http://quizlet.com/
In the 3 minutes demo lesson class, I got to know a website called Quizlet through Yichen's demo lesson. I found it was very useful and interesting. I checked out this website after the class and put it into my future teaching tool list.
It is a website for teachers to create quiz for students. The quizzes cover many different subjects: languages, standardized test, math, science, history, literature, law, medical, etc. Although it is called quiz, it is more like learning through self-testing.
On an English learning lesson set page, there are a list of the new vocabulary with audio, picture and meaning for learners to study and flashcards for studying one word by one word. Learners have different choice of learning. There are two big chooses in a quiz: Study and Play Games. In Study part, one has three options: Speller, Learn and Test; in Play Games part, one can choose from: Scatter and Space Race.
In Speller part, one just need to type in what he heard, which is much like dictation. When the spell is wrong, the wrong letter will be highlighted and cross out automatically. At the same time, the audio will play again and the right words will appear for learning. Then everything disappear for the learner to type in again. It is a very good way to learn and self-test.
In Learn part, learners need to type in the words by listening to the meaning of the words. The prompt and pictures may be offered for the visual learners. Once one fails, the right answer will appear and one will be asked to copy the right answer in the box for reinforce learning process.
In Test part which is the real quiz part, students will have blank filling questions, multiple choice questions, matching questions and T/F questions in the test. One thing that calls my attention is the randomly questions in this part. Every test is different from the previous one. The website will automatically create different tests for learners to keep testing the same knowledge in different question forms.
Scatter is a fast-paced action game for dragging the vocabulary onto its definition. Space Race tests both of the vocabulary knowledge as well as the typing skills. In these two way, language learners can learn and test their knowledge through fun games.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
The OWL was introduced to us by one of professors in last semester. I just had a glance of the website without looking carefully and deeply into the details. Based on the handouts that my teacher gave to me, I can tell that it's a great site for teachers and students to look for information about writing.
It offers the resources of teaching and learning writing, grammar, ESL writing and writing job searching. It's not a simple writing website in helping the language learners but also helping people in writing in other different majors and fields, such as medical, engineer, social science,etc. It provides a site map which is very helpful for people to have quick looking of what the web offers and quickly locate what you are looking for.
With the purpose of teaching ESL, I found many useful grammar exercises, mechanics， academic writing guide, writing rubrics, APA/MLA/Chicago format guide and the use of punctuation in this writing lab. It covers the knowledge that ESL students need in learning writing from words level to the article level. There is a resource section for writing tutors, teachers and instructors, which provides many useful documents about how to teach writing in different grades, how to prevent plagiarism and how to tutor people write cover letter and resume for job hunting.
It can be used in the writing class teaching but also can be used for students who want to improve writing after school. With the site map in hand, adult and advance level students can go to different sections to find the information about learning writing and they can practise those writing skills by themselves to see the effectiveness.
http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/RevisedBlooms1.html
Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification of the learning objectives. It was proposed by an education committee and discussed with a series of conferences for improvement. Its old version has two levels of thinking: basic level: knowledge, comprehension and application; and higher level: analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The big differences between the old version and the new version is the position change of evaluation and synthesis and the replacement of synthesis into creation. One goal of Bloom's Taxonomy is to motivate teachers to focus on helping students to develop from the basic level to the higher level in their thinking and learning.
This 3D version of Bloom's Taxonomy offers teachers visual colored blocks to show the different steps in teaching and learning. Teachers can use this 3D picture to locate the development of students and try to focusing on helping them to move to the higher blocks. With this colorful mouse over blocks, it can be introduced to the advanced level students and they can make fun on these blocks and look for where they are and where they should work hard to move to, which can serve as an interesting and useful tool and a kind of motivation as well.
Besides the 3D picture, this website also offers many recommended resource for people who are interested in it to have a depth view and understanding. Some useful websites that related to the application of the Bloom's Taxonomy in different level classroom also can be found through the links on this website.
