Australia Network Breaking News English CALL4ALL ELLLO

D.Film MovieMaker English Trailers Lingual Net

Penguin Chat PopJisyo Rikai

Learning Management Systems: Moodle SKWRL Online Journals: ITESLJ Language Learning & Technology

CALL Associations: APACALL EuroCALL PacCALL

Authentic Materials: Creative Commons Google Image YouTube

This site has an excellent "Learn English" section. They have 4 different sections offering various video based learning activities including scripts, useful expressions and quizzes. The videos are all typically graded for learners of English.

Maintained by Sean Banville, Breaking News English allows students to study using current news articles. He paraphrases current news into a one-page Word or PDF along with various activities for teachers to create a lesson with. He also supplies an audio file of him reading the article allowing each lesson to be made into either a listening or reading focus.

Maintained by Dr. John Paul Loucky, CALL4ALL is an extensive collection site claiming to be "a Virtual Encyclopedia of all major language learning links, Web dictionaries and Computer-Assisted Language Learning organizations in the world." Although not a task in itself, this is a good resource for teachers to find Internet-based activities.

This is a site for students of English to practice their language skills using movie commercials. There are over 130 trailers, each with 8 different activities, allowing students to practice reading, listening, writing, speaking and grammar. An advantage of this site is that it allows teachers to track their students' scores and forum entries. It also has printable versions of cloze, quiz and weblinks activities for homework or in-class use.

Lingual Net is another video-based English study site. There are currently over 60 short movies with accompanying activities to study from. They site utilizes the "tri-view method" where students watch the movies 3 times, first without subtitles, then with subtitles, and finally with movie with quiz questions that pop up at various points in the movie.

I've been using Penguin Chat with students for several years with positve results. This site lets students text chat using an anonymous nickname and in several different rooms. As Penguin Chat is open to anyone on the Internet, before using this site I recommend going over chat rules and warn them of the dangers of giving information to strangers.

Jisyo means dictionary in Japanese. With this site, users type in a URL for a site and it opens within a frame of PopJisyo. Then, while a user hovers the mouse over a word, a pop-up of the word and lexical support is provided. There are over 10 dictionaries to choose from including Japanese->English, Japanese-> German, English->Korean, and English->Websters English dictionary. This site works really well with reading the news in various languages. Double-clicking words you come across adds them to your 'word list' so it is easy to study them later.

Rikai means 'understanding' in Japanese and is very similar to PopJisyo. In fact, they share many of the same functions. While PopJisyo used to be inferior to Rikai, over the past few years Rikai has become inferior. I include it here because it's still remains to be an effective tool.

Begun by Martin Dougiamus, Moodle is an Open Source Learning Management System teachers can use to create CALL courses. Activities include quizzes, forums, chats, assignments, Hot Potatoes, surveys and wikis just to name a few. With many programmers continuing to increase the functionality of Moodle, new activities are often added. To use Moodle, one must have access to a server with PHP/MySQL capabilities. There is a somewhat steep learning curve, but for the most part it is not to hard to use once one gets the hang of it. There is also an extensive forum section to get help at.

SKWRL is a Learning Management System that I have created. With SKWRL, teachers can create various tasks including audio- and video-based ones. There are currently over 8 different activities that can be created. Additionally, there is an advanced gradebook feature that lets teachers keep track of computer-graded activities as well as non-computer graded items such as attendance and classroom participation. While not as elequent as Moodle, SKWRL does have some advantages. Eventually, I hope to be able to add the activities that are unique to SKWRL to Moodle.

The Internet TESL Journal is an electronic journal filled with practical articles on ideas for the classroom and is a good place for teachers to learn from their peers. This online journal typically comes out once a month. Back issues are kept online as well.

As opposed to the Internet TESL Journal, LL&T contains more in the way of theoretical and research oriented papers. This is an excellent periodical for staying abreast of current trends and the latest directions of CALL. Issues often have special themes of particular interest to technology in education. There is also an excellent search function for finding back articles.

APACALL was founded in 2002 by Dr. Son to bring together teachers and researchers in the field of CALL in the Asia Pacific region. APACALL has held two conferences and published one book so far. APACALL is also free to join.

PacCALL is another primary CALL organization serving the Asian Pacific region. PacCALL has a large online Moodle-based interactive zone for member collaboration, an annual online journal, and an annual conference. Membership is US$50 per year.

Creative Commons is an excellent resource for teachers trying to find authentic, uncopyrighted digital material. Material is categorized by audio, images, video, text and education (including lesson plans). Some items found may contain restrictions on their use such as for education only or not-for-profit use only. Creative Commons also allows people to submit their own original works to the site.

Google Image search is a great place to get images to supplement classroom activities. It is easy to search and navigate with one of the best collections of images available. Some of the images are copyright protected so care must be taken that they are used responsibily for educational purposes and that credit is given to the source material.

YouTube is another excellent source of free, authentic, copyright free video-based material. Unfortunately, the material is not specifically made for educational use and there is no ideal way of sorting for material suitable for classroom use. However, if one were to go to YouTube and surf for the fun of it, there is a good chance that you would unintentionally stumble across some videos that could be used as part of a classroom activity.