Best Web 2.0 tools

Hello,

What are the best web 2.0 tools you are using to support your language teaching?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Thompson on July 12, 2010 at 10:15am

The Center for Language Education and Research at Michigan State U. has some very nice on-line resources for language teaching here. I'm especially fond of VoiceThread and am using it with students for targeted speaking/listening practice. There's a new VT group in Classroom 2.0 for those interested.

I keep a short website of on-line resources for my students of Spanish. Most of these resources have been mentioned already.

Permalink Reply by Penny Hildinger on November 12, 2010 at 4:40am

I love the clear site at MSU too. I am using their audio drop box for the speaking part of my student's exams. You just embed it on your web page, and the audio they produce goes right into a drop box on the MSU site. No storage issues!! :)
I am checking out the rest of it. There is a lot of stuff there, all produced with World LAnguages in mind.

Permalink Reply by Wendy Cotta on September 25, 2010 at 1:34pm

Vocaroo is another audio recording tool. I love that you can email the audio submission and embed the submissions as well. (Embedding ability is useful if you use blogs, wikis, or control your own webpage.) The interface is incredibly simple from the user perspective. Here is a video tutorial.

Permalink Reply by Wendy Cotta on November 11, 2010 at 9:35am

Another great tool that supports listening comprehension skills: http://www.lyricstraining.com/index.php.

The site has user-generated content. That is, users upload music videos from youtube and other sites with the lyrics. Then, students can listen to the music videos at three different levels: Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert. The listening activities begin from a cloze acivitivity format (fill-in-the-blank) to more advanced. The listener can translate the lyrics to English for additional support. Also, scores are posted so there is a gaming component that may engage students.

Have fun trying it out!

Permalink Reply by Wendy Cotta on April 21, 2011 at 3:15pm

I just discovered a great new free site that allows you to create video questionaires or conduct video interviews. My school is a 1:1, that is, every student has a laptop with a webcam. We have used Skype for virtual exchanges but sometimes have networking issues resulting in dropped audio or dropped calls. With this new site, you write up a series of questions. Then, you can send the questions to another person who will be prompted to record their video responses by webcam. You can create a private interview that is not accessible to the public and manage the video files very easily. You can even share the video clip with others via email or download the video responses as an MP4 file. I can see so many possible uses for this great new tool. I encourage you to check it out: Intervue

Permalink Reply by Yuly Asencion on August 2, 2011 at 12:11pm

Hello everybody,

My graduate students have collected several tools useful for Spanish teachers and students in a wallwisher. I hope you find them useful.

Permalink Reply by Wendy Cotta on September 11, 2011 at 4:47pm

Socrative is an up and coming ed tech company with a great FREE web-based software offering that is like a clicker response system for laptops and/or phones. Their softward supports formative assessment practices in an engaging format for students. They had their beginning with Harvard's Graduate School of Education so I will keep an eye out for further developments from them, as they are focused on meeting the needs of the educational market.