Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012 from Jane Hart

VOA Learning English

VOALearningEnglish is a site with good listening activities of different kind, the teacher can choose what suits his needs. The site offers Shows in Special English where one can learn English reading and listening to weekly shows. The stories are written at the intermediate and upper-beginner level and are read one-third slower than regular VOA English. There are downloadable texts, MP3s, PDFs and captioned videos. Interactive Books section gives pronunciation, definition and examples of words and idioms. A good way to introduce vocabulary in the classroom and revise it at home. Students can improve their listening skills, vocabulary and comprehension skills with Article Activities.

Grammar in Focus

Road to Grammar with Road to Grammar Junior provide Quizzes on various grammar topics with notes, Extra Extended Practice on major grammar topics with all the necessary information, interesting interactive Games, Downloads both for teachers and students. There is also Road to Grammar blog with more ideas about teaching grammar.

Cambridge English Online where we have recently found the great Phonetic Focus (read here) also offers wonderful Grammar Gremlins - a funny short grammar game with elementary, intermediate and advanced levels. You will have only one minute to complete the five questions correctly. A nice way to master grammar!
The site has other interesting interactive activities: Tower of Babble with matching the question and the answer, Wild West English with various games included, English Doctor with testing on over 70 idioms using body parts and many others.

The Macmillan Dictionary is going places

More information - the article on Macmillan's website.
To access the online dictionary click here.

163 Questions

The NYT Learning Network blog offers a  list of 163 discussion questions taken from its Student Opinion feature. The questions are based on the NYT content with the links to the relevant article. The questions can be a good way to start the lesson or a discussion, to help students in writing or project working. There are the questions for various topics, age and language levels (intermediate, advanced).
The first two questions as an example:

1. Do Apps Help You or Just Waste Your Time?
2. Do You Keep a Diary or Journal?

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.

Something About Photos

Fotopedia is a great collection of wonderful photos on any topic you need. The photos are given together with encyclopedia articles. There is also Fotopedia Magazine with daily added selections of photos and articles. For example, Infinite Riches: The Hermitage Museum.

TeachingPhotos has photos of hundreds of classroom displays and provides inspiration to teachers all over the world. It is nice to see how other classrooms look like, what activities teachers use and how they are designed. The examples of different school subjects are given.

Photography from the National Geographic - great photos from the great site. Students will probably love the activities from My Shot section. Not much about English - but really beautiful. Anyway, a creative teacher will find the way to use this great photo resource in teaching English.

Teaching with News

Newseum

Newseum Washington, DC's Most Interactive Museum is the site of the Newseum - a 250,000-square-foot museum of news which offers an experience of blending five centuries of news history with technology and hands-on exhibits.

Today's Front Pages section could be a nice teaching tool for a lot of tasks: warming-up, motivating the discussion, the source of information for students' projects. The students can search for the needed information, compare the front pages of  newspapers from one and the same and from different countries and continents.



One more interesting thing from the Newseum is NewsMania - "the news trivia game as fresh as today's headlines". It has three levels - Intern, Reporter, Editor - offering questions with multiple-choice answers. But even if you're wrong (the questions are not easy at all) the correct answer is given.



NewsCred

NewsCred - Create and Discover Newspapers About the Things You Love - not only shows the Breaking News but also suggests creating your own online newspaper in 60 seconds. This could be a wonderful idea for students to present their projects, to create their class or group newspaper, just to be a good way to try themselves in the newswriting sphere.

The Newspaper Clipping Generator

Other ideas from fodey.com can also be very interesting to students:
Create... .. a newspaper .. ninja text .. a clapper board .. wizard text .. talking squirrels .. talking flowers .. talking tomatoes .. talking cats .. talking owls Just for fun! Why not?

More from BBC

BBC offers a nice Better@Languages questionnaire with the 9 questions and the advice on making the most of one's strengths and overcoming one's weaknesses. Choosing between True and False variants the person gets a piece of advice on each of the 9 questions.

One more great resource from BBC. Beyond the Postcard is a series about not so well known features of some well known places (Edinburgh, Belfast, York and others). Text, video, audio comprehension exercises will help practise and improve one's English. 
More about BBC resources in BBC News Video Post

Topics Online Magazine

 Topics Online Magazine for Learners of English is really a magazine full of interesting topics both to enjoy reading and to use for a lesson. It's International and Meeting People sections are of special interest.