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UFDC - Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature

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VIDEOS UNDER 2 MINUTES

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Free tools to make your students better writers.

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Explore featured activity packs that are created by our teachers

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Free Technology For Teachers – A TeacherMeade site

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Knowing the Principle Parts of English Verbs Is Not Enough.

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See flowcharts of how the principal parts combine into simple, perfect, continuous, and passive phrases. Watch what changes to form the negative and interrogative. Apply contractions as well.

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iFake Text Message is a great tool for creating authentic looking materials to engage students and shift materials design into a genre that's both relevant and familiar. The tool enables you to create a screen image of a text conversation.

Creating a fake text is easy just go to: https://ifaketextmessage.com/

Type your message into the field on the left and you will see it appear on the screen on the right.

Then just add more text and build your conversation.

You can customise most of the features of the screen to make it look more authentic.

When you have finished just click on the 'Create Image' button. You can then download it and add it to your materials.

Here are a few ways you can use this with students

Gapped dialogues - Create gapped dialogues and see if your students can work out what goes in the gaps.

Conversation starters - Create the beginning of a conversation and get your students to work in pairs to continue it (They can create the next screen using https://ifaketextmessage.com/).

Dialogue rebuild - Create a longer conversation that takes 4 to 5 screens, then give your students the screen images and ask them to put them in order.

Reported speech - Use a screen image to practise reported speech. Students have to report what they read in the conversation.

Famous conversations - Get your students to think of two famous people and then create a dialogue between them.

Finding errors - Recycle some of your students' common errors by putting them into text conversations. Then get the students to try to find and correct the errors.

Exploring cyber-bullying - Create a collection of screens that students can look at and decide whether they constitute harassment and discuss how they should respond.

Writing prompt - Create the beginning of a dialogue from a horror / romance or even sci-fi story. Get the students to continue the story.

Vocabulary record - Give the students 3 - 4 new words they have been learning and ask them to create a dialogue that includes the words.
Shakespeare as SMS - Use https://transl8it.com/ to translate a few lines from a Shakespeare play into texting language and see if your students can decode them.

I hope you enjoy these ideas and think of others to use with your students. If you'd like to find more activities like these check out my ebook - 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom.

Nik Peachey

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iFake Text Message is a great tool for creating authentic looking materials to engage students and shift materials design into a genre that's both relevant and familiar. The tool enables you to create a screen image of a text conversation.

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"The Best..." list is going to be an expanding one.

These are the ESL/EFL blogs that I subscribe to now, but I'm sure there are many more out there that I just don't know about...

I hope you'll contribute their url addresses in the comments section! The criteria I used included that they are updated regularly (more-or-less), their focus is ESL/EFL, and that they provide information that I've found useful in my teaching.

Here are my picks for The Best ESL/EFL Blogs (not in any order):
David Deubelbeiss ELL Classroom Learning the Language Adult Education and Technology Life Is A Feast Learning Technology Blog Nik's Daily English Activities Nik's Quick Shout Technology News Burcu Akyol's EFL Blog Jamie Keddie Kalinago English TEFLtastic Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals Seth Dickens Carla Arena Think And Dream In English Teacher Boot Camp Ozge Karaoglu's Blog The English Blog English Raven Marmara Elt/EFL Resources everythingESL My Life Untranslated: Adventures of a New ESL Teacher in New York City
I've written a lot about how I use online video games with my English Language Learner students. I was originally inspired along line by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer. They've just begun a blog on topic called Digital Play.
Marisa Constantinides - TEFL Matters
French Frog's Little English Pon d
Ken Wilson's Blog Teaching Village
Who else should be on list? Please keep in mind the criteria I've used - they're updated more-or-less regularly, their focus is on ESL/EFL, and that they've provided information that has been useful in your teaching.

Sean Banville, the man behind a zillion sites used by ESL teachers around the world everyday, has compiled a very big list of ESL blogs - and it's growing. If the ones I have listed here aren't enough for you, definitely go and check out his webpage. And, if you have an ESL blog and it's not there, let him know.

David Deubelbeiss has put together a great tool that allows you to explore 130 different ESL/EFL blogs. It's called the ELT Blog Generator. Unfortunately, I can't get it to embed here, but you can go to the link and have some fun.

"One Stop Blogs" is a project of Macmillan Publishers that brings together the feeds of ESL/EFL blogs (and others that are not specifically ESL/EFL but could still be of interest).

Teaching English at The British Council has greatly expanded the number of bloggers who are writing monthly posts on different topics. You can find them all here. I'll also be writing there, and you can find my posts here.

Poplingual has an attractive listing of popular ESL/EFL blogs and their recent posts. I learned about it from Eric Roth.

If you found post useful, you might want to look at previous "The Best..." lists and also consider subscribing to blog for free.

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"The Best..." list is going to be an expanding one. These are the ESL/EFL blogs that I subscribe to now, but I'm sure there are many more out there that I just don't know about... I hope you'll contribute their url addresses in the comments section!

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A web clipping app for language learning. Discover, clip, organize and remember useful foreign language phrases and collocations while browsing the web.