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Check out the extensive list for topics of interest to EFL/ESL teachers. These are interesting and professional-looking, each about 30-40 min. on embedded video.

"The CALL Interest Section of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL) offers language teachers world-wide the opportunity to participate in the Electronic Village Online (EVO), a professional development project and virtual extension of the TESOL 2011 Convention in New Orleans, LA, USA. The intended audience for this project includes both TESOL convention-goers and those who can participate only virtually. Interest Sections, Affiliates, E-groups, and other member groups of TESOL in particular are invited to sponsor sessions related to the convention. "

"With the advance of web 2.0 technologies, there emerged a wide range of educational tools that we can use with our students in and outside the classroom.Collaborative web tools is one example. Using such websites, teachers will be able to help in holding online and real-time discussions with their students, help them in their projects and assignments, guide their learning, do backchanneling, and synchronously moderate discussion threads and many more." The focus here is on tools for collaboration. Many are new and interesting, such as virtual whiteboards, search team to do online searches together, browse websites together, create online projects collaboratively, create your own chatroom, etc. Some of these will be gone quickly, but they all appear quite useful. About 30 in the list.

"Description: A breathtaking array of 'learn to code' Apple, Android and Windows phone apps. Learn C++, Python C#, HTML, SQL, JavaScript, Java, CSS, php and Swift via the site or apps. These are 'must try' tools for anyone starting out with coding. The site even has a 'Code Playground' to experiment with your code." I haven't had a chance to try out any of these, but this should be an interesting starting point to get students coding.

"Do you Diigo? To be honest, I signed up but never used the online social-bookmarking tool. Fortunately, TESOL's Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL) Interest Section has been busy bookmarking some great online resources. Dr. Elizabeth Hanson-Smith shared the Diigo CALL IS Virtual Software List on the TESOL CALL Community: http://www.diigo.com/user/call_is_vsl. This list contains tons of resources on various teaching topics! However, this post focuses only on the teacher-training videos." A nice review and selection by Sandra Rogers for the TESOL Blog.

Tom Preskett's blog is well worth following. Of special interest are articles on Using Social Media for Personal Learning (11 June 2012), and Tablets: Finally a Technology for the Classroom (18 May 2012). He suggests that "Dynamic content can be created, delivered and actively engaged with by each student."

"If we hope to construct enduring understanding in our students, it's critical that, now more than ever, we know their strengths and interests. By incorporating students' strengths and weakness into authentic learning experiences from the beginning of each unit, while at the same time including opportunities for feedback, metacognition and revision, we promote a variety of cognitive and emotional benefits that can lead to academic success. " A thoughtful description of ways to successfully integrate learner feedback into the assessment process.

Insert a URL on this page and it will render a readability score using Flesch, SMOG, etc., plus statistics such as number of words, sentences, etc. This could be helpful to determine readable authentic materials for ESL/EFL learners. However, I suspect most webpages all run pretty close to the same level. This would be interesting to experiment with, and especially useful for electronic books and content materials.

R. Byrne: "Wikispaces recently added a Quizlet widget to the library of widgets that you can embed into your Wikispaces pages. Quizlet is a free flashcard service that anyone can use to create and share flashcards. Quizlet offers a massive library of flashcard sets created and shared by other users of the service. And now you can search for Quizlet flashcards, embed them into your wiki, and use four different study modes while those cards are embedded into your wiki. The screenshots below provide directions for adding Quizlet to your Wikispaces wiki." Quizlet can handle various types of media, so it makes for interesting flashcards. This step-by-step visual explanation makes the embedding task easy; creating the flashcards at Quizlet takes some work and thought.

Audrey Watters writes an interesting article here ranging from apocalypse to rapture to singularity and taking in MOOCs in the process and distilling all that to just ten universities, which is what Sebastian Thrun there will be 50 years from now.

interesting, surprising (many of them), evidence of cultural contexts

Mentoring for 21st Century Skills It's all about the Learning" About the book: In this book, we present a collection of papers and articles which represent the varied backgrounds and interests of the authors, all of whom belong to the VITAE team who developed the materials and approaches which are outlined here. While some articles are practical in their focus, describing the application of pedagogic models and the experiences of the participants; others are more theoretical, offering in-depth explorations of the approaches taken in developing the VITAE model.

An interesting visual way to find images--each image found leads to a "swirl" of other related images, usually from the same site. Images found can be used in content-based/project-based learning. Be aware of copyright issues when using images from the Internet. Thanks to Webhead Rita Zeinstejer for this tip.

This site is going EFL/ESL in a big way, using video: "We recently found out that 22frames.com is becoming a popular site for learning English as a second language (ESL). It turns out that watching captioned videos provides a way to not only learn formal English but also idioms and other cultural concepts. To find videos, you can browse through categories or make caption-only video searches on your interests. Even more, we have been devoting significant time and resources to developing ESL-specific features that are motivated by our users' feedback." "Recently, we found out that many of our users are using the site to supplement their English learning (see: http://www.22frames.com/esl.aspx ). They also began to pitch ideas we could implement to make the site even more useful for this activity. With so many requests, we decided to seriously consider these ideas and devote significant time and resources into realizing them. Now, we are turning our site into a substantial and FREE English learning resource. We are aware of a couple sites out there that are also focused on using captioned videos for English learning, so we've been focusing on the unique user-motivated features. Therefore, my goal here is to let you know about our free resource and that we are opening the door to requests for anyone who might desire features that have not been implemented elsewhere. Perhaps, you can share this with your colleagues/readers/etc as it will help us better gauge which features to prioritize and to increase the rate with which we will release new features. Please note that we are really serious about considering whatever feedback we get. I'm also pleased to announce our first feature, which we expect will help in learning/teaching popular English idioms. Idioms are a big deal in learning English, and it is clear that watching them used in real situations will increase the rate with which they are learned. We therefore processed a large group of YouTube videos in o

22 Frames is going to the ESL/EFL market, and is free. First features are idioms.

English for Child Care Language Skills for Parents and Providers This is by a friend and collegue in California and should be an ESP of interest. Free download.

"Watch interesting, authentic videos. Learn the vocabulary that matters to you. Speak and get instant pronunciation feedback." Stills from videos with descriptive voice over, or clips, with captioning. Record your own voice and get a score. Users can also slow down the descriptive speech with a button click. Looks like a great practice device, with a wide variety of voices and accents.

This site is commercial, but it has lots of interesting ideas on ways the readers theater can help students with reading, listening, and speaking.