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More grammar support with Grammar Quizzes

John Allan — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:35:04 +0000

Grammar-Quizzes.com is a free educational resource created to promote the understanding, learning and practicing English grammar through the use of current event stories, pictures, sentence diagrams, and self-assessing-quizzes. Most of the content is written for intermediate non-native speakers. This site is available to instructors and their students without charge.

A Memorial Day lesson for Memorial Day

John Allan — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:24:12 +0000

In the United States of American today is Memorial Day. Breaking News English has a complete lesson set for your to explain this day of observance to your students.

365 ESL Short Stories

John Allan — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:27:30 +0000

How could I have missed this one? This is a great set of interactive learning resources for ESL learners. Each story, geared towards lower-intermediate learners, has the written text, an audio reading, a set of yes/no questions, cloze practice, a crossword puzzle, single term dictation practice and a vocabulary list with links to definitions.

This is a great example of harnessing available technologies such as Dictionary.com. Hot Potatoes, Google Translate, a Premiumbeat media player and basic HTML.

ManyThings.org has many interesting and useful activities for ESL learners

John Allan — Tue, 14 May 2013 21:18:50 +0000

Interesting things for ESL students is for students of English as a Second Language (ESL) or (EFL). included are quizzes, word games, word puzzles, proverbs, slang expressions, anagrams, a random-sentence generator and other CALL activities. This is a non-commercial for TESL teachers to use with their students.

Try Wikimedia Commons for millions of free files

John Allan — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:00:41 +0000

Wikimedia Commons permits the use of over 10 million media files. This media file (images, sounds, and video clips) repository allows accessibility to public domain and freely-licensed educational media content. Great for budget challenged teachers across the globe.

Locate media by topic, location, type, author, license and by source.

Free Shared Whiteboard thanks to Twiddla

John Allan — Sun, 12 May 2013 19:17:30 +0000

Need a Scientific Calculator?

John Allan — Mon, 06 May 2013 23:35:46 +0000

My daughter is now in high school and sometimes forgets to bring her math book and calculator (not to mention an eraser and pencil) home. No longer is forgetting the scientific calculator an excuse for not doing homework! It covers all of the following functions:

Standard Functions
abs arg exp ceil floor log ln lg min max sqr

Trigonometry Functions
sin cos tan asin acos atan sinh cosh tanh asinh acosh atanh

Simple Wikipedia – a place to take your ESL students

John Allan — Sat, 04 May 2013 18:40:55 +0000

For many ESL students Wikipedia is a frustrating experience. Teachers often spend a lot of time providing explanations of vocabulary and cultural issues. Simple Wikipedia is an option for a place to take your students at the intermediate levels.

Another source of legal images – FlickrCC

John Allan — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:53:52 +0000

FlickrCC, Flickr Creative Commons, is a tool that searches Creative Commons images from the Flickr site itself. This means that you can bypass the Flickr advanced search option. The display is very appealing to the eye. It displays image thumbnails, attribution information and a text definition. A full image editor that can be instantly accessed with a single click is also available. This is a very impressive resource.

Visuwords for discovering word relationships

John Allan — Thu, 02 May 2013 05:53:07 +0000

Learn the nuances of words through word relationship diagrams you can quickly create at Visuwords. Word associations such as synonyms, homonyms, part of speech, derivation, and much more can be found by simply typing the term or phrase in the text box and pressing search icon. Visuwords draws its data from Princeton University’s open source database WordNet. Give it a try. It might just be useful for your teaching, writing or learning!