Hello hello ellloenglish !!!

http://www.elllo.org/

Look at the red arrow:

This tool is divided into 5 sections: VIEWS, MIXER, GAMES, VIDEOS and NEWS

When you click on Mixer there're 2 more sections you can get: SONGS and POINTS.

There're one more feature which is SCENES as shown below:

You can see 3 tabs:

1) Transcript

2) Audio Slide Show - you can turn on the text to get the subtitles

3) Audio Notes where you can click on the highlighted word to hear the pronunciation of the word and how it's used in a sentence.

You may download the audio and do the quizzes as well.

How I would use this tool?

Easy peasy lemon squeezy! I would simply use this for listening activities.

This tool can suit my secondary school students at all level depends on how I'm going to use it.

There're a lot of topics you can choose but I will make some adjustment for the activities or maybe adding more activities for students.

The website will be my favorable source for any listening sources.

How is this tool underpinned by current understanding of language learning?

1) Can hear variety of accents spoken by people all over the world.

2) Authentic materials: Using the real English that we hear on the street.

4) Personalising the learning to students' interest. Important to motivate students.

5) Develop listening skills - Loads of listening activities (audio + transcript).

Most importantly, it not only provide the audio for listening but create the reason for listening as well that will create the reason for students to communicate and talk about the topic.

6) Variety of topics - world & cross cultural knowledge

As in the picture above: The topic is about Korean Family. Students can listen to the audio and do the exercise while learning about other culture as well.

Kill two birds with one stone!

7) Promote autonomous learning - a good autonomous learner will look at other way to learn English and this tool will be one of the best choice.

8) Language learning is skill-based. This tool has variety of skills: writing, reading, vocabulary and listening.

9) Extract language from the context. Learning language while learning other stuff as well. (Content and language integrated learning; CLIL)

10) Let students to gauge their level. Good learners will always reflect themselves.

Limitations:

1) The organisation of the main page is quite messy and confusing.

2) The website can be easily corrupted. Especially when lot of people using this webpage simultaneously.

3) The video provided not really helpful and interesting.

Learning by Clicking

http://clicknlearn.net

You may wonder how this website work.

Well, you can try it out. Just click on the link above.

This tool is actually designed for Spanish students learning English. That's why the levels of the activity is classified based on Spanish education system.

Basically, this website is aimed to let students have fun while they learn.

I would recommend this on account of:

1) This tool is actually interesting and quite helpful.

2) It is a good practice for beginner and intermediate students.

3) It is free!

4) Printable version is provided. Teachers can print it out.

5) Combination of visual + audio + written explanation.

However, there're several things I dislike about this tool.

Taking example of one of the activity:

(1 BAT: grammar: Futures)

1) The topic is depressing. The effect of airplane crushed in the air is terrific.

2) Confusing. The pictures in this activity don't really represent the name. For example: sleeping bag in this picture don't look like sleeping bag.

3) Inflexible. You will stuck in one activity forever if you don't get the right answer.

For example in the activity above. You have to get the answer right before you can proceed to the next activity.

4) If you click on the 'back arrow' and click 'next arrow again', all the answers you've filled in are gone. You need to do it again.

That's all!

But I still believe this tool would be useful to the some extent.

Try it and see what'll you think of this tool....

Distill a long Text

Reading a long text can be daunting , but it doesn't have to be. Knowing a few simple, statistically proven tools will help you understand the long and wordy text.

Here is the saviour tools that will help you:

1) http://www.wordle.net/

Start with the simple step. Copy and paste the text in the space provided or just enter the URL of the web page where you find the text as shown below:

Then it will create this for you!

You can choose the colour, layout and font you like for your wordle.

Most importantly, you can print that out!

2) http://www.wordsift.com/

This tool work almost similar as Wordle. But this tool has extra features like images/videos, visual thesaurus and the text.

I don't really like the idea of images because I don't really think it will be a great help for students to understand the text.

The images and the text will work if you click on the words in the wordle. Then a lot of related pictures will appear from Google. Sometimes unrelated pictures will appear as well and that's the UGLY part of this tool.

But the idea of highlighting the words in the text by clicking in particular word in the wordle is absolutely brilliant. Students can see how frequent the words are used in the text and how it's used in a sentence.

Another cool thing about this tool is, the words in wordle can be sorted versatilely. You can sort the words from common to rare or vice versa and sort it alphabetically as well.

Why I think and are FABULOUS ???

1) Good pre-reading activity. Students can preview the text to build comprehension.

2) Help teachers to review the text to identify challenging words or concept.

3) Identify suitable images or videos to use in class.

4) Great tools for group activities and also can be used individually as literacy support.

You may wanna try this as well!

http://www.visuwords.com/