English Virtual Community

Daniel Johansson from the bab.la team has sent me a mail asking to spread the news about a new product called Wording   a very useful tool for those who want to improve their writing. Wording acts as a correct sentence structure checker. It is ideal for English language learners  to improve the use of collocation, diction and syntax in their writing when choosing the appropriate sentence pattern.  For example, by associating correct examples of prepositions with common language usage to give you the best suggestions for the proper preposition.    I would like to remind the reader that bab.la offers students some other tools such as quizzes and games to study/revise the English language.  Link: http://en.bab.la/wording/ 

Popplet is an application for the web and iPad, where you can collect, curate and share your ideas, inspirations, and projects.  It is a combination of wallwisher, glogster and field for webspiration which offers a lot of  possibilities: users can type, draw, upload images , embed videos or draw in the virtual “post-its” called “popplets" .  Advantages: Teachers can use it for collaborative work  Popplets can be connected It doesn’t have an limit on the number of characters you can use. . At the moment   is in beta and you need to request an invite.  Here is a video explaining how it can be used.  http://popplet.com/ Related posts: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2011/01/03/popplet-looks-like-a-winner-its-wallwisher-on-steroids/ http://2sparkley.edublogs.org/2011/01/05/popplet/

Practicing English with a native speaker or another ESL student is a great way for international students to improve reading, writing, and speaking skills. There are many different sites that make it easy for students and other ESL learners to connect online. Here are a few sites to try: MyHappyPlanet - This online language learning community allows members to message native speakers from around the world. The site can also be used to learn about the English language and culture through videos and member-created lessons. italki - italki is a great place to find ESL partners. Members hail from more than 200 countries and are always eager to discuss and practice English reading, writing, speaking/listening, grammar, pronunciation, and more. MyLanguageExchange - More than one million people practice their language skills on MyLanguageExchange. The site employs the Cormier method of language exchange which groups native speakers of two languages so that they can spend half their tim...