Hi Teachers,

We'll have a tech workshop tomorrow on Wikis. Lots of fun in store! If you want to create your own wiki, I'd recommend pbwiki, which is what we used during the workshop.

Create your own wiki at http://www.pbwiki.com

Check out this podcast episode!

Kristi''s 1 minute podcast


Give it a listen!


Ted interviews W





Enjoy! -- Kristi Newgarden

I added all the Exercise Creator sites to the Staff page of the website just now. I only added tools that work on Macs. Let me know here if you try any of them. I've tried Study Place, Hot Potatoes and Quia so far. Hot Potatoes and Quia are great for creating stand alone exercises. Study Place is a CMS (Course Management Software) that you would use to create a class page. Students would then log on and have access to your lessons and activities. You can create quizzes and games within Study Place, but you'd have to locate these on your course page.

One of the best tools I've learned about is Quia. This is an exercise creator site. I HIGHLY recommend you check it out. You can get the 30 day free trial and if I hear from enough of you that you want to use it, we can purchase a group membership. Anyway, you can search a database of exercises created by teachers in various fields including ESL. It is so easy to use. You can create quizzes that are scored and reported to your email, you can create vocab review exercises, grammar review practice, games, quizzes, surveys, etc. Here is a link to a vocab review I made for Michelle's Vocab Development class this week. SO EASY - it took about 5 minutes!
I'm going to add links to other Online Exercise Creator sites I've learned about to the UCAELI Teacher Sites when I get a chance. It's really worth taking a few minutes to try some of these.

Teaching Vocab and Grammar Online Info

Here are a few good resources I want to share from this latest course.

These are all Vocabulary related and from an article titled "Extending Vocabulary Use with Computers" which is at: http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_tech3.htm

Microsoft Word Shift F7 - if you put the cursor on a word and use this combination in Word, you will be provided with some synonyms for that word.

Visual Thesaurus - http://www.visualthesaurus.com/index.jsp
This looks like an amazing tool to help students see word families and branches of word meanings. Great for visual learners.

Concordancing - is an interesting concept for building vocabulary. Here is a brief definition:
Concordancing is a computer-based activity undertaken by people studying language for both academic and practical purposes. After searching a database of natural language, a corpus, for a particular item, usually a word, the program typically returns a page of text which has the target item vertically aligned down the centre of the screen. In this way, concordancing offers two simultaneous views on the target item: the horizontal view in which multiple contexts of the item can be observed, and the vertical in which the item’s co-text is displayed. This data can then be interpreted and used to address the question that initiated the search. The diversity of a language can never be comprehensively presented in a dictionary and few dictionaries provide much information about a word’s grammar or its collocations.

Collins Cobuild Corpus Concordance Sampler - http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/form.html

10-step Intro to Concordancing - http://web.quick.cz/jaedth/CCS-3.htm
This is in a lesson format you can use in class. You might want to use this with Advanced students or in Reading/Writing class.

The Compleat Lexical Tutor - http://132.208.224.131/

Look on the far right side for teacher tools including exercise makers to create your own cloze activities, turn text to speech, find premade academic word lists

Let me and others know if you try any of these.

As many of you know, I’m pretty obsessed with computers and technology. I’ve been taking courses in UCONN’s Learning Technology program the past few years as well as online courses in TESOL’s Certificate in Teaching English Online program. I get so excited about things when I’m learning about them and want to share ideas with other teachers, but then other work comes up and I don’t seem to find the time to put together a workshop or even a good reference site. But that is about to change! I’m hoping that this blog will allow me to let you know about the cool sites and resources I learn about as I’m learning about them. I hope this will lead some of you to try new things and bring your feedback to our meetings. I'll also add a way for you to comment on my postings.

This site is designed to relay newly learned tips and freshly formed ideas on teaching English with technology to teachers in UCAELI’s Intensive English Program.