Random Name Generator

Random Name Generator - a why-not thing to use sometimes in class, surely children will love it!

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012 from Jane Hart

English Language Tools

Online-Utility.org offers online computer utilities which allow to perform tasks without installing any software. Its English Language Tools software can be used in teaching, learning, linguistic research and more.
The discription of the tools as the site gives it:

Readability Test and Improve - Calculates and prints various readability tests. Finds sentences which you should consider revising to improve text's readability.

Learn English Text - Provides tooltips with synonyms and dictionary links for difficult words.

Vocabulary Builder - Generate vocabulary lists for any English language text.

New Words English Dictionary - Create custom vocabularies and dictionaries (for teachers and students).

Dictionary - Explains to you meaning of the words. Learn English words. Reference and lexicon.

In Simple English - Allows you to find words in English text which are not considered simple or basic or they aren't in the word list you choose. Useful when one should write simple English texts.

Filtered Word Frequencies - Allows you to find uncommon words in any English text or web page. For working with students in class Learn English Text  and Vocabulary Builder seem to be especially useful.

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

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/

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.