With the openness of the resources on the Internet, we save much time going back and force to the library to find the information that we need. With some key words and a click, everything that related will automatically list for you. It's a big convenience for people. Students and teachers also benefited a lot from this high-tech development. Teaching and learning can all be done online and the access to the information and knowledge also give students the chance to learn more as many as possible.
However, with the development of the Internet, the crowd gradually turn into the role of producing the information and resources. Everyone is able to edit the information on the web, such as Wiki. There is no guarantee of the authority of the materials, which makes people who want to use the material in academic environment hesitate to do so.
Using Internet as a teaching tool in the classroom is a great idea, but teachers have to be fully aware of the authority and the reliability of the resource and the information on the website. The website evaluation criteria that Cornell library website offers can offer teachers great help in choosing and using the online resources. It does not only provide the criteria from Cornell University but also from other famous University in American, such as UC Berkeley , John Hopkins University. Those criteria covers the the authority, accuracy, objective, currency, etc.
Besides the criteria, it also offers some other website links for looking for the reliable websites and some articles that related to this issue for people who need to a research on it or want to have a better understanding.
http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php
Text-to-speech is a very interesting website where you can type in the text, choose the language, the accent and even the different interesting effects, then you will hear the real people voice reading your text out. It offers 30 languages and more than 200 different people's voices for you to choose to read your text.
Language learners can learn different languages through this website. It will be very useful for English learners to distinguish the American English, British English and Australian English. They can type in the same words and choose different voices to listen to the different pronunciations. For intermediate level students, they can use this website to help them to pronounce the new vocabulary if they don't have the access to any native-speakers in theri learnign settings. For entertaining, you can change the effect to listen to the interesting voice effects or you can type in words that you want to say to your friends and then record the voice to make it fun.
The only one problem with this website is that the length of the text is rather limited. It just can allow you to type in one to three short sentences one time. It may not be a good choice to read a passage for learners.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/english/frameset.html
This website is a really good source for beginners to learn and practice their pronunciations in English, Germany and Spanish. It offers the names of different phonetic symbols for teachers (the names will be too abstract for beginning language learners). For learners, it offers gif pictures of the movement of the tongue and the the shape of the mouth, the sound and the example words. By clicking the bottom, learners can have a clear picture of how the tongue moves and how to shape your lips to make the sound.
Learning pronunciation can not only rely on the listening of the sound and imitate. Learners should know where their tongues should go and move and how to shape their mouths before they can make a right and clear sound.
There are many second language learners will be influenced by their first language pronunciation. For example, some Chinese students from North may mix the pronunciation of /w/ and /v/, and some Japanese students may find it's hard to distinguish /l/ from /r/. Consideration this situation, it becomes more important for them to have these gif pictures to help them to pronounce.
This is a very useful website and I surely will use it in my future teaching of the beginning pronunciation.
http://teachertube.com/
People are very familiar with the Youtube which is a very popular videocast website. Here is a Teacher Tube for teachers' community to share ideas and lessons. There are many videos, docs, audios and photos for other teachers to download and apply to their own classroom. Any the channels conver different level education and different subjects. There also has different discussion groups for teachers to discuss and debate different topics.
It is a good website for teacher to post their ideas or lessons for seeking comments or for encouraging other teachers to use them. The different materials are offering teachers different approaches to teach and apply the ideas.
Meanwhile, I find some parts of this website need to be improved for better use. First one is about the catagory. I am going to teach in ESL for adults, but I can not find any materials related to ESL in Teacher Tube. And there isn't a channel that related to teaching English for ESL teachers. Second problem is the name of the materials. Since all the materials are uoploaded by different indicidual teachers, the way of naming the materials are various. Some of the names of the documents are just numbers from which nobody knows what it is. I even can not fin any discreptions of the materials after I click in. It makes the search become time-consumming, difficult and troublesome for teachers. Teachers who are planing to use this website should be careful about these problems.
