Reading my morning RSS feed I stumbled over this post on one of my favorite blogs “Free Technology for teachers“.
Vocabulary and SpellingCity.com has over 42,000 spelling words with customizable sentences and definitions, A REAL person who says each word and sentence, Free home pages for teachers and parents to
save lists, Teacher training videos to show teachers and parents how to use Vocabulary and SpellingCity.com, Customizable sentences and definitions for words with multiple meanings (e.g., a scale for weighing, to scale a mountain, the scale on a map), Free printable handwriting worksheets for handwriting practice with your saved lists.
Forvo can best be described as an audio wiki for word pronunciations. One of the problems with learning to speak a language that is not phonetic is trying to figure out how to pronounce the words. Forvo hosts hundreds of recordings of word pronunciations by native speakers. Along with word pronunciations, Forvo provides some basic demographic information about each language. Forvo’s content is user-supported and user-generated. New pronunciations are added on a regular basis.
WordSteps is a resource for learning the vocabulary of your choice of nine languages. To start learning vocabulary with WordSteps select the language you are trying to learn then choose a set of vocabulary words in that language. WordSteps provides six types of practice activities for each set of vocabulary words. The sets of vocabulary words are called dictionaries by WordSteps.
Voxy is an interesting approach to helping ESL students learn English. Voxy uses current articles from world news, pop culture, and sports to to help students acquire language. As students read an article they can click on highlighted words and hear them pronounced. Highlighted words when clicked reveal the Spanish translation. Clicking on highlighted words also adds them to a study list. The study lists can be used for quizzes and games. Voxy is available in English and Spanish.
Repeat After Us is an online library of copyright-free English texts and audio recordings. The purpose of Repeat After Us is to provide ESL students with a place to read and hear proper pronunciations of English words.
Lingus TV is a website featuring videos to help viewers learn conversational Spanish. The collection of videos includes lessons for beginning, intermediate, and advanced learners. The short videos feature actors having brief, realistic looking and sounding conversations.
Hello World provides games and activities for students to develop their knowledge of foreign languages. Hello World has games and activities in nine languages including Spanish, French, and Mandarin Chinese
