Free e-Sources for English Language Teachers

by Wallace Barbozawbarboza@cabarrus.k12.nc.us

Carolina TESOL December 6th, 2008Charleston, SC

Find Someone Who...

As the song starts to play, you are going to mingle around the room with your card and talk to different people about the things which are listed on it. In case you find someone who knows or has ever used any of those tools, please write their name down on your card.

Let's share what we have found

Web 2.0?

Wiki?Voicethread?

Podcasting?

Teacher Tube?

RSS/XML/Feeds?

Google Docs?Odiogo?

Who has ever used any of these in their classrooms?

Web 2.0

The term "Web 2.0" describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web culture communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, and blogs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Wiki

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

"Wiki" (/wiːkiː/) is a Hawaiian word for "fast".

"Wiki" can be expanded as "What I Know Is," but this is a backronym.

Voicethread

A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or phone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam).

http://voicethread.com/about/

Podcasting

A podcast is a series of audio or video digital-media files which is distributed over the Internet by syndicated download, through Web feeds, to portable media players and personal computers. Though the same content may also be made available by direct download or streaming, a podcast is distinguished from other digital-media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting

Teacher Tube

TeacherTube is a video sharing website similar to, and based on, YouTube. It is designed to allow those in the educational industry, particularly teachers, to share educational resources. The site contains a mixture of classroom teaching resources and others designed to aid teacher training. A number of students have also uploaded videos that they have made as part of college courses. As of July 2008, the website contains over 26,000 videos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/teachertube

RSS/XML/Feeds

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader". A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/RSS

Google Docs

Google Docs is a free Web-based application in which document s and spreadsheet s can be created, edited and stored online. Files can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection and a full-featured Web browser .

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci1283458,00.html

Odiogo

Odiogo's media-shifting technology expands the reach of your content: It transforms news sites and blog posts into high fidelity, near human quality audio files ready to download and play anywhere, anytime, on any device

http://www.odiogo.com/

Slideshare

SlideShare is the best way to share and find presentations. Share publicly or privately.

http://www.slideshare.net/

Animoto

All that Animoto does is turn pictures and music into slideshows. The people at Animoto are interested in finding out how educators could make the most of their service so they are offering free access to entire classrooms with all-access pass.

http://research.edu.uea.ac.uk/dominiklukes/2008/apr/animotofreeforteachers

Delicious

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

http://www.wordle.net/

Which one will be more useful for your classroom?

How do you intend to use these tools?

Do you think students will enjoy working with some of the tools?

Do you want to get even more out of the Web 2.0?

Visit http://www.go2web20.net

Thank you!