More L2 online resources!

I take my classes to different online spots and you are welcome to check out some models that you can also follow for your own lessons

CLICK ON ANY OF THE ICONS and you might even see our very own work in many of these sites!

 My LingTECHguistics program begins with WWW.MYHQ.COM where I do digital bookmarking to share with other teachers. You can click on the LingTECHguistics* logo and enter “My Apples”.  Each time students need to access an educational or practice site, all they do is go straight to “my apples” and click on the assigned section to do the review of a lesson. Outstanding tool that lets you add HQ links from other people.

  My class is Ninged to other Spanish classes to keep up with what the others are doing, for ecollaboration, and to communicate in tandem exercises.   All you do is sign up. If you are familiar with social networks such as Facebook, then Ning will be no trouble to understand.

We have an active blog where we follow our worldwide project of sending our Puerto Rican Coqui frog to teach Spanish around the world “The Traveling Coqui project”. This is a Google product, so if you start by creating a gmail address, you will have quick access to it.

 Our wiki is made with the purpose to keep in touch, upload files, join other L2 learning groups, and meet new students. Sign up with a Gmail address and go straight in!

This is my favorite, and mostly geared towards older learners with more maneuver of the computer. As you sign in, you are officially a citizen of Second Life, complete with a profile. You can enter worlds, or create your own avatar, where your students will enter and see all you have set up. Some use it to teach about one writer’s personal world, and the tools to create the avatar are available. Stewart and File (2007) called this one of the best language learning tools available in the Web 2.0.

 This is a fun site for blending pictures and creating new images with digital photography. Great for creativity and to blog about it later.

 Chatzy is one great language learning tool for tandem collaboration where students can monitor each other’s language usage. Teachers can use it to collaborate online with their students under a supervised environment.

 Catalogs all your books online, allows you to create reading groups, enter book groups online, discuss and rate new reading material, and even takes all the titles of the books that you enter, and creates a VISUAL library with all the book covers that you submit. Then, you can take that visual libray and embed it in other networks as a widget.

Microblogging, focal writing, concise sentences, great for short scoring rubrics. Good to follow and great to keep in quick communication.

 Publishes your writing creativity free. It is a publishing site that allows you to take your writings and creates them into books. Your students will feel very proud of themselves as they use this service.

 You and your students can save and upload all your created PPT presentations in separate folders that they can access online and edit from home using Slideshare. You can create PPT groups and contacts. Your class can be one Slideshare group and, instead of uploading and downloading PPTs for you to grade, you can simply obtain the link to it. Privacy settings are available, and you can track who has viewed your presentations and who has marked them as favorites.

This is a tool to fall in love with. You can create cartoons, comic strips, and all sorts of creative work. Great for students practicing dialogue techniques in first and second languages. Fun tool for teachers to grade punctuation and vocabulary usage. Amazing and fun tool indeed!

 Toondoo is another site for you to create written work and turn it into comic strips. One way to get your kids to follow the reading is to enter passages from required books and have the children paraphrase it into comic strips.  I suggest its use to set the classroom rules in a positive way. You can print your comics, and put them as posters in the classroom.

 Voicethread is great because it combines writing and speaking. It is blog where you narrate to your computer microphone as you explain the postings.  My students write a paragraph, find a visual, and then read the paragraph aloud while the voicethread offers the feedback of having them listen to themselves and the visual put together.  You can make a voicethread group where your students can enter and post their created work. Great tool to create rubrics for public speaking, proper language usage, writing, integration of technology and much more.