New school year – new ideas to try – busy life! Currently I am working on ideas for using Web 2.0 sites with language learners. As I add new sites to my ELD and French students’ courses in Blackboard, I will be sharing these with you.

The first two sites that I have incorporated into a daily journal assignment for my French classes are ones that I have previously written about:

http://www.frengly.com AND http://www.nicetranslator.com

It’s fun to watch the students – especially those in French 1 – being excited about learning new vocabulary words that are meaningful to them. The journals are just like what they might do in an English class, except that they are cranking them out in French.

Merveilleux!!

NOTE:  See http://ideas4cue.wordpress.com/languagelearners/ for shared sites soon!

http://www.diigo.com/list/ngibsonz/morecue2009

At first glance, eyePlorer just looked like a cool, visual search engine. But there’s another feature that makes it even better. You can actually drag information from the visual search onto a virtual notepad which then can be e-mailed or copied to your clipboard and into a document. Wish we had this when I was in college!!

Prezi is a unique online application that creates  non-linear presentations by  mapping ideas, images and videos,  and it has the ability to zoom into details.   If there is no web access when you want to show your presentation, a downloadable version can be obtained to show offline anywhere…and flash is not required.

Learn more about Prezi:
http://prezi.com/9303/view/#1

“Save Stories, Photos, and Videos on a Collaborative Timeline.” Share with family, friends or others…make personal collections or use to create reports on school-related topics with collections of photos or videos and research.

Create mind maps for yourself or to share with others anywhere in the world, via the Internet.

MyStudiyo allows users to create multimedia quizzes for their websites or blogs – or players can be invited to a MyStudiyo Channel Page. There are a variety of templates to use, and it’s a very user-friendly site.

Here is an example from the MyStudiyo site:

http://www.mystudiyo.com/ch/a526/go

Students can sign up for their own channel page and create quizzes to share with one another – a great way to encourage them to internalize information!

“Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Learn how words associate.”

This site provides a high level dictionary/thesaurus/diagrammer that develops higher level thinking skills.