AllMyFaves education
A stable resource for locating the current offerings by the Web sorted by popularity and category. You can surf through the resources to locate ideas and activities that can enhance your lessons.
Animoto
This resource turns your photos & videos into amazing presentations. Animoto automatically produces orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from your photos, video clips and music. The educational possibilities are to create a “hook” for a topic or as with all Web 2.0 it is up to your imagination and your students’ goals. See Stephen Roney’s Canada Day video. TRY the LESSON
Antconc
Antconc is a full concordancer that can be run from your flash drive. Concordancers can assist with defining term usage as well as generate cloze activities and more.
BBC Learning English, BBC resources are comprehensive and very thorough. Get a hot coffee and surf this site to discover the wealth of resources available. WE also have the BBC Learning widget on this site for quick access.
Breaking News English Lessons, Lesson plans and Podcasts of current events in the form of ESL lessons. This service is also attached to our site.
This is a great Web 2.0 resource for ESL teachers. After free registration, you can download worksheets/lessons and after you get the gist of how the resources are formatted, perhaps you may even upload one of your worksheets to the site itself. Ice breakers might come in handy. There are so many resources at this site, you will have to go yourself and explore yourself for your purposes.
Clipnabber Classic allows you to download videos from YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, MegaVideo, and lots of other video sharing websites.
Cloze test generator
This is a life saver for an ESL teacher. Try it out and generate fantastic activities for your students.
Data driven learning is a term that has been with our profession since the advent of micro computers in the seventies. Essentially it means using a computer to generate authentic learning tasks from authentic materials (data). Many DDL learning objects are created through concordancing tools such as the ones at LexTutor. Data driven activities should be learner centered (as the data can be selected by a teacher or the students themselves. The tasks developed should be exploratory rather than drill and kill. In this activity you will locate a vocabulary list and then generate a simply vocabulary activity for your students. The text developed will be pasted into a word processor and manipulated for pedagogical presentation.
CoolText logo generator
Cool Text is a free graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you need an impressive logo without a lot of design work. Simply choose what kind of image you would like. Fill out a form and you’ll have your own custom image.
Creaza Media Production Suite
Creaza is a creative suite of tools that allow for organizing, cartooning , video editing and audio editing. This is simply incredible! Teachers can now create full multimedia experiences without having to pay thousands of dollars for the tools!
At times, material developers require special fonts or letter shape sets to create an impression or the illusion of an event or concept. The web resource Dafont offers this option to educators at www.dafont.com. Dafont is a repository of fonts. The font categories range from Holiday to Fancy. Most personal computers have an office suite that include an overabundance of fonts. However, the font sets at Dafont provide variations that challenge the imagination. TRY the LESSON
Thanks to Sandy Millin for this resource. Her description reads, “A set of photos, based on a weekly theme, taken by ELT teachers, trainers and writers from around the world. These are, in turn, available free to others in the field of ELT under a CC license.” Go to the Eltpics at Flickr to see the image sets. You might just want to contribute to this useful resources as well.
ESLPod(Cast)
Subscribe to this resource if you have advanced students with specialist or require challenging listening activities. Subscription opens the complete Listening Guides with a myriad of activities to accompany these audio learning objects.
ESLVideo
ESL video takes a bit of work but allows you to make custom interactive (self marking) quizzes for your requirements. Locate or upload a video on YouTube, use the easy widget to input questions and bring in the students to take the quiz based on the video or audio content.
Go2web Wow! Amazing inventory of Web2.0 sites that are organized into neat categories for quick location of resources.
GoMockingBird is not really a TESOL tool but for materials developers that are planning or trying to get buy-in or funding for a blog, web or social site for their teaching or development. It allows a developer to quickly and efficiently create a mock up of a digital concept. this saves the cost of an expensive editor – Photoshop – and the time it takes to learn the intricacies of wire-framing, layers ans pen attributes.
Gutenburg Project is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. It is a great way to locate digital text without copyright issues. TRY the LESSON
Lorem Ipsum is a text generator for typesetting. Some call it “dummy text.” This may not seem very important for ESL teachers, however some may be charged with larger projects such as websites or textbooks. The text generated by this site can be used to assist with early decisions on the work such as layout schemes. TRY the LESSON
LiveBinder is a quick and reliable means of storing, categorizing and sharing Internet resources. It is a free service, check out the Wordle binder.
