Professional Documents
Culture Documents
© PEACHEYPUBLICATIONS.COM
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INTRODUCTION
This book has been written and designed primarily with
English language teachers in mind though the majority of
the resources and tools contained in the book will have
much wider use than just language teaching.
The book contains more than 70 tools and resources and
these have been hand picked because they represent a
broad cross-section of what is at present available.
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INTRODUCTION
Whilst many teachers and educationalists continue to
argue about the distracting influence of digital devices in
the classroom and their impact on students’ attention
spans, there can be few who still argue that teachers
should not be using web based digital resources and tools
in education.
There has been a shift over the last two decades from
whether we should use them to how we should use them
and which tools and resources we should be using and
when. Most teachers have accepted and are willing to
engage with the process of sifting through the available
resources and looking for ways that these can support and
augment their students’ learning.
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CONTENTS
The sites, apps and resources within the book have been
divided into the following chapters:
• Reading Tools
• Writing Tools
• Speaking Tools
• Listening Tools
• Grammar Tools
• Presentation Tools
• Poll & Survey Tools
• Infographic Tools
• Course Creation Tools
At present each chapter contains between 5 - 10 different
sites that have been selected to help you make a quick
choice of the tools you need.
All of the tools and resources selected for the book are
either free or have a useable permanent freemium offering,
so you will never be forced to pay for any of these
resources in order to sustain the work you are doing with
your students.
I do recommend though that when you do find any
resources particularly useful, and when you feel you would
like to continue using them on a longer term basis, that you
consider upgrading to a premium account and so give the
financial support that many of the companies need to
sustain their business and make improvements and
developments from which you and other teachers will
eventually benefit.
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KEEPING
UP-TO-DATE Over the coming years it is my intention to regularly review
and expand on the contents of this book. If you would like
to be involved and assist in this process you can do so by:
• Suggesting tools to be included in future editions
• Writing an entry about a tool you have used and
found useful
• Reporting a dead link or a tool or resource that has
become commercially unviable for teachers
• Reporting a typo or factual error.
Anyone who contributes in any of the ways above will get
a brief mention in the next edition of the book along with a
link to their own blog or website.
Send contributions to:
nik.peachey@peacheypublications.com
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FURTHER
READING Digital Video - A Manual for Language Teachers
• This is the first book in the Digital Classrooms series
and the winner of the 2016 British Council
Innovations award for Teacher Resources. The book
combines practical classroom activities with
resources reviews and 27 video tutorials to help
teachers develop the skills they need to effectively
exploit one of the most useful resources available
online.
Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• This book was designed to help teachers exploit a
wide range of digital tasks and resources to
encourage students to think more critically about web
based media. The book contains 12 lesson plans, the
whole of ‘Exploiting Infographics’ and more chapters
including how to exploit poll and survey resources as
well as tasks for exploiting presentations.
Exploiting Infographics
• This book was designed to help teachers understand
how to exploit Infographics both as resources for
prompting discussion and digital research but also
as motivating creative tasks for the development of
digital skills. The book contains a range of advice
and example tasks that can be used with a wide
range of classes. This book is also contained within
‘Thinking Critically through Digital Media’.
10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• This book contains a collection of 10 lesson plans
that are designed to develop students’ digital literacy
and critical thinking skills. All ten lessons are also
included in ‘Thinking Critically through Digital Media’.
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LESSON PLANS
Each of these lesson plans constitutes between 90 and 180
minutes of study and can be used in part as simple
conversation classes or in total for deeper research
projects. All lesson plans are included in ‘Thinking Critically
through Digital Media’ and a selection of 10 are included in
‘10 Lessons in Digital Literacy’.
• A World without Magnets
• Breakfast around the World
• Perceptions of Advertising
• Emotional Intelligence
• Careers for Introverts & Extroverts
• The Science of Happiness
• The History of Weddings
• Studying How to Study
• 50 Facts about Hair
• Body language
• Mind your Waste
• The Habits of the World’s Wealthiest People
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
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COPYRIGHT AND
PIRACY
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READING TOOLS
This chapter contains a range of tools and resources to help
you develop your students’ reading skills. These range from
tools to assist with vocabulary whilst reading to resources
with a wide range of ready-made graded authentic and
semi authentic content to help engage and motivate your
students both at home and in the classroom.
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The site looks like it will be better for higher level readers
rather than beginners as many of the articles are quite
complex.
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WRITING TOOLS
This chapter of the book contains a range of resources to
help you develop your students’ digital writing skills. These
range from tools to help students develop collaborative
writing and peer editing skills to more creative tools to help
students exploit poetry and develop stories and fictional
narrative.
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You can also use the chat window at the side of the page to
give advice or comment about the text. If you click on the
‘Timeslider’ (the little clock icon next to the star) you can
watch a recording of the text being created and see how
the text was constructed and how students edited and
changed each others’ work. Any work created on the free
version of the site will remain there for up to 30 days.
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You can copy & paste or write directly into it and then click
on ‘Edit’ to get your writing evaluated for level and clarity.
The app will identify areas where your text is difficult to read
and suggest ways that you can make it clearer.
