Teach with Google

Google Art Project On the Google Art Project website, you can visit famous museums from all around the world - Madrid, New York City, Berlin, London and elsewhere - and explore famous art pieces. The Google Art Project is easy  for children to explore, making it effective even in elementary school. You can select from the list of museums, and then choose whether you want to explore the museum itself, or start examining the work of art.  Navigating down the hallways and rooms of an art museum gets kids really excited.

Google Culture Institute is the collection of 42 online exhibits telling the stories behind major events the period 1905 - 2008 (The Holocaust, Apartheid, D-Day). The exhibits contain text, photo and video information. 

Cookie and others

Cookie offers more than your traditional games website. It features educational games chosen by child experts and educators. It contains worksheets, educational videos and stories to help children develop basic skills and have fun while they learn. Games and activities help develop language, math, reading, science and general problem-solving skills. The site is brightly colored and pictures, containing many things the children will enjoy not only at school but also at home.

City of Grammaropolis - a wonderful grammar reasource introducing the parts of speech in all the details with funny cartoon characters. The site offers various activities on each part of speech - the pictured description, colorful on-line comics, videos, quizzes and games, songs. Grammaropolis is a fresh and exciting way to learn about the parts of speech. Students associate human qualities and characteristics with the parts of speech, abstract grammatical rules start to make a lot of sense.

e-Learning for Kids offers interactive material for a number of subject areas: Math World, Math General, Language Arts Courses, Science Courses, Computer, Environmental Skills, Health, Life Skills, English Language. In each group the materal is presented by the courses for different ages. The courses are mainly interactive animated slides.

Downloadable Educational Freeware

Artha is a free English thesaurus that works off-line and is based on WordNet. It is available for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows. For a given word, the possible relatives shown by Artha includes Derivatives, Synonyms, Antonyms and many more. 




Seterra is a Windows-based application that makes geography interesting for students, and presents geographic facts  in a format that is easier to remember. It is like a free map quiz game, but it actually serves as a good educational tool for both the classroom and the home. 




and many others at Educational Freeware

Phonetics Focus

Phonetics Focus offers a wide range of resources, designed to help improve pronunciation and knowledge of phonics. It is good for working with students in class, practise individually, use materials to prepare for a lesson.

Confusing Words

ConfusingWords is a list of commonly confused English word pairs. Each pair is given the definition, the examples, True or False and Drag and Drop exercises. Very useful to have such a list at hand.

Visuwords

Visuwords is both a dictionary and a thesaurus, finds  the meanings of words and associations with other words and concepts, produces something like a net of the word.

VocabAhead

VocabAhead is a great vocabulary-learning site illustrating words with nice short videos (picture, definition, example). It makes learning words both fun and interactive, being extremely good and convenient both for students and teachers.

is on the VocabAhead Page of this blog.

PBS Teachers

PBS Teachers is an environment where teachers can ask questions, use free tools and printing lessons and activity plans. It offers classroom resources for teaching students of different ages in the categories of The Arts, Healht & Fitness, Math, Reading & Language Arts, Science & Tech, Social Studies. The resources are given in topics and various media types. Activity Packs section is of special interest. Each pack focuses on a certain theme and includes links to PBS resources and supplemental activities The Activity Packs have the embed code to add them to personal sites (the PBSTEachers Page of this blog).

More Activities for Kids

eslgamesplus contains numerous activities online, classroom games, memory games, spelling games, sentence games, interactive board games, matching games, concentration games and many others on various topics (lexical, grammatical). There are also printable worksheets, flashcards, printable board games.

Kiz Phonics

Phonics Activities, Learn to Read, for Preschool, Kindergarten, First Grade, 2nd Grade is a good resource to help kids enjoy reading. Kiz Phonics is a nice progressive program for teaching kids to read using a systematic phonics approach. The program is arranged by levels. The level sections are complete with phonics worksheets, videos, online games and activities. The program is suitable for school teachers, parents and other educators trying to help children learn to read.

OUP Britain

OUP Britain website contains some extra cultural resources on Britain. Ready-to-use worksheets include information, questions and related vocabulary, also a list of useful links to other OUP resources, Culture Focus is a good resource for learning about recent events in Britain. Interactive Britain Quiz with thirty questions Culture focus offers more about recent events in Britain, questions and suggestions related to the topic as well as some useful vocabulary. This page is updated regularly with more topics related to Britain.

Teach Your Monster to Read

Teach Your Monster to Read is a fun game to help improve the speed and accuracy of recognizing letters and sounds. The game has levels (or islands) with four activities each. Children will love playing with a nice monster avatar. The teacher can create accounts for all of his students easily and can also log-in anytime to see their progress. A good way to make learning interesting!

News:24 hours in pictures

24 hours in pictures section in The Guardian could be a good motivational moment for a lesson - a start for a discussion, guessing the topic, arising questions and so on as far as the lesson needs it. A selection of the best images from the world each day with the information on every picture (where and what it is) is not only a nice teaching material but also a good fast and beautifully-shot way to learn what happens in the world.

Geobeats

Geobeats offers great videos on United Kingdom-London (the dream of any teacher of English) and the world's countries and their cities. The videos are mostly short with tapescripts offered - very useful.

http://bit.ly/uiPHg4

Creating Timelines

Today's newsletter from Free Tech for Teachers contains the information about tech tools for creating the timeline. The idea of using timelines in teaching and learning English seems not bad and quite useful especially for students' project work and presentations - many topics the students are working at could be presented in the form of timeline. Here are some timeline creation tools described: 

Six Multimedia Timeline Creation Tools for Students from http://www.freetech4teachers.com/

BBC News video

BBC News video is one more great BBC service which could be of much help in teaching. BBC News video offers video material on a variety of topics (World, Business, Science and Technology, Entertainment, UK, US and Canada). One-minute World News could be a good motivational resource for a lesson.

