Helpful+Links

This page is for other blogs, wikispaces, websites, etc. that I have found useful. I'll try to provide a brief and useful description about what each link contains.

KSDE ESOL Standards The link above takes you to the Kansas State Department of Education page that contains downloadable ESOL standards and reviews of the standards. The document below contains a few standards I have used or plan to use with ESL college students (I use the 9-12 intermediate and advanced categories since my Korean students are preparing to transfer to universities in English-speaking countries).

Or, you can see all the standards in the document below.

Educational Blogs List This list is what inspired me add to this page to my wiki. The list contains numerous blogs for various categories of or related to education (including English, ESL, and Library/Media).

Recommended Books In a couple classes during Fall 2010 semester, I made students choose a book to read during the 2nd half of the semester. The link above contains about 40 books that others have recommended (not books I am personally endorsing). I used the list to give students some ideas about which books to choose for their independent reading assignments. I looked through a couple of the books, and they seemed appropriate for intermediate level ESL students. [The book list is in the second portion of the page].

ALA Reading Lists This has several lists of recommended books. More professionally put together and more extensive than the link above.

Free Online Gradebook As the link suggests, this is a free online gradebook. It allows you to set the categories (i.e. attendance, quizzes, homework) that will be included in the gradebook, the weight of each category, the order items appear in the gradebook, and whether or not you want to drop the lowest grade in each category. One of the best features of this site is that it allows students to access their grades online anytime (once the teacher has given them an access code). It also shows the instructor the last time students have logged in.

Quizlet.com This is a a place you can make on-line flashcards. The flashcards allow you to play a couple different games, study, and generate tests. The tests generated cannot easily be used for official assessment, but they can easily be copied and pasted into Microsoft Word and then used for assessment. Most of the vocabulary links in my class pages are to flashcards in this site. Pictures can be added to the flashcards. In the free service, the pictures must be selected from those the site offers, but for something like $10 a year you can upload any (appropriate) pictures you want. The site also allows people to share flashcards and combine sets (useful when it comes time to study for midterm and final exams).

Most of the vocabulary links in my course pages contain links to Quizlet.com flashcards.

Freerice.com This contains different study quizzes. The only one I really looked was the English Vocabulary. I didn't notice a place where you could make flashcards, but it does contain 60 different levels of English vocabulary. The program automatically moves users up or down levels based on the number of correct or incorrect answers. A really cool bonus of this site is that (according to the site) for every question answered correctly 10 grains of rice are donated to fight world hunger.

Blabberize.com This is a pretty fun site that allows you to upload pictures and "cut" a mouth in the picture that will move to the voice recorded. Voice recording can be done from within the program. One way I've used this site is to have students find a picture of a character in a story they are reading. Then, using this site, they had to pretend to be that character and apply for a job. The assignment seemed to challenge and engage the students. I'm sure other projects could be generated using this site.(If you are interested in seeing some of the projects, click on the following link Blabberize Project).

Voicethread.com This site allows users to upload pictures and audio into a format that can be saved and embedded into other websites. One of the best features is that other students can easily add audio to the original project. This provides an easy way to incorporate discussion oriented homework into classes. All the information is arranged on the same page (around the picture in the project) which makes it easy for students to find and instructors to check.

LiveWeb Program that allows users to embed web pages into Microsoft Power Point. Very useful, but users can generally only progress forward through an embedded website; tool bars and tabs are often removed from the top and/or side portion of websites, making it impossible to