Thursday, May 21, 2009

Creating with CLEAR

CLEAR (the Center for Language Education and Research, based at Michigan State Univ.) has a number of sleek, easy-to-use online language teaching tools. Most allow you to build speaking and listening activities for your students - a real rarity among teacher-friendly tools for building online activities. There is also a nice process-writing service for writing teachers called "Revisions".

Teachers can sign up for a free account to build activities. Students can work on those activities without an account (except for the Revisions service, which they do need to register for and be added to their teacher's class). Teachers will need someplace to place their activities for students to access them. That could be a blog like this one, a class wiki page, or a standard web site.

Here is one very simple example: the Audio Dropbox. Intended as a place for students to "drop off" speaking assignments (like they might drop a writing assignment in your mailbox), the audio dropbox takes about 5 minutes to build and embed in a web page. Please feel free to leave me a comment.



Check them out at: clear.msu.edu/clear.
And thanks to Barry Bakin for posting about CLEAR and leading me to their stash of goodies!

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