More tools to work with the text

Wordle  is a tool for generating “word clouds” from texts. The clouds give prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text. The clouds can be of different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images can be printed out, or saved.

  Wallwisher offers many opportunities to organise the work. It is not exactly working with text but with information. Posting messages, collecting favourite links, sharing ideas, wishing ona special day, making plans and lists, keeping notes and many others. Wallwisher in the classroom can help in various ways - as far as the teacher need it.

The ideas to use Wordle, Wallwisher and some others in the classroom: 

14 Edtech Integration Tips & 20 Resources for the School Year
From http://shellyterrell.com/

Tools to work with the text online

Select and Speak is a text to speech Chrome browser extension. It installs with just one click. With the help of Select and Speak you highlight any text on a webpage, click the Select and Speak icon in the browser, and listen to the reading of the text.



ProfessorWord provides the definition of almost any word in the text. Just one click to the word and you get the definition. Professor Word is easy to install and to use. 

English-Guide.org

English-Guide.org is the collection of links to interactive resources under Vocabulary, Listening, Grammar and Others sections. Each of the above sections includes topical subsections which makes it easy for a teacher to find necessary material. The reasources, mostly games and videos, are taken from various English teaching sites, categorised into levels and given the Editor' rating. This makes the site convenient for a teacher to use as far as he needs it.

BrainPOP

BrainPOP is a collection of educational games and movies categorized under the main school subjects. There is a free watch section available. The BrainPOP Educators is of special value offering many resources, ideas, teachers' and students' activities, discussion opportunities and many others.
The Brain POP's Featured Movie and POP a Joke are on the BrainPop Page oif this blog.

fit4theclassroom

fit4theclassroom is a nice collection of resources to discuss such things as Food, Mood, Recharge and Move. It is a series of elementary lessons plans with various activities and videos that can add much to the lesson and help demonstrate the importance of a balanced daily life.

ProjectBritain.com

ProjectBritain.com gives much information about the country. It contains facts about Britain, in an easy-to-read way and to understand for people of all ages and cultures. The topics covered are numerous, from the most famous, Royal Family, to really unusual, Pillar Boxes. A great resource for students' independent work.  

LearnEnglish Kids

LearnEnglish Kids by British Council is a nice helper for teaching kids at school and at home. Games, songs, stories, videos and worksheets on various topics. Especially valuable is the Parents section with helping ideas, the forum and the links to related websites.

Teacher's Pet Displays

Teacher's Pet Displays is a wonderful site full of amazing resources of all kinds. The site offers numerous downloads on different topics stimulating ideas for a lesson, nicely created worksheets will make learning and teaching fun. Posters, labels, sound displays and other materials are lifesavers for a techer who wants to make unforgettable and bright lessons.

10 Resources for World Food Day

10 Resources for World Food Day - 10 resources to make your lessons on Food topic more interesting and    informative.

Premier Skills English

The world id crazy about football! Why not use it in teaching English? Premier Skills English is organised all around this popular game and offers wonderful resources both for teachers and learners.Boys will be happy)

elllo

Much listening practice on elllo presented in Views, Mixer, Games, Videos and News sections, sorted by Level, Country, Topic, Media. Interesting topics, illustrations (in Games especially), vocabulary practice and quizes make the site really valuable for teaching English.

neoK12

neoK12 offers a wide choice of educational videos, lessons and games for school kids. The materials are given in Physical Science, Life Science, Human Body, Earth and Space, Geography, Social Studies, History, Math, Fun Video and English sections. The English section with its Phonics and Rhymes is especially interesting for EFL teachers.

Jolly Phonics - A to Z - Part 2/3

More Phonics and English Lessons at NeoK12.com  

Lessonstream.org by Jamie Keddie

Lessonstream.org by Jamie Keddie is a great place containing wonderful lessons with plans and all the materials needed. The organisation of the site is very convenient as you can search the lesson by Language level, Learner type, Time, Main Activity, Language aim, Topic, Material. The teachers'comments to each lesson give an opportunity to see how the material works in real - very convenient and useful.

Art.sy

Art.sy is of great help to prepare and conduct the lessons on art,  or just to enjoy various works of art online. It provides the large collection of contemporary art available online. Works from all cultures and time periods, the information about artists and art movement are accessible for study and enjoyment. 

Vocabulary.co.il  is a vocabulary website with flash online word games. They include an online word search, an online crossword puzzle, hangman online, unscrambles and others. The fun of the games can help both native and foreign learners of English build their English language vocabulary skills. There are word games for all levels of English.

Learning Chocolate

The bright thing I have come across today is Learning Chocolate - Vocabulary Learning Platform - USEFUL vocabulary, ready-made exercises, nice pictures. Suitable for using in class, at home with your own children, with different age groups.

Exam English

Exam English is for studying for an English language exam, contains Free Online Practice Tests for the most important international ESL/EFL exams: IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, and the Cambridge ESOL exams such as CAE, FCE, and PET. Offers the free level test, the detail information about each exam and the practice material as  an example of the test. Convenitent to have all that in one place.

abcteach

abcteach site is full of various resources, especially for young learners. The Teaching Extras section offers many efl-useful printable things under numerous subcatogories like Alphabet Letter patterns, Classroom Signs, Posters, Badges and others. Some materials are free to download, some need member login.  A really time-saving thing for a teacher!

One more site which offers a wide range of printables is Lanternfish. It contains various printable teacing resources for languagee arts, TESOL, TEFL, ESL. Worksheets, flashcards, bingo cards and the discriptions of different games and activities make the site really useful.