Jing

This is Russell Stannard's favourite, and it really is a fantastic tool. Like some of the other great ideas on the net, it's very simple, but has loads of useful applications.  It's a screen capture tool, so you can use it to very easily take pictures and make videos of what is on your computer screen.  Whilst you are showing the screen, you can also tape your voice explaining what's going on, or (if you have the Pro version) also use a webcam to make a video of yourself.  The basic version is free, or you can download the Pro version very cheaply ($15 a year - about £10), and this gives you a few more options. When you have made a video, you can save it on your computer, or upload it to the server and have a url or an embed code to retrieve it by. There's a little yellow sun that sits on the top of your screen, so it's always there, easily accessible and it's a very simple application to learn to use.

This is a set of training videos from the Teacher Training Videos website that will show you how to use Jing.

There are loads of ways to use this tool.  For me, it's an excellent way to get a 'connected classroom' going.  You can really easily and quickly make videos that you can e-mail to your learners and motivate them to continue to study throughout the week.  Some ideas -mainly from  Russell - thanks :)

 - Send them a short video of yourself talking, explaining what the homework is this week
 - Put their homework on your screen and then talk them through the mistakes rather than using a correction code
 - Put the vocabulary from the lesson on a word document, and show it, talking them through the meanings.
 - Rather then just sending the url for a website that's useful, send a captured picture of it, with notes attached.
 - Get learners to download the free version and ask them to make their own videos - you could ask them to find an image they like on the internet (perhaps one from the Google Art Project) and describe it.  These videos can be embedded on their blogs or they can share the urls with you and with each other
 - I think that with more and more distance and blended learning teacher training, this kind of feedback will really help to bridge the distance between tutor and trainee and reduce the feeling of isolation often experienced.

Here are some more ideas from Russell.

I recently sent out my first Jing feedback on some homework that a learner had sent to me, and she was really surprised and pleased.  She wrote back:

Hey..

Wow this is kool

I didnt expect you talking to me

I did this in my email program, really quick  I am sorry... I promise the next it´ll be better

cheers

Hopefully it'll be motivating!

I really like the idea of using this tool for giving feedback to learners.  This is a link to an excellent article about this, and here's an example of a video I made on Jing showing how you can give feedback on written work.




Not many limitations with this - it takes a little while to upload a video after you've made it, and the maximum time you have is 5 minutes, but you can always make a series of more than one video if thats' a limitation. All in all, a real winner!
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Quizzes

Quizzes - there are gazzillions of them (yes, that is a real number...) on the net.  Just put 'English Quiz' into Google and you'll see that I'm right.  They're quite good if you want to do a bit of form focused grammar practice, or if you want to learn vocab in lists.  Does that sound a bit old-fashioned? A bit Skinner-esque?  Get out the carrot and stick?

I guess it'll depend a lot on the kind of learners that you have whether or not these will be motivating or effective. I think that there is a place for this kind of material, if only because it raises awareness of language form and because using ICT you get instant feedback.  You could use it to give practice in a specific area for homework or ask learners to find a couple of quizzes that they found helpful and swap them with each other as a warmer for the next class.  It's probably worth using with an eye to how your learners enjoy it, though. 

About.com has a wide range of quizzes at all different levels. This is the page showing you all of the options:

As you can see, there's loads of stuff!  It can be useful if you want to give learners specific practice in a particular area, but the layout isn't all that motivating. Here's what they look like:

Another quiz site that has a huge amount of material is http://a4esl.org/ .  As well as thousands of quizzes to practice vocabulary and grammr, there are also bi-lingual vocabulary quizzes in a really wide range of languages. This can be quite fun to do with languages you have never learnt - I got a surprisingly high score in Croatian based on some cognates and a bit of lucky guesswork! 

This site also has some really nice links to VOA Special English (where you can read and listen to a special news programme) and to a variety of podcasts designed for esl learners.

Language Plants

This is a link to a blog called Language Garden, by David Warr, which has a whole collection of 'word plants' in it.  They're hard to explain, so the easiest thing is to show you a one!  Have a look at this one - how could it fail to brighten up your class?

There are lots of others, some very thought provoking, using lots of different kinds of texts.  This one is one that stirs me.....

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Martin Niemöller,
a German anti-Nazi theologian

I think that they are a really nice way to introduce a text for further work on vocabulary or structure, or for further productive work on  the same topic.  What's particularly nice for lower level adult or teenage learners is that a lot of the texts are quite profound or thought provoking, but quite accessible due to the repetitious nature of the texts.  The visual aspect may also help to add motivation, and comprehension.

Limitations?  I guess you might have to be a bit sensitive to your learners in terms of some of the content (the one above, for example, might be upsetting to some), but apart from that I think they're great for a five minute filler, or for basing a whole lesson around.  Let the garden grow!

