In my faculty workshops I often look for solutions that faculty actually want to use. Some of the most successful offerings include workshops on writing, on organizing your classes and research, and on saving time. Today’s post covers all of these; in fact, long-form writing will be one of the Read more…
The summer is over, and after finishing an article and working on some language center design work I’m ready to blog again. This post is all about saving you time. Signing people up can be a big hassle. Let’s say you want to schedule oral exams or have students each Read more…
Story Builder is not that new anymore, but many people I talk to haven’t heard about it. So if this doesn’t sound familiar, read on. If you want to make dialog writing a bit more interesting, then google story builder is a neat way to change things up a bit. Read more…
Karaoke is not the first thing that comes to mind for many when thinking about language learning. Over the years I’ve seen music in general and karaoke in particular used in wonderful ways to practice other languages and in addition to that promote the joy that language learning can bring. Read more…
A few weeks ago I wrote about my favorite sources for images for language learning and teaching. Today I’d like to write about another great tool: Thinglink. This one is actually for adding meta info to images: text, links, other images, videos, etc. It’s quite easy to do: you upload an Read more…
I posted about Turnitin a few months ago. I liked the tool not for plagiarism checking, but for written feedback and peer-reviewing. Even though some of these tools are great, good old paper is still quicker and easier. They have just now added voice commenting, and this opens up some Read more…
Turnitin is mostly known for its plagiarism detection software (a feature that can actually be turned off if you only want to use the features discussed below). For me, the real advantage of the program are the peer editing features, the quick commenting, and the rubric grading feature. First of Read more…
When a new semester begins, I usually struggle with two things: learning students’ names and keeping attendance. Students drop and add classes, and it’s hard to take attendance without knowing who is who. Students being late and myself getting back into teaching mode make matters worse. Well, there’s an app Read more…
I’ve been testing soundcloud and thought I should share what a great tool this can be. It’s a web 2.0 audio recording and publishing tool, and is quite simple to use. For example, I can easily record and display several tracks I recorded in a browser or one of the Read more…
Having used it for a few years now, I can highly recommend Dropbox. It is easily one of the most useful programs out there, even the free version. If this is news to you, you might want to check it out. It synchronizes files beautifully among computers and gadgets, wether it’s Read more…