The Art of Teaching English: Online Resources for ESL

The main purpose of this is to provide all ESL learners with comprehensive exercises, tasks and useful links related to various skills and components of English language.

Formative Assessment and Online Games

Teachers have created some at http://www.equizshow.com and found that other teachers in other places who also love online resources are posting quizzes that anyone can use. Here is one at http ://www.equizshow.com/play/12895

Google Apps

Many people are catching on to Flubaroo http://www.flubaroo.com/. With Google forms you can make a quick multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank quiz. Once the students take the quiz (for practice or a grade), the teacher adds the correct answers as the key then runs the self-scoring tool. You can email the grades to students. The teacher can look at results per questions as well as student success. The teacher can quickly find out what needs to be retaught.

Presentation Tools with Audio

Brainshark http://www.brainshark.com/
Emaze http://www.emaze.com/
Knovio http://www.knovio.com (Upload a Power Point, then talk about it. Your face appears next to the PPT in the movie that is created.)
Powtoons for Education http://www.powtoon.com/edu-home/

Prezi for Education http://prezi.com/prezi-for-education/ (Sometimes described as Power Point on steroids. Going from one slide to the next is a journey up, around, in or out. The wonder of Prezi is that you can add audio to each slide.)
Educreations works on ipads as a whiteboard to capture voice and handwriting (like the SmartBoard Notebook 11 videorecording tool). Create your own videos.

Free Languages Games

Languages Online
Engaging interactive tasks and printable worksheets that introduce, reinforce and recycle vocabulary. Activites are self-paced and self-correcting and include recordings by native speakers.

Download these free programs and create your own interactive games and activities. Follow the simple steps to add your own text, pictures or voice recordings. Suitable for all languages!

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/languagesonline/default.htm

Content Generator

Their programs allow anyone to generate their own e-Learning quizzes, games and applications through our custom software - no coding required.

http://www.contentgenerator.net/

Hot Potatoes

The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. It is not open-source. The Java version provides all the features found in the windows version, except: you can't upload to hotpotatoes.net and you can't export a SCORM object from Java Hot Potatoes.

http://hotpot.uvic.ca/

News

1. EuroNews – Fantastic site, they provide videos in one of several available languages and then there are transcripts directly below each video. The main homepage is here where you can select from various languages using the menu at the very top left of the page, the default is English.

Educational Videos (lectures and documentaries)

1. TEDVideos TED, as many of you know, records and publishes free educational lectures and talks online. The talks are in many different languages, their search function allows you to search by language, and most of their videos have subtitles.

Random Video Collections

Here is where there’s more sheer quantity than anything else. Two of the sites I’ve found so far do something very similar: they just take random videos from wherever (usually YouTube) and then the users do subtitles for them for free. Fantastic sites, they’re adding new videos all the time, and, of course, the biggest benefit is that they’re completely free. The other two sites are run by educational institutes. You will, with all of them however, have to sift through them and pick out what you want to watch.

1. Amara aka UniversalSubtitles.org – You can search and sort by language of the speakers and subtitle language using the search bar on the videos homepage, just pull the menu down and select your languages). Again, these are just videos that people have found on YouTube and decided to do the subtitles for. Note that you can sign up for an account and help subtitle videos of any language you speak.

2. Edustation.me’s Video Section – You’ll need to sign up for a free account to use this one, I believe. Once you’ve done that, look at the menu at the top right and select the language that you’re learning where it says “Idioma para aprender”, then go to the homepage and click “videos”. They have a ton of videos there with subtitles.

Video-based review activities

Blubbr is a neat quiz creation service that you can use to create video-based quizzes. Using Blubbr you can create interactive quizzes that are based on YouTube clips. Your quizzes can be about anything of your choosing. The structure of the quizzes has a viewer watch a short clip then answer a multiple choice question about the clip. Viewers know right away if they chose the correct answer or not. To create a quiz on Blubbr start by entering a topic for your quiz. After entering your topic enter a search for a video about that topic. Blubbr will generate a list of videos that you can select from to use in your quiz. When you find a video that works for you, trim the clip to a length that you like then write out your question and answer choices. Repeat the process for as many video clips as you like. Click here to try a short Blubbr quiz about the human heart.

