Webwatcher Russell Stannard celebrates sites which seem simple but do so much.
The flood of useful technologies and tools on the internet never ceases to amaze me. It really is hard to keep up with so many great pieces of software. In this issue I want to focus on some quick, useful tools that can help either you or your students. They are all very simple to use and you can demonstrate them to your students very easily.
Find words that rhyme:
www.rhymes.net
When you are preparing lessons about pronunciation and you quickly need to find some words that rhyme, this useful tool will come to your rescue. You just key in a particular word and it provides you with a collection of words that rhyme with it. These are divided into groups according to how many syllables they have. The site has some other interesting sections, too, and it is really worth exploring.
Find a verb conjugation:
http://conjugator.reverso.net/conjugationenglish.html
This can be very helpful for students who need to find certain verb forms or conjugations. Simply key in the word, click on ‘Search’ and it produces a large table with all the different conjugations. The site does a lot more and can also be used for French, German and Spanish.
Print out some flashcards:
www.eslflashcards.com/
This site is amazing. It offers numerous sets of illustrated vocabulary flashcards and they are all free. You can see the list of sets in the middle of the screen. Hover your cursor over the name of each set to see what words are covered in it. Click on the name to see the cards. You can choose from three different ways to download them: either one card, two cards or nine small cards per page. The quality of the pictures is extremely good and there are plenty of cards to choose from. Provided you have a printer, this is a superb tool.
Look words up quickly in a dictionary:
www.easydefine.com/
The more I use this tool, the more I like it. Imagine you are a fairly high-level student and you are reading a text. Let’s say there are ten words in the text you don’t understand. Just key the words into ‘Easy define’ and it will search for all ten words at the same time and give you a dictionary definition for each one. This can save you a lot of time as you can do multiple searches and then print out the resulting definitions. It is not perfect and the definitions tend to be quite high-level, but it is a very useful tool.
Find the origins of words:
www.etymonline.com/index.php
This is a great site if you want to know where a word comes from. I keyed in soccer and it informed me that it is an abbreviation of Association in the term ‘Association Football’ with er added to the end. I also looked up London, Fosbury flop and hallmark. I received very clear and easy-to-read explanations of the origins of these words. Just key in the word you are interested in and click on the ‘OK’ button. I love learning about the origins of words and it can make teaching vocabulary so much more interesting. I can see potential for students to use this tool, too.
Find the most popular words in English:
http://quizicon.com/100-Most-Common-English-Words-Quiz.html
What a fun tool this is! It gives you five minutes to think of the most common 100 words in English. You simply press the start button and begin writing in the words you think will be on the list. If they actually are in the top 100, they will appear immediately on the screen. This is great fun to do with students. It is very easy at the beginning (everyone can predict that words like a, the, and, that and but will be on the list) but it gets harder and harder, and you are limited to just five minutes. I have used it several times in class and it has gone down really well with my students.
Use a talking dictionary:
www.languageguide.org/english/
This is a superb visual dictionary. Just click on the category you want and a page will open up with lots of pictures related to that topic. Roll your cursor over the pictures and you will hear the words pronounced and see them spelled out on the screen. The words are very clearly pronounced and the level of detail is excellent. Encourage the students to print the sheets out and learn the words. They can listen and repeat them, too, to get extra pronunciation practice. There are also other languages on this site. My students really like this and find it very useful.
You can find free help videos, which I have created, that will show you step-by-step how to use these tools, plus a few more, at: www.teachertrainingvideos.com/10simple/index.html
Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer in ICT at the University of Westminster, UK. He won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and Communications Technology for his website www.teachertrainingvideos.com. He was also one of the winners of the 2010 British Council ELTons awards.
This article first appeared in issue 70 of English Teaching professional, September 2010.