Quizlet

Quizlet is a great site for giving your learners practice in vocabulary that you want them to learn (or they can make their own!)  You can make vocabulary lists with definitions and send them the link and they can use the flashcards to learn the vocab, or play different games with it, or test themselves as many times as they like. You can also print out the flashcards if you want a set to use in class.  Another great thing about this site is that it gives you an automatic sound fgile for each word (ie it says it for you) - great for pronunciation. The only thing I would say is that it doesn't always seem to work :( but hey ho, you can't have everything!  You have to register witht he site, but it's free.  You can also look at other people's quizzes, which is nice - perhaps you won't have to make your own...

Here's an example of some flashcards I made for my celta trainees to help them learn the names of tenses....

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Study these flash cards | Study grammar flash cards

Nik's Daily English Activities

This blog is absolutely brilliant!  Nik Peachey has so many great ideas for using the internet, and this is a list of dozens of websites for learners to use outside the class.  It's also a great one for you as a teacher as many of these ideas can be adapted to use in class. 

Here's an example - A city love story  using a short film (9 minutes) from You Tube about Beirut.  I used this is class - opening with a discussion of places you have been that have surprised you (because they've been better or worse than expected) and then discussed people's impressions of Beirut.
I then showed them the first minute (showing what a beautiful city it is) and asked for impressions.



They then watched the next 6 minutes and noted the things that the girl and the boy like.  It's not in English, but there is really nice language in the subtitles (he likes the elasticity of cheese, for example!).  We did watch  the end of the film, but my main focus was then on the learners writing what they like about their cities or towns.  It was really inspiring!
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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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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.

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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Learning Chocolate.

Great name for a site - not so sure that I love it as much as the other kind...
This site opens with the introduction:

Welcome to Learning Chocolate! This web site aims to help students to memorize vocabulary in an easy and efficient way, by using pictures, sounds and games. Try our games and enjoy learning, like eating chocolate.

.. and that's what it does - it's essentially a picture dictionary -

The great thing about this site is the range of activities that you can do with each picture – it gives you the pronunciation, the spelling and the meaning, and you can do different games to help you to remember.  These include listening to the words and matching them to the picture, a dictation exercise, and other matching exercises.  Here's a sample page:

This site will probably appeal to younger learners at lower levels, but here’s the rub – a lot of the vocabulary is REALLY obscure – I didn’t know a lot of the ‘cuts of meat’ words, and I’m an adult, educated native speaker of English!  The options don’t seem to have much focus – so we have (at one end of the spectrum) feelings – sad, surprised, happy – elementary level words –and then, at the other end, we’ve got the life cycle of an insect with words like ‘pupate, emerge and cocoon.’  There’s no indication of the frequency or usefulness of these words, (although I guess that some common sense in translation would tell most people that cuts of meat aren’t common conversation starters unless you’re a butcher!)  The other problem is that the vocabulary is obviously decontextualised, although, as a lot of it is concrete nouns or action verbs, perhaps this isn't so important.  It might be a nice site for younger learners to do  -maybe learn one selected section as a homework task. It could be useful for spelling.  Try it out.

Cambridge English On-Line Phonetics Focus

If you want to learn the phomemic chart, this one is a real winner!  It has lots of games to play that practise the chart sounds with spellings - some of these are quite fun, for example shooting at the chart symbols to make a given word.  There are also flash cards and a chart to print out. 

This is largely a 'use at home to practise' kind of site - I like it mainly for my teacher trainees as they need to know the phonemes and often have trouble learning them.  It's nice for drawing attention to sound/ spelling differences though, too for learners.

It does have an interactive chart, where you can hover over the phoneme and hear it (with an example word), but apart from that the only sound on it seems to be 'pee-ooww' kind of shooting noises, which is the only criticism I have -it'd be nice to hear the sounds in more of the games.  Still - it livens up the fairly tedious task of learning the symbols, and it's been nominated for an ELTon, so it must be good!