Comics in the Classroom

Disclosure: Storyboard That is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.

Some of my favorite uses of comics include using them as story prompts, having students create them to tell personal stories, and to illustrate key ideas in a book as an alternative to writing a traditional book report.

Creating a storyboard can be a good way to organize a story and plan a video project.

Apps to Help Students

Speak It is a Google Chrome extension that enables you to have the text on most webpages read to you. With Speak It installed just highlight the text on a the page you're viewing then right-click to activate Speak It. Then click the play button to have the text read to you. The voice is very digitized, but it is clear. Installing Speak It takes just a few seconds. To install it go to Speak It's page in the Chrome Web Store and click the install button. Restarting your browser is not required in order to activate Speak It. If you decide that you don't want to use Speak It any longer you can uninstall it by right-clicking on the Speak It icon in your browser and selecting uninstall.

New Features Come to Google Documents in the Form of Add-ons

Google Drive has supported 3rd party apps for quite a while now and many of those apps are quite helpful to students. Beginning today Google Documents and Google Sheets now contain a new way for students to add even more functionality through 3rd party services. Add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets allow any Google Drive user to add new functions to their documents and spreadsheets. To access Add-ons just open a new Google Document and open the new "Add-ons" drop-down menu to browse for add-ons.

Good Alternatives to Google Image Search

The Morgue File photo collection contains thousands of images that anyone can use for free in academic or commercial presentations. The image collection can be searched by subject category, image size, color, or rating. You will find a mix of images that don't require attribution along with some that do require attribution so pay attention to the labels that come with each picture. Morgue File is more than just a source for free images. The Morgue File also features a "classroom" where visitors can learn photography techniques and get tips about image editing.

Every Stock Photo is a search engine for public domain and Creative Commons licensed pictures. When you search on Every Stock Photo it pulls images from dozens of sources across the web. If you click on an image in your search results you will be taken to a larger version of the image, a link to the source, and the attribution requirements for using that picture.

Pixabay is currently my go-to place to find and download quality public domain images. You can search on Pixabay by using keywords or you can simply browse through the library of images. When you find an image you can download it in the size that suits your needs. Registered users do not have to enter a captcha code to download images. Users who do not register can download images, but they do have to enter a captcha code before downloading each picture.

Each time that I visit it the Flickr Commons collection seems to have grown. The Commons contains images that have been contributed by more than five dozen libraries and museums around the world. The images are mostly historical in nature.

The Wikimedia Commons houses thousands of images that you and your students can re-use. Searching in the Wikimedia Commons isn't the most intuitive process which is why I don't recommend it for younger students. Search the Wikimedia Commons by keyword or browse it by category and topic.

Earlier this year the Wellcome Library made more than 100,000 drawings, photographs, paintings, and advertisements available to the world under Creative Commons licensing. The images available through the Wellcome Images library are primarily of a historic nature. You can browse the galleries or search for images by keyword.

Unsplash is a Tumblr-hosted site that adds ten new, free, high-resolution images every ten days. I scrolled through the site for quite a while today and found a lot of nice images. The downside to Unsplash is that the site does not have a search function.

You can find more than 85,000 free images through the Getty Museum's Open Content Program. You can download and re-use the images as long as you give proper attribution for the source of the image. Use the Getty Search Gateway to find images in the Getty Museum's Open Content Program. The Getty Search Gateway allows you to filter your search according to material type, topic, name, source, and location. Once you find an image, click the image's title to be taken to its landing page where you can learn more about it, get the required attribution information, and learn more about the history of your chosen image.

Creating Infographics

InfoGraphic making websites like Piktochart and easel.y offer templates and graphics for making InfoGraphics, students need to register with these sites to create.