Fodey.com - Make your own newspaper

This site is a really nice one for encouraging your learners to write at home.  They can easily and for free create a newspaper story like the one below or little animations with wizards, squirrels, cats or ninjas - all good fun and very easy.  You don't have to sign up and when you have created your image, you can just download it and it's yours to do what you want with - how easy is that? 

Get them to write a story and send a copy to you by e-mail, or print them out and stick them up on the wall. 

Free website hosting - KompoZer

Here's an interesting tool if you or your learners are feeling a bit 'techie'.  This site allows you to create your own website for free. You just go to the site and download the software on there and Bob's your mother's brother!  My 12 year old son assures me that it works and it's really easy to use (they are using it at school to make websites). The only thing that I'd say is that a quick internet search showed me to this site which gives a guide on how to use it, and it says that this is great for experimental or small scale sites,but that you have limited publishing availability, so you have been duely warned!   It has a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style template set up so that you can do what you want really easily (if you can use Word, you can use this).

 There are lots of ways that you could use this for a class - make one yourself for your learners with links to useful websites or upload homework, etc.  If you (and they!) are a bit more ambitious, you could get them to make their own - it's a great motivation to produce writing for an authentic purpose.
Good luck!

Glogster

This site is a really nice idea if you want to start your learners blogging but a blog is a bit intimidating! With this tool you can really easily create a page with pictures, text, music, videos etc. It's quick and easy,lots of fun and free!

Here's my example - I had to put it in as a pic, but there is music, too, if you follow this link you can get the full experience!!

You just go to the site, register (it's very quick) and you're ready to go! Nice to find other Glogs that you like, too...
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Wallwisher

Another great site from Nick Peachy's blog.  It's free, it's quick to set up, you don't have to register and it's very interactive!    It's the internet equivalent of a big notice board that anyone can add content to.  This could be text, pics, video, links to websites, etc.  
There are all sorts of possibilities with a class - you could have a discussion topic in class and ask them to post their views so that they can all be viewed or you could get individuals to make a wall each over a period of time (maybe a month).  This could be on a particular theme, or could be an accumulation of ideas, language, texts that they like etc over that time. In this way, it acts just like a blog, but perhaps because it's so easy and intuitive to use, it might be seen as more of a do-able task to less 'techie' learners.

The only downside I can see is that it's potentially very public (but so is a blog...).  You can set it so that only the designer of the wall has access to it, or so that other peole can see it but not add to it, and you also have the option of 'vetting' all posts before they go on the wall, so hopefully this will be enough to ensure that you don't get anything nasty on there!

Here's my 'wall' - feel free to stick a comment on it!


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A Picture's Worth...

...a thousand words.

This lovely site that I found through Nik Peachy's 'Learning Technology Blog' is full of contributions of a photograph and a short essay to accompany it.  These are between 300 and 1000 words and are as diverse as you could imagine.  Here's one example:

They are a window into so many different lives and they are touching, funny, interesting and very personal.  They could be used for readings in class -  as short, self contained authentic readings, written in generally quite straightforward language, they are great -  but you can also get learners to read some outside of class, choose a favourite (they're quite addictive - once you start, you keep reading them!) and present theirs to the class, or to explain it a partner.  You could also print a few out and get them to match the pictures with the text.

You can't upload your own directly, they have to be submitted for consideration by the editor, and then they may be published on the site, but you could get learners to write their own 'Picture's worth' and display them in the classroom, put them on a blog or submit them to the site to see if they were accepted (or all of the above!).

Limitations?  There's no embed code, so you can't include one from the site on your own blog, which is a shame, but that's a small point.  They only other problem is that some of the stories might make you cry.....

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Phras.In

This is an interesting little site for learners particularly at higher levels, who are interested in collocations, etc.  It's very simple.  You need to have two possibilities of words/ collocations/ sentences that you want to test, you type them in and the site will tell you how many hits there are for each (ie which one is in more common useage) and also show you the contexts that they appear in. 
Here's an example I tried with the rather loaded word 'spinster' vs 'single woman'

You can see which is more common!

This can also be used to good effect for comparative grammar.  I put in 'I went to China' and 'I have been to China' and it was interesting to see that the simple past is 4 times more common than the present perfect, but also to have lots of authentic examples of the (problematic) latter tense.  It's concordance for the common man!

I think that this will appeal to a certain type of learner, who is very interested in the language itself, but you could give them pairs of possibles to try out for a homework task.  It's also nice to ask them to put in phrases you have taught to give them a wider context for using that language. 

