Group items tagged

Conversation starters

Conversation starters and short reading passages for efl/esl classes

Dr. Nellie Deutsch in conversation with Gina Bianchini in WizIQ

Conversation English is an iPhone/iTunes app where people can view a short video of a dialogue and do exercises. If your students are crazy about their smart phones, this would be a good way to get them to practice. It's about $5 US.

"Programming is magic. It's the ability to create things from pure imagination. We started CodeCombat to give learners the feeling of wizardly power at their fingertips by using typed code. "As it turns out, that enables them to learn faster too. WAY faster. It's like having a conversation instead of reading a manual. We want to bring that conversation to every school and to every student, because everyone should have the chance to learn the magic of programming. "CodeCombat is a community project,with hundreds of players volunteering to create levels, contribute to our code to add features, fix bugs, playtest, and even translate the game into 50 languages so far. Employees, contributors and the site gain by sharing ideas and pooling effort, as does the open source community in general. The site is built on numerous open source projects, and we are open sourced to give back to the community and provide code-curious players a familiar project to explore and experiment with. Anyone can join the CodeCombat community! "

The Quizlet Blog is a good source, not just for using Quizlet, but for lesson plan ideas like this one for Black History Month -- or any time of the year that race might come up as a topic. And when doesn't it?

This chat room tool might be useful for your classes, or as a backchannel if several teachers are working on a presentation together. The interface can be mounted on your own website, ensuring that students don't wander off. You can easily save a transcript of the chat, and it lets students join from home or other classrooms. T/H to H. Dilatush who let us in EVO know about it.