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Before using this with students it’s a good idea to get them
to read one of the stories so they understand the concept.
You could create a story yourself or choose one of the
stories featured on their blog. This might be a useful one to
get your students started - ‘The Sand and the Scarab’ by
Cian Gill : https://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/mw8q
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They can save the books they create into their own library.
This is a great way to get younger learners writing. The app
works in the browser on tablets or laptops so it’s ideal for
the BYOD classroom. You can see some examples here:
https://www.mystorybook.com/categories/featured-stories
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The student can then use this plot to write the story. There is
quite a wide range of story types to choose from and they
can even use it to generate song lyrics and a range of
letters. This is great for students who need a little help with
the imaginative part of the writing.
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The site has a lot of social media wrap around and students
can comment on each others’ books and share them on
social media platforms.
This is a nice tool to use with older teens and ideal for class
trips or documenting out of the classroom projects. You can
see some example books here:
https://steller.co/most-viewed/
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LISTENING TOOLS
This chapter contains a range of tools and resources to help
you develop your students’ listening skills. These range from
a wide variety of authentic ready-made content based
around news or songs to tools that can be used to support
and assist with listening skills whilst watching video clips
from YouTube.
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You can also pay for a premium membership which will give
you some LMS type learner tracking and class creation
tools and allow you to customise, adapt and assign the
content to specific students or classes. You can see some
examples here: https://listenwise.com/current_events
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See: https://support.google.com/youtubekids/
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SPEAKING TOOLS
This chapter of the book contains a range of tools to help
you develop your students’ speaking skills. These range
from tools to help with specific areas of pronunciation to
tools you can use to get students recording their own
voices. These tools can help you to create engaging
multimedia activities that get your students speaking.
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Just record and share directly from your iPhone or iPad. You
can also save the recordings into DropBox to save space
on your device.
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SPEAKING PhoTransEdit -
TOOLS http://www.photransedit.com/Online/Text2Phonetics.aspx
This app offers a very simple quick way to convert up to 300
characters of text into phonemic symbols. Just type or copy
paste your text into the upper field, click on transcribe and
your text will appear as phonemes in the window below.
You can them copy and paste the text into any document or
presentation. There is also a free desktop version that you
can download from the site for use offline.
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GRAMMAR TOOLS
This chapter contains a range of tools to enable you to
develop your students’ understanding of English grammar
and syntax. These range from tools that analyse grammar to
those that enable you to instantly create grammar activities or
create corpus based materials that exploit authentic online
content.
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The site will also allow you to choose the types of words that
are extracted from the text, so you can for example just
remove articles or prepositions. When an interactive cloze
has been created you can type in the missing words and
the site will highlight the words in red if they are incorrect.
The activities this tool creates can’t be saved, so there is no
copyright infringement, but that also means that you can’t
create and distribute the activities to multiple students. You
can show students how to use the tool to create their own
revision tests though, so it’s still very useful and works well
on an interactive whiteboard.
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PRESENTATION TOOLS
This chapter contains a range of tools and resources to
enable you to create and share presentations. These range
from tools to help you share presentations for the classroom
to tools which enable you to add talking head narration and
embed presentations into online courses. There are also
tools to help you create simple animated presentations or
more unusual types of presentation like web based posters
or single page websites.
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To get started just click on the edit icon and you can simply
type in your text and the links to the media you want to
include. Each line in the editor creates a new slide.
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Students can use the single page to share and display the
results of their research and add explainer text.
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It’s also very easy to export the data you collect from the
surveys and analyse the answers. It does look a bit dated
though compared to many of the newer survey tools and it
doesn’t have very attractive design templates.
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They can also add the pros and cons of each idea and then
vote for the ones they like the best. The data the survey
produces can be hard to analyse, though the voting part is
quite straight forward. It’s a great tool to use in class,
because it’s very simple and quick to create the survey and
students can exchange surveys easily and get instant
results.
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INFOGRAPHIC TOOLS
This chapter contains a range of tools to help you create
various kinds of visual representations of information. The
tools in this chapter vary from those that can be used to
create standard graphs and infographics, to ones that can
be used to quickly transform text into to visual displays.
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The free version of the site only offers quite a narrow variety
of styles, but this is a great tool for introducing your
students to the infographic concept and enabling them to
create one in just a few minutes.
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You can also create one project, which enables you to store
digital assets in your account to use on other infographics.
If you use a paid subscription you can also add
collaborators so that you can work on the designs and
graphics together.
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COURSE Ed - http://www.edapp.com/
CREATION Ed is a really impressive course creation and LMS tool for
TOOLS creating highly interactive and touch responsive learning
content for mobile devices. It has been designed to work
on both iOS and Android devices and produces media rich
learning activities. You can drop in video, images, text or
audio and create a really wide range of interactions around
them.
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Once you have created your platform you can build multiple
classes and courses with a really wide range of interactions
including a plugin for the http://bigbluebutton.org/
synchronous webinar platform. This is a great service that
could enable you to create your own online school to deliver
lessons or training.
The free version of the site does carry some advertising, but
for a small monthly or yearly payment you can get the ads
removed.
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