprehensible Input Classroom - blog with links, ideas, activities, curriculum plans, etc. for teacher ideas. Can be used by teacher to add depth and interest to curriculum planning and lesson steps.
Every thing you need to know about Creative Commons - including where to find copyright free resources, teaching about copyright and applying it, citing sources, and more. Perfect for the 600 course
This post by Silvia Tolisano offers a series of activities and a checklist to assist you in re-designing your curricula to support student empowerment and 21st century literacies.
embed-ible resources for all sorts of visual learning. One could use some of the data visualizations to show the importance of learning a second or third language.
I like how visual the site is. Other than infographics it incorporates videos and other interactives. I even saw Venn Diagrams. It has a lot to offer to use in the classroom for students and outside the classroom with other teachers or administrators.
Explain Everything is a screencasting app for the iPad. It costs $2.99 in the App Store and no account is needed to use it.
This iPad app is designed for educational professionals and students alike, to create projects and record them as screencasts. It is a powerful tool and flexible app that is easy to use. Students use Explain Everything to make collaborative projects using multiple mediums. The recording feature allows foreign language students to create speaking samples with their projects, which can be used to measure progress with language proficiency in a digital portfolio. Teachers can use the recording feature to create a lecture capture. Projects can be designed directly in Explain Everything or files such as presentations, photos, notes, and videos can be imported into the app to create a project that can be annotated with pencil or text, narrated, recorded, and shared in a variety of ways, uploading to Photo Roll, You Tube, Email, Drop Box, and Evernote. Explain Everything can be used by both teachers and students as an interactive whiteboard tool for presentational purposes, when connected to an Apple TV or projector.
The site offers step-by step video courses and training exercises on different technology skills that will help you build a web site, start a blog, and more. I would use this for the 605 and 610 course.