Useful tools for the English Classroom
In the second session of our course we have been introduced to a variety of tools that might be useful for us as future teachers of English, as well as for our students. In the following I will shortly describe some tools and write about my personal experience I made with them. Note that all of the described tools are for free and only require an email account.
You can find the Evaluation (task 1) of the web-tools here.
Weebly
Weebly is a handy tool if you want to create a homepage and you do not have any knowledge of HTML. By using a simple drag and drop editor you can create your page a page for a school project, a classroom website or students e-portfolios within minutes. You can choose from a huge variety of designs, sizes and shapes to make your site as personal as possible. If you want to include a blog or a poll to your website, you will have no difficulty to do so.
By the way, this website is also created and hosted with Weebly ;-)
Netvibes
Netvibes is an online tool with which you can create a personal learning platform. What does that mean?
A learning platform can be anything you need for studying or working i.e. your desk, your computer or any tool you use. With Netvibes you can create an online dashboard including all the online tools, websites, blogs or social networks that are important for your studies, your work or your interests.
Basically your dashboard is like any starting page for example yahoo where the owner provides you with many different kinds of information. The big advantage of netvibes is that you can create your own personal homepage to which you can include any widget or rss-feed you are interested in. This will not only save time because you do not have to open every website on its own but also you do not have to be annoyed by advertisements.
If you may have problems to get started with Netvibes, there are many good tutorial videos for example this one here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIorN9dG4Mk
Delicous
Delicious is a simple and good solution to save bookmarks. It overcomes the problem that you might forget interesting URL's or the problem that you usually have your personal bookmarks only included on your own computer or laptop. With delicious you can access to them from any computer at any time. You can structure them using tags so that you do not forget what the pages you bookmarked were all about.
Another helpful tool is that you can search for various tags and see bookmarks that are most popular by other members of delicious. Moreover your personal bookmarks will organize themselves by the various tags with which you subscribed them. It is up to you whether you hide your bookmarks from other users or you make them public. You are not convinced yet? Check it out yourself!
Collaborative writing tools
Writing tools like titanpad, edupad or piratenpad are simple tools for collaborative writing. They can be compared to normal text editor programs with which you can write a text with a group of people. Those tools can be used effectively for example for so called "Schreibgespräche" or organisational matters. The tools display which person wrote which text. This is very helpful for the teacher because he or she knows who collaborated or not. One main disadvantage is that the tools do not require an authentication so that everybody could join the conversation.
To overcome this problem I can recommend google.docs which is very suitable for writing group papers. It offers more features than the other tools and is password protected. For this tool you need to have a googlemail account. In comparison with the other writing tools it would need more time to set up a google document because you have to invite every person that is permitted to gain access to the document whereas you just have to create a page with the pads, and afterwards other people can join the conversation by opening the URL of your page. Therefore you have to think about which tool is most suitable for your specific use.
Bitstrip.com
Have a look here if you want to find out more about this tool. It is worth it!
Audacity
Audacity is a useful tool when it comes to creating podcasts or other audio records. If you don't know it yet, have a look at the video below which should give you a first insight of the functions of the tool.
