ESL Jobs
English Central Job Board
http://englishcentral.net/index.php?id=52
TESL Toronto Job Board and Info (Excellent overview of industry and links to TESL ON and TESL Canada sites!)
http://tesltoronto.org/careers
Professional Associations and Publications
TESL Ontario – Email Newsletter Archive – http://www.teslontario.org/publications/newsletters-emails/
TESL Ontario – Online Newsletter 2009 - http://www.docstoc.com/docs/20180612/Teaching-English-as-a-second-language-in-Toronto/
(uses “Docstoc” viewing tool, alternative to Google Docs, Acrobat, Sribd etc)
TESL Canada Journal – Current Issue - http://www.teslcanadajournal.ca/index.php/tesl/issue/current
Goverment – Institutional Sites – these two sites are incredible resources!
Teaching English – British Council and BBC
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/
BBC Learning English
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
LINC – Curriculum Guidelines and CALL Software
Settlement.org - CALL: Software guide for the LINC Classroom
Useful for ESL teachers in Ontario LINC classrooms
Settlement.org - How to use the LINC Curriculum Gudelines
Settlement.org – 3 Teachers Experience using LINC Curriculum Guidelines with LINC Levels 5-7
ESL – LINC Software
Ellis – Info Brochure
http://www.wfi.fr/formavision/ellis/opb_aca_3.0(4c_screen).pdf
Ellis – Description of Content (by Grammar/Skills/Function)
http://www.formavision.com/ellis/correlations/BEST_correlation.pdf
My Canada (with online demo)
http://www.nas.ca/mycanada/
Tensebuster (incl. online demo)
http://www.clarityenglish.com/program/tensebuster.htm
CMS – LMS – Websites / Blogs/ Wikis
Want to engage your students with some online content and create a virtual classroom? The tools below can help you get started…
Moodle – Learning Management System or LMS that is used in all kinds of training and e-learning situations (the open source “free” alternative to systems like “Blackboard”)
WordPress - Build a website / blog on the web’s most powerful and popular CMS (Content Management System)
http://wordpress.com/ is the free version – themes, templates, fairly easy to use! Your url is name.wordpress.com
http://wordpress.org is the “self-hosted” professional version – more themes and options and “yourname.com”
Wikispaces – Create a wiki for teachers and students to collaborate
http://www.wikispaces.com/
Google Sites – Free websites and wikis that can be built from templates and translated to dozens of languages
http://sites.google.com/
Google Applications and Services
Google Accounts – to access things like Gmail (the best web-based email), Docs, Picasa etc
https://www.google.com/accounts/
Google offers a ton of useful online tools, including: Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Maps / StreetView, Blogger, Sites, and Picasa.
Explore them individually or through an education site like this one (view video introductions):
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/k12.html
Web 2.0 Tools – Sharing – Bookmarks - Documents – Storage and Backup
Documents – Acrobat (Adobe)
https://acrobat.com/
Google Docs – Handy because Google accounts include many other tools
http://docs.google.com/
Slideshare – Upload and share a PowerPoint presentation on the web
http://www.slideshare.net/
Delicious – Web-based social bookmarking
http://delicious.com/
Dropbox – Online Storage – 2 GBS free!
http://dropbox.com
Media – Photos – Audio – Video
Voice Thread - http://voicethread.com/
“Group conversations around images, documents, and video. Transforming media into collaborative spaces with video, voice, and text commenting.”
See their demo at the VoiceThread site and also see how Randall (from ESL-lab.com fame) used an embedded voicethread on one of his websites: http://www.englishvoices.org/ev-esllearning.htm
YouTube – Create and Upload or Organize Favorites and Playlists
http://www.youtube.com/
Teacher Blogs - See what other educators have done with WordPress.com blogs!
http://literacyispriceless.wordpress.com/
http://twowritingteachers.wordpress.com/
Media Literacy
A popular approach to teaching “media literacy for the Internet” is to ask students to contrast the following websites – one is a legitimate, academically reliable source and the other is highly problematic propaganda run by a white supremacist group! Compare and Contrast:
http://www.martinlutherking.org/
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php
Writers / Thinkers / History of CALL
Marc Prensky – Essay on Education – Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants
Don Tapscott – First chapter of “Grown Up Digital” - http://www.grownupdigital.com/downloads/chapter.pdf
Grown Up Digital (Book Review by Mike)
History of CALL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_language_learning
Technical / Multimedia
Video: Free Webapps – Alternatives to Expensive Software
Yahoo Tech: Popular Software and Free Alternatives (Open-Source)
CNET: 3 Ways to Save Video Files from the Internet
My favourite is the suggestion to use a Firefox “add-on” – cheap, works every time! (Plus if your connection times out and you’re using a tool like “Download them All” you can resume where the download was when the connection failed). I have also found the website “keepvid.com” often allows you to download an mp4 video file from sites like YouTube. Recently I also discovered “Keep Tube.”
Project-based Learning
Digital Storytelling, ELL and Literacy - Life Academy, Oakland California
Creating Media – Video-Learning Object
Peter J. Faddle - Evolution of a Video-Learning Object Format
Tech Info and News
Mashable – Social Media News and Web Tips
http://mashable.com/
Don’t FORGET to check out the media page (plus other links in the right sidebar)