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"Shawnee High School Language Arts Literacy teacher Kristin Giles came to the ETTC recently to seek out websites to support her research paper unit. Here are some of the places she visited on the World Wide Web:" A list of links to info/advice/help with research skills. Nice way for a teacher to get herself prepped for teaching the research paper.

A lesson plan for writing dialogue/short play online at a cartoon creation site.\n\n"Lesser controlled computer room writing activity. This activity can be adapted to the level and grammar area of your choice.\n\nLevel: Intermediate & above\n\nLocation: Computer room\n\nTopic: Writing direct speech in a cartoon\n\nLanguage Focus: Direct speech, present tenses etc\n\nTime: 30 minutes"

Poetry Forge has online (Flash) tools for generating instant poetry, as well as a downloadable version of the tools to use on the desktop. It's really fun to add some words to a list and then have the poetry-maker pop up your new poem. Students can learn a lot about metaphorical language here.

Although this is a science and math teacher blog, the tips and tools mentioned here are outstanding. Blog by David Wetzel (drwetzel)\n\nTopics that include a brief lesson idea and tools to use: book trailer video, interactive poster/presentations, audio/video podcasts, slideshows, collaborative project sharing.

"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.

"HP Teacher Experience Exchange, is a free site providing teacher discussion forums, lesson plans and many other teacher resources. Learn more." Sponsored by Hewlett-Packard.

This is a set of online tutorials and exercises for academic writing students. They explain the nature of the academic paragraph, including the importance of the topic sentence, how to order a paragraph, and typical transition words and signals within the paragraph. Written by Elizabeth Hanson-Smith.

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.

Make quizzes free with the tool at 4Teachers (home of RubiStar and other tools). Students can take the quizzes online, and you can access them from work or home. Free. --EHS

A huge list of materials online related to listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar, and general study skills. Teachers need to review and select from sites to use them effectively in an academic program. Prepared by Christine Bauer-Ramazani for her Academic Skills courses.

"Find flashcards to study or create your own flashcards. "Study flashcards or use the other activities such as matching, crosswords, hangman, scrambled word, or bug chase. "Study flashcards anytime/anywhere by printing your flashcards or by using a flashcard app. " -- Subjects include geography, business, math, science, languages, medical subjets, and varies tests, such as GRE. Not specifically for ESL/EFL. Nice that you can use the flashcards on- or off-line.

A nice instructional video by Michael Coughlan. Links from this page will take you to other tutorials by Michael.

If you are a fan of grammar, this site is for you. Hundreds of online lessons for further practice.

Vocabulary exercises at many different levels with lots pre-reading (sentence-level), and then exercises with cartoons and sounds for help. Highly interactiv--point and click on an item, drag-and-drop an item to a cartoon figure, listening to the item and type, etc. Despite cartoon/movie figures, adults could use these exercises, too (from Russel Stannard, TeachertrainingVideos.com).

Over 1,000 recordings to learn English (and other languages) with accompanying exercises, downloadable audio, etc. R. Stannard calls it one of the most useful language learning sites online: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/elllo/index.html.