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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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Storybird

This is such a fantastic site - it is amazing what is available out there!  If you want to give your students motivation to write something, this is your site!  It makes it possible to produce really lovely looking, professional e-picture books that you can then tweet, facebook or embed, using professional illustrations from a really wide range of artists.  How can this be free? I don't know, but it is!

You can also go onto the site to read books that other people have written.  The nice thing about this is that they are short, and illustrated with beautiful pictures, so you can use them even at low levels.  Some are aimed at children, but others are definitely written for a more mature audience.  Here's an example:


Fight off the doubts! by laurig on StorybirdYou could just send one of these a week to your learners to give them some extensive reading practice, or you could use one in class on a IWB for language work based on the content or (most obviously) narrative tenses.  They're really inspiring! The only limitaton I can imagine is that they will appeal to younger learners and to a lot of adults, but teenagers may feel they're a bit patronising. You could get them to write books (maybe even bi-lingual ones) for younger kids in the school or siblings, perhaps?
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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.

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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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.

Worldmapper

This site is really interesting, especially if you have students who are quite politically aware (or you feel you'd like to make them more politically aware!).  It has a wide range of world maps that are distorted according to various criteria.  You can choose what you'd like to see -anything from numbers of people in tertiary education to internet use, and a whole raft of other things.  Below is an example of one showing GDP, showing how the purchasing power of various currencies varies form country to country and therefore the discrepancies in power between nations. It's a bit of an eye-opener....

I think that this would work very well with educated teenagers or adults who are interested in world events.  A simple print out would make a great warmer for a discussion on the topic and could be used for work on comparatives and superlatives, too. If you were teaching articles with geographical place names, it might make an interesting alternative to the 'take a trip round the world' activity, too.

I suppose that the only limitations are that the class would need to be fairly well educated and have a good sense of the actual geography of a world map (this wouldn't work so well with my ESOL class of middle aged South Asian women, I don't think) and that they need to have a background of expressing the kind of critical thought that this discussion would entail.

Mapcrunch

This is an example of a picture from Mapcrunch.  It's a site that uses images from Google Street View from all over the world.  You can also follow the roads along and see different views, and there are pictures from all over the world to choose from:

Some of them are really stunning., but it's worth noting that,since they are all street views, a lot are of suburban streets or motorways and so a bit universal in character.  A nice activity might be to show some of these less iconic ones and see if the learners can guess where they are.  It could be nice for teaching comparatives and superlatives or doing speaking exercises to descibe scenes.  Here are a couple of examples - Which countries do you think they are from?

Give up?  Well, it's New Zealand, and Switzerland - arguably two of the prettiest countries in the world!

Image Slideshow using Gif Up

GIF animations generator gifup.com

Gif Up is a really great website for creating slideshows for use in the class.  You can use pictures of your own, or from Flickr (which has thousands of images of all sorts of things) or from websites.  to use it, just go to the website, click on 'Select from Flickr', and put in a word to search for (I used 'africa')

Then select up to 9 images and the site will make a slideshow for you.  It's designed to make animations, so put the speed on 'super slow' if you want it to be more of a slideshow.

This is a nice tool for use as an introduction to a topic or a reading, for example.  You could show them the slideshow and ask them in pairs to think of as many words as possible to describe them.  You could then elicit more vocabulary and add to theirs.  My class also wrote poetry from this:

Africa
Elephants roaming the savannah
Boabab trees sheltering herdsmen
Buffalo stampeding
Children playing in the rain
Africa.

Cambridge English On-Line Cartoon Maker

This site has got lots of nice things in it, but the best two (I think) are the Phontics Focus (see next blog entry)and the  Cartoon maker - Sorry it's the wrong way round, but check this out! (double click on it to get a bigger view)

It's really easy to use - you just select whether you want a single page cartoon or one with 2 or 4 pics, then you have a choice of characters (only 2 in each pic) and you can add speech bubbles and 'Kerpoww' signs, as well as add some narrative and props.  It's very easy to navigate - you just have to remember not to press the 'apply' button for each picture until you've finished it, as you don't seem to be able ot change it after that.

This would be great with teenage or younger learners - You could do some authentic reading of English langauge cartoons and I think they'd have a great time constructing their own cartoons.  The final effect is quite professional, too.  Downsides? Not many, really - you can save the final product as a jpeg, but I couldn't get mine the right way up!