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Tut Pup Spelling Site

This is a brilliant site for young learners who want to practice English spelling.  Basically, it's a fairly bog-standard spelling bee type programme.  You hear a word (at a level that you chooose, ranging from 'Easy Peasy' to 'Uh Oh') and you spell it. 

What makes it oh-so-much-more engaging is that you are in competition with a real person in real time somewhere across the globe.  You get to see their 'codename' eg Red Turtle 567 and where they are from (shown by a flag) and you have a limited time to spell the words that are said.  This is my game with Pink Cow from Belgium!

If you register, the site will record your victories and you can win 'medals' for various combinations of wins.  Clearly it's aimed at younger children and adults will probably feel patronised by it, but there is something incredibly motivating about knowing that you are competing against another real person somewhere out there.  My kids really love it!  You can practice maths on it, too.

Hot Potatoes

Hot Potatoes is a quiz maker.  You can download it for free from here, and it has a range of different types of quiz, ranging from a crossword, to multiple choice questions, matching activities and clozes.  It's nice in that you can produce quizzes that are applicable to your learners and include colour, pictures, and useful feedback with the answers.
This picture shows you the screen you get for making a JQuiz:

It's a great tool if you have something specific that you want to test your learners on, and they can be saved to use with further classes or to share with colleagues or on the net.  It's worth considering, though,  that they take a lot of time to make and a very short time for the learners to consume.  Also, although you can include feedback with the answers, on the whole, they are a testing, rather than a learning tool.  They do take a lot of time to develop and there is already a huge amount of quiz type material on the net, so if you want to test your learners on standard grammatical items, it's probably best to do a quick Google search.  If you want to develop more specific quizzes, though - this is your tool. 

Web Quests

WebQuests are interactive journeys that learners can make to find specific information using the internet and then report back on it in various ways.  They bring ICT to task based learning and can be very motivating for learners.

This is a link to a ready made WebQuest in which you plan for a trip to Australia.  The introduction states:

In this Webquest your objective is to find out about the culture and lifestyle in Australia. When you go there, what differences do you find? What do you like and dislike about it? What do you miss from your own country? What would you like to bring back from Australia?

and then there are five tasks to complete.  These practise all four skills and also include a lot of helpful functional language. The first task, for example, asks learners to use certain sites to find out specific information, giving them lots of practice in reading.

But it's not all about using the net to find information - the learners are also required to do something with it! 

So, after they have found out the information, there are speaking and writing exercises, including sentence stems to help with language activation (although there would probably need to be some teacher input on the 'I wonder (whether/ if)' structures, too).

There is a wide range of material here, covering grammatical areas such as comparatives and superlatives as well as the functional language. Plenty for several lessons.  In fact, that might be my only real criticism - by the time you get to the end of it, you might well be heartily sick of the subject!

There are lots of WebQuests ready made and available on the net.  The original idea was:

'developed by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University in February, 1995 with early input from SDSU/Pacific Bell Fellow Tom March, the Educational Technology staff at San Diego Unified School District, and waves of participants each summer at the Teach the Teachers Consortium.'

and their website has loads of resources, There is also a linked site - Quest Garden which has templates to make your own WebQuests. You can register for a free trial for 30 days, or sign up and pay for a member ship, but it's only $20 for a 2 year subscription, so it won't break the bank!  Making your own might be very helful if you were, for example, teaching CLIL and had specific content that you needed to cover. Other than that and if you are teaching general English, making your own is a lot of work and  there are many good WebQuests already out there so you could use 'off-the-peg' ones!

Slide.com

I'm not sure that this is really very valuable for language learning, but it's a bit of fun and very easy to do!  You can go to the site and upload a few pictures to make a slideshow, as you can with other sites, but you can also put different effects on them

With these pictures, for example, I asked my learners to guess who the people were and to describe them. I then went on to a lesson about families.  I think that the puzzle aspect makes it that bit more engaging, and you can press the 'View All Images' button to see the images without them changing every second!   It's quite limited in scope but it's a nice little gadget to warm up a lesson!
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Slide Share

This site is really interesting.  It's a huge bank of slide shows on any subject you care to imagine.  I searched for 'efl' and found this one.  There's no sound, it doesn't give you a presentation, but it's a great way of getting information on all kinds of subjects.

Teaching EFL with the Brain in mind

View more presentations from Bertha Leiva.

