CNN Student News

Today’s website: CNN Student News.

What is it?

The website provides a large amount of news videos, each of which has transcripts, discussion questions, and news quizzes. New video made based on the recent important news will be uploaded from Monday to Friday. It is suitable for intermediate to advanced learners.

Wordia--Let people tell you what the words means!

Today's website: Wordia

What is it about?

It is a brilliant unique and interesting on-line dictionary for intermediate to advanced English learners to learn vocabulary. As the slogan of the website goes, Wordia “bring words to life”. This website provides not only standard definitions of words from Collins English Electronic Dictionary (Digital Edition: 2008 © HarperCollins Publishers 2008) but also videos in which both famous and ordinary people can give their own definitions and connotations of words.

Wordle

Today's website: Wordle

What is this? 

It is a fun and interesting tool which generate word clouds from a piece of text. Wordle not only creates an artitic image of word clouds but also extracts the most commonly occuring words from the specific text or website. It is simple and easy to use that users only  have to paste a text or add the URL of a blog, the RSS Feed of a webpage. Besides, Wordle also provides a variety of options in terms of layout, color, font.

It is suitatble for both teachers and students to create their own unique word clouds in language classroom. 

wordsift- Learning English in a visual and interesting way with tag clouds

Today's website: wordsift

What is this?



It is an excellent tool to learn English in a playful and interesting way. It can automatically select the most important words from a text and then transfer them to a map of tag cloud. When clicking each tag, students can easily check the meaning, synonyms or its relationship with other words by the online dictionary “Visual Thesaurus”, which is combined in the website. Besides, there are also some pictures in association with every tagged word.  

The website is suitable for every English teacher.

Ted: Ideas worth spreading

Today's website: TED: ideas worth spreading

Source: http://www.ted.com/

 What is this?

It is an amazing website with over 700 best talks, which are subtitled in English and even in other various languages. Originally, the talks are given by great people in the field Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED). However, the website now has more topics other than the three fields. These videos are freely shared and reposted so that English teachers can use the video clips on the website to amplify the depth and width of our teaching materials.       

BreakingNewsEnglish: Brilliant teaching resource

Website of the day: BreakingNewsEnglish

What is this?

It is a brilliant website for teachers to teach English news. The news is updated every two or three days. What the teacher have to do is to select a piece of news which will be interesting for their target students and then adopt the activities provided. There are a variety of ready-made activities and they are free of charge.

Todaysmeet - Online discussion space!

Website of the day: Todaysmeet

Todaysmeet.com

What is this?

It is a free chat room service that allows users to create an instant back channel for either a classroom or presentation. It’s simple, easy and free of charge. To create the chat room, you only have to type in the name for your room, which later will become the particular URL of your chat room, and select the length of time you would like to have the chat room exist. Afterwards, all you have to do is to give the URL to your students.   

lyricstraining-Practice listening and having fun!

Today's website: Lyrics training

What is this?

It’s an excellent websites with many popular music videos whereby students can enjoy listening to their favorite songs while typing the lyrics they just heard. In every music video of the website, there are three modes of exercises based on the levels of students: beginner, intermediate, or expert.  Teachers no longer have to print out the lyrics or press the buttons on the CD player again and again to find the certain parts of the song.

              

Listen-and-Write -- Fantastic website to practice listening!

Website of the day: Listen and write

What is this?

It is a website that we can use to improve listening ability in particular. It contains various video clips and audio files, each of which includes three activities which learners can write down what they have heard: full mode, quick mode, and blank mode.