Learn English Online with Videos

Here's a sweet website for English learners who have access to broadband Internet (at home, school, or the library): www.englishcentral.com.

It features real video clips of all different genres - everything from President Obama taking questions from reporters to movie trailers and TV commercials to business speakers. Videos are organized topically by category, and also sorted into "easy," "medium," or "hard," categories so learners can choose material that is appropriate to their level and interests.

Learners are prompted to record themselves repeating the audio from the video clips, so using this site does require that learners have access to headphones with a microphone.

It's free to use, though users must complete a brief registration form with an email address.

If you try it with your learners, let me know how they like it!

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!