E-mail and e-cards

With E-pals, you can set up e-mail accounts for your students that will enable you to communicate with them and they with each other and other e-pal members. This type of system offers a guaranteed child safe environment, but may limit your students if you wish them to mail other friends, or send English birthday or christmas e-cards etc.

There exist many child safe e-mail services, most of which promise to exclude unwanted adverts, risky links and so on. Another essential feature of a childsafe e-mail is that it does not require personal information such as identification numbers in order to sign-up. However, most ask for teacher or parent permission for the under 13s.

Most parents are OK with the idea of using a safe, teacher-moderated e-mail account for communicative activities, but it is still a good idea to check and get permission, especially in the case of the very young.

One good site for child safe e-mail can be found at Zilladog

The following links are to sites offering e-card services which we will evaluate during the course. If you know of any others, please post your comments.

SCHOLASTIC
ANIMATED CARDS
BLUE MOUNTAIN
MARLO

Podcasting

One area very much in fashion in ELT circles is podcasting. PodOmatic, enables you set up your own podcasting site free of charge.

SET UP A PODCASTING SITE


The following are links to two examples for young learners: you will notice they are both made with blogger, the tool you are using for the project and in which you are reading this message:

BRITISH COUNCIL YOUNG LEARNERS MADRID
BRITISH COUNCIL YOUNG LEARNERS BARCELONA

Professional Development

The internetcan help you to stay up to date professionally. Sites designed for the international English teaching community provide information about books and materials, online and offline resources, jobs, training opportunities and so on.

On line newsletters and magazines are also great places to find and subscribe to mailing lists, discussion groups and bulletin boards.

Many sites offer regular e-mail services, posting lesson plans and resource materials directly to your inbox - materials that you can store and catalogue on your own hard drive.

The British Council runs a number of excellent EFL websites, all of which offer teachers the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the profession, join discussion groups and find training and development opportunities:

BRITISH COUNCIL TRAINING
BRITISH COUNCIL RESOURCES
BRITISH COUNCIL THINK
BRITISH COUNCIL YOUNG LEARNERS

A link to the UK Guardian TEFL section:

EDUCATION GUARDIAN TEFL

Some sites (professional associations and high quality magazines) may involve paying a subscription fee in order to gain full access to all the materials available:

TESOL HOMEPAGE
THE EL GAZETTE
IATEFL
IATEFL (YOUNG LEARNERS SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP)
ET PROFESSIONAL
ESL MAGAZINE

Bulletin Boards and Mailing Lists are great places to get tips. Check out the examples below:

ESL NEWS MESSAGE BOARDS
DEVELOPING TEACHER


ELT Academic Research can be carried out at:

ITESL JOURNAL

Or via the:

GOOGLE ACADEMIC SEARCH

Your Own Discussion Groups or Forums
We will look at how you can configure your own discussion groups - both for teachers and learner project work, at:

GOOGLE GROUPS

Once I have your e-mail addresses, I will make you members of a group by invitation . We can develop discussions and try to answer questions there between sessions.

Top 10 Google Tips

Instead of just typing in a phrase and going through page after page of results, there are a number of ways to make your Google searches more efficient.

Either/or.

Google normally searches for pages that contain all the words you type in the search box, but if you want pages that have one term or another (or both), use OR: english OR primary OR resources

Quote marks.

If you want to search for an exact phrase, use quotes. ["efl grammar worksheets"] will only find that exact phrase. [efl "grammar worksheets"] will find pages that contain the word efl and the exact phrase "grammar worksheets".

Not.

If you don't want a term or phrase, use the "-" symbol. [-grammar worksheets printables] will return pages that contain "worksheets" and "printables" but that don't contain "grammar".

Wildcard.

The "*" symbol is a wildcard. This is useful if you're trying to find the lyrics to a song, but can't remember the exact lyrics. [can't * me love lyrics] will return the Beatles song you're looking for. It's also useful for finding stuff only in certain domains, such as
educational information: ["esl methodology" research *.edu].

Definitions.

Use the "define:" operator to get a quick definition. [define:morphosyntax] will give you a whole host of definitions from different sources, with links.

Site-specific.

Use the "site:" to search only within a certain website. [site:eltpamplona.blogspot.com activities] will search for the term "activities" only within this blog.

Music.

"music:" returns content related to music only.

File types.

If you just want to search for .PDF files, or Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets, for example, use "filetype:"

Location of term.

By default, Google searches for your term throughout a web page. But if you just want it to search certain locations, you can use operators such as "inurl:", "intitle:", "intext:" Those search for a term only within the URL, the title and the body text.

Life beyond Google...

Here are some links to sites that offer an interesting twist on web searching: the sites are less well-known, but can save a lot of time if you are searching for specific resources:

Software search
This engine allows you to search for useful software, mostly freeware and shareware.

Categorized search
Yoozila filters the results into social, video, blog, news and other categories.

PDF Search
A specialist seach engine that looks for downloadable pdf files

Sound Search
A site that specialises in finding sound effects freely available on the web

Image globe
This is an innovative and interesting image search engine

Multiple Search Engine
Sputtr promises to search multiple search engines simultaneously

MultiSearch
Ms Freckles is another multi search utility with an attractive interface.

Encyclopaedia Style Search
Factbites offers what it claims is a more "human" approach to searching.