This is a wonderful resource for creating interactive materials for your students. It is free and has great potential. There are good demonstrations that help you prepare learning opportunities.
MyBrainshark is a tool that helps you add voice to Powerpoint, narrate a document, upload a video, make a photo Album, produce a podcast.
Picasa Web Album is a great place to host an image web album for teaching purposes. You must have a Google account to access this service however.
Pixlr is as they say, “the most advanced online photo editor in the world! “ It has 90%+ of the basic features that most educational developers require. give it a try. It provides you with an impressive array of image filters.
Prezi allows you to create presentations which do not use slides but are based on zooming in and out. You can write and add images, share the link by email, download to hard disk or embed the result.
This resource allows educators to quickly (and for free) assemble interactive multimedia, multiple choice questions and games for creating learning opportunities. These can be shared with the thousands of other educators who contribute their own learning objects to the resource.
Quizlet is a Flashcard creator as well as a repository for ready made flashcards.
SafeshareTV, When teaching with online videos, teachers are frustrated with access delays, inappropriate advertising. Safeshare which works with YouTube videos only,attains a separate link to a YouTube video. teachers can also pre-cue a starting and ending point for targeted viewing. An excellent means of control over unpredictable Internet video.
Scribd This is a link to an ESL activity using Scribd. Scribd is a social community that shares all sorts of resources. It may be a place for you to seek out documents, slide shows or other media that can be used in your classroom.
The SettlementAtWork Wiki’s LINC resources page provides a great set of documents to peruse , especially the Classroom Activities (with audio support files). If you are taching functional English many of these materials will be useful.
SlideShare, found at www.slideshare.net, is a presentation sharing community. It undersells itself as it is also a document sharing community. Sharing your documents is as simple as emailing the URL or web address to your peers or friends. There are two ways of uploading and sharing your slide shows. The first is anonymously and the second is as a member with more control of how and who uses your content. TRY the LESSON
Smush.it Image optimization is an art few have mastered. This tool takes an image already loaded on the Internet and compresses it with without reducing its quality. It is available as a part of a download YSlow, but you can “smush” up to 5 images for free at this site.
Springer Exemplar Springer Exemplar returns examples in context for a given word. The best thing about it is that you can specify the discipline. Great for creating ESP vocabulary in context exercises! It is a refined concordancer for everyone!
StudyStack is a large repository of virtual and printable flash cards. There are games and other activities related to themes. It is a great resource for lesson preparation and hands-on manipulation.
Teachers Net
Lots of resources here for all grades and levels.
TeacherTube is a safe (as safe as the Internet can be) place to locate and find presentations or videos produced by educators for educators. It is much safer than YouTube for letting the students view it on individual workstations. TRY the LESSON
Tools for Educators What can you say about this site? All sorts of practical resources and activities for teachers to prepare for their classes.
Twitter4teachers
This wiki was created to easily help educators find other educators on Twitter that have the same interests as them (that teach in the same content area). Check out the list of educators on the pages linked below and add your Twitter name to the appropriate list too.
Vector Magic converts bitmap images like JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs to the crisp, clean, scalable vector art of EPS, SVG, and PDF with the world’s best auto-tracing software. This is great for logos and line art.
VocabGrabber allows the one to visualize the relationships between words. As well it provides a nice dynamic chart that informs one of the functionality of the word. TRY the LESSON
Webresizer (image editor) If you are in a real hurry but still need control over your image optimization – unlike Smush.it, then this is your tool! Quick and easy. As well you can upload images from your computer and all of the options are right on the front page.
WikiQuote is a free online site of quotations from notable people and creative works in every language, translations of non-English quotes, and links to Wikipedia for further information. Visit the help page or experiment in the sandbox to learn how you can edit nearly any page right now; or go to the Log in to start contributing to Wikiquote.
Wordle
Wordle, www.wordle.net, is a word cloud generator. It accepts words that are entered into a text box and generates a variety of word clouds based on orientation, font, size, color, character shape, word limit, and background. The results can be tweaked, printed or displayed on digital resources such as a class web site.
Zamzar There are many reasons to convert media files. In the case of video, many players are proprietary (made by a company to suit there player), so they do not play all video formats. Therefore, you can take charge by using a free tool such as “Zamzar” to convert your video from one format to the other. One of the most common conversions is from “AVI” to “MOV”. TRY the LESSON
