Group items tagged

"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.

This is a useful way to use Google to create your own search engine. The screencast embedded in the blog entry here gives informative details on the how-to for this built-in Google feature.

This is a collection of texts and accompanying images created by users that you can use for ESL/EFL activities. Have students create and add their own digital stories connected to a theme or short story they have searched for and read. You can also search by a key word, such as a grammatical term they are studying (e.g., "used to"). Thanks to C. Arena.

"Search Cheat Sheet This is a quick guide to the operators and restricts supported by wave search. Keywords about:[keyword] - finds waves which have [keyword] occurring anywhere. Same as [keyword]. title:[keyword] - finds waves which have [keyword] in the title. caption:[keyword] - finds waves which have an attachment where [keyword] occurs in the caption. ---------------- Status is:read - finds all read waves. is:unread - finds all "

An AMAZING search engine.

A search engine for apps, organized first by the type of interface you are using: mobile, desktop, browser, or web (or all). May create some good short-cuts in the elusive quest for the perfect app.

Created by a teacher, the toolbar can make crosswords, bingo cards, jumbles, word search puzzles, flashcards, cloze tests, pair-matching puzzles and much more.

This site creates several kinds of activities and games: interactive map, riddles, fill-in, crossword puzzles, dialogue with audio prompts, dictation, jumbled word or sentence, matching, word search, and quizzzes. You can store your creations for repeated use. Thanks to D. Gonzalez for sharing this.

Start your presentation, type a few words and then search for a copyright free creative commons-licensed image to illustrate, add charts or graphs, and select theme, layout, and filters. Share and view on any web-enabled device or embed in your website or blog. Help your students create beautiful presentations on the iPads. Free.

A helpful guide to using Wikipedia and other resources for beginning researcher-students. Also mentions EducationWorld and the use of search engines.

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.

"Classroom Clipart: The Source for Free Clip Art, Illustrations and Photographs" has a huge list and a search engine. Very useful for students creating presentations and projects.

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.

Another way to use tagging. if it can be found in a search engine, you will see it displayed on a visual wall, as in this example from the Webheads in Action: http://spezify.com/#/webheads Makes using tags of all kinds even more important. Be sure your students select really unique tags. (In this example, there is a YouTube video and other materials related to Spider-Man, whose fans are also called "Webheads.") Extra nice feature--click an image to expand. If you click elsewhere, the video or whatever will stop playing.

You can select any pictures in Flickr and add dialogue bubbles to them. Good for projects where students upload their own pictures or select them from a search at Flickr. (See Russell Stannard's video on how to encourage students to use Bubblr for writing: http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/newBubblr/index.html.)