English Central

This site is an amazing one for listening skills, learning vocabulary and practising pronunciation.  It has a really wide range of video material at different levels, (indicated easy, medium and hard) that you can listen to and transcripts below them so that you can read along as you listen.  That in itself would be helpful, but this site goes a whole lot further!  As you watch each video, you can go back a line at a time and listen again (helpful), you can slow down the speed of the speaker (very helpful - I particularly love this feature) and you can click on the more difficult vocabulary in the transcript and it will give you a definition and a pronunciation guide (how much help do you need?!!).  Fabulous! There is such a wide range of material it should appeal to adults with a wide range of interests and to young learners.  You can register on the site and it will keep a track of your scores, but you can also use it without registering, and in either case it's free.

After you've watched the video, you can also use a microphone to record yourself reading each of the lines and the site gives you a score.  Most of the videos have American accents, so you won't get 100% scores if you don't mirror that, but it's quite forgiving of other accents and even when I put on my most RP voice (ie quite different to an AmEng accent, but perfectly acceptable) it gave me a high score. 

I think that this is something that you could set as a homework task, allow learners time to listen, understand the vocabulary, practice some of the pronunciation, and then come to class prepared to discuss a video that they have watched.  It may be that you want to give them all the same one or they could each choose one and describe theirs to a small group as a jigsaw activity.

This is a really inspirational video. Check it out!

Limitations - I'm stuck to think of any! 

Vocaroo and AudioBoo

These two sites are both great for recording yourself or for your learners to record themselves.  They're both great and both have their places. Vocaroo is really easy, straightforward to use and is a great tool for learners to use and e-mail their recordings to you, their teacher.  AudioBoo is a bit more complicated although the layout is very nice, but you can do a lot more with the recordings you make.

With Vocaroo, the website interface couldn't be more simple.

Press where it says 'Click to Record', speak, and then click to finish.  You then have the option to listen to what you've recorded, record again if you want to and then send it as an e-mail or post it on the net.  I really like the idea of getting learners to record themselves speaking for homework and for them to send this to me.
Here's a bit of 'The Jabberwocky' by Lewis Carroll that I recorded:

The second audio site I tried was AudioBoo.  This is much more sophisticated, and Russell can tell you better than I can how to use it:  Here's a Boo that I made earlier, one of the downsides of it is that when you've made your boo it seems to take an extraordinarily long time to load to the computer, but once you've done it, it's saved and you can then tweet it, embed it, send it to facebook etc. You can also follow other people, so there is a lot of potential for authentic listening practice here.....

Which of these sites is more sutable for your learners will depend a lot on your learners.  If you have young, digital natives who are comfortable with Twitter, etc, they'll probably get a lot out of AudioBoo, but if you have less tech-savvie learners, or want to do some recording very simply, then, I'd say Vocaroo is better.

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Twist Our Words

This is a really quirky little site - I'm going to send it to my students now and see what they come up with!   You can choose words from a list and make a video of celebrities saying your sentence.  The list is pretty limited, it has to be said – doesn’t even include ‘you’ – but maybe that’s part of the fun. 

It’s certainly a challenge and will make your students think….. if, of course, they don’t discover the ‘Lucky Dip’ button and get the site to create one for them!    Here's mine:

Art Project (powered by Google)

Here's another lovely site if you want some visual stimulation for descriptive work.  With this website, you can go on a virtual tour of lots of the most famous art galleries in the world - MoMA in New York, the National Gallery and the Tate in London, The Hermitage in St Petersburg - if you're into art, it's really fab, and even if you think your students are not so interested in high culture, how much nicer to describe beautiful pictures than mediocre ones.

The gallery tour looks like this and you can navigate your way around using your mouse. 

 You can also zoom in and have a better look at individual pictures, like this:

There are lots of ways you could use these pictures.  You could use this picture, with low levels for example to practise prepositions (the bed is next to the wall, there are pictures on the wall, etc) and articles (there is a table under the window, on the table is a glass).  At higher levels ask them for homework to choose a museum, choose a picture and write a description of it, or just a paragraph on why they like it.

Limitations?  I guess it won't appeal to everyone, as quite a lot of people may feel that this is a bit 'high' culture - for teenagers, it may not be very 'cool' - and, to be honest, navigating your way around isn't all that easy (you can end up staring at the wall, or the ceiling or going through the wall into the street!), but it works well if you choose a museum and them go through the pictures that they have selected.

TED - Videos of really interesting talks.

TED bills itself as 'Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world' and it is just that.  This is one example of the kind of thing that's available, but there are talks on all kinds of things -it would be difficult to find something not to be interested in! This is one of my favourites:  (thanks to Nik Peachy for drawing my attention to this one)

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

"Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra's experiments prove that wrong."

The talks are aimed at educated native speakers, and as such are high level, but the content is so nice, and they'd be perfect for listening practice for learners aiming at Higher Education in English speaking countries and wanting to do IELTS or similar exams.
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