But from 2004-2007, I had up to 15 German students a week who would pay me for the pleasure of putting them through their lingustic paces – “the Polish started to polish their boots…..at the bank she looked at the interest on her loan with interest….after eating dessert, the army deserted in the desert…”.   At the end, I would wonder why the students staggered off looking for the nearest bar.

English language teaching is very hard and one of the hardest parts about it is preparing lesson materials.  Robin Williams made it look easy in the movie “Good Morning Vietnam” with his quick fire wit and dialogue – but that’s just in movie-land.  In real life, it is much more difficult.   If you are teaching classes of up to 30 people (which I did for a short while), then you have to constantly find lesson materials that will motivate them and hold their interest for the 45 minutes you have to teach them (it’s even more difficult if you’re teaching children).   This means spending up to 2 hours a day, each day, solely on preparing your lessons for the next day.   No wonder a lot of teachers burn out fast.

English language teachers are constantly looking online for new sources of material and the internet is a great place to look if you know of the right places.   A lot of the good sites on offer are run by ESL (English As A Second Language) teachers themselves who sympathise with their fellow teachers and who want to help out.

Here’s some of the places where I got my material from :

Breaking News English

If you are stuck for what to teach someone, the day’s current affairs is always a good place to go to.  Everyone has an opinion about what’s in the news, whether it’s the war in Iraq, the financial crisis or Michael Jackson’s death.

Breaking News English attempts to fill that niche by providing 1000+ news reports and questions for discussion.  As you can see on the left, the recent lesson plans have ranged from “Israel & Hamas reject Amnesty report” to something more low-brow “Manchester United agree to sell Ronaldo”.  So there’s something for everyone there.

You can download each lesson plan in doc, PDF and mp3 format.

ESL Cafe

This is quite a popular site which has been around for quite a long time.   It has a bit of an Asian angle to it (they have dedicated job boards and forums for Korea and China) but the stuff that Dave Sperling includes on the site can be used anywhere.

You can find links to lesson plans, links for students and teacher forums. You can even apply for a new job if you hate the one you’ve got.

One Stop English

One of my really favourite sites.   You can download LOTS of lesson plans here, made by other teachers.   They tend to steer you towards the paid “staff room” but you can ignore all that and stick to the free stuff instead.  Things like Lesson Share, Monthly Topical News Lessons, Games & Activities and Grammar & Vocabulary.

Inside Out

I’ve just discovered that this website has had a big makeover since I was last there a couple of years ago.   But it still seems to be hosting the free lesson plans.

This is good news because for quite a while, I relied mostly on Inside Out to give me ideas.   The site is part of the MacMillan dictionary people so the lessons sometime refer to the MacMillan definition of words but regardless, you can still use these lesson plans with other dictionaries (I’m an Oxford dictionary man myself).

The subjects of the lessons can be a bit dry sometimes (the recent one is on litter).   So sometimes you strike out here and you have to go looking elsewhere.   But on the whole, they have some really good stuff here.

ESL Partyland

This site (which has also had a recent makeover) has some really good conversational lesson ideas.   This was the first site that my predecessor at a local language school recommended to me before she left and I can see why.   With the conversational questions that ESL Partyland offers, you will have the students talking non-stop right away.

The site also has some excellent grammar lessons which I used constantly.

So these are the ones that I used.    If you teach English to foreigners, what sites do YOU use?   Please recommend them to us in the comments.

Image Credit : Trey Menefee

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Establish International Teenage Pen Pal Exchanges with ePaLs

While much of the Internet has advanced in terms of social networks and blogging communities, for some reason the world of international student dialog has fallen by the wayside. If you sift through the web for any advanced, high-quality resources for parents or teachers to connect their teen students with other teenage pen pals from around the world, you’ll quickly realize that the pickings are very slim. MakeUseOf has covered a number of great resources for adults to meet up with other adults, such as BuddyStumbler, or Simon’s review of 3 virtual worlds that are great for meeting friends. But when it comes to young students and teenagers, special privacy rules apply in order to protect the privacy and security of those students. Finally, a service has arrived that fills that important niche – and that service is ePals.

Connect with Teenage Pen Pals Through Blogs, Email and Other Means

Throughout the years, a number of amateur web designers attempted to create an online service where students in classrooms located anywhere in the world could establish a connection with students in other classrooms. Unfortunately, almost every site created had a major flaw. Most of them were horribly designed, others were lacking in functionality or features, and far too many of them allowed teenagers (even those under 16 years old) to post their contact information (such as their email address) directly onto the unprotected website. In this day and age, that kind of lack of privacy or security for under-aged kids is unacceptable. Thankfully, every classroom across the world can now turn to ePaLs for a pen pal communication portal that answers all of those concerns, and provides all of the features that students should have had access to long before now.

Unlike just about any other pen pal website out there, this website has a very clean design with advanced features everywhere you look. Students have access to forums, blogs, and teachers can initiate contact between students by searching for other classrooms that are participating in the ePaLs service. Finding a classroom is simple – all teachers have to do is click “Search by Map” under the “Connect” menu item. On the next page, the teacher is offered a world map, or a drop down box, to select what part of the world they would like to establish a line of communications with.

Clicking on any area of the world will allow you to drill down to a specific country. Once you click on a country or region, you’ll be able to view hundreds of listings created by teachers in other classrooms who are looking for an International exchange of ideas with other students. In many cases, classrooms are taking part in a collaborative project through ePaLs, and they’re seeking out additional classrooms to collaborate with. The listing profile below is one example of such a project.

In this case, students from many parts of the world are collaborating on a project related to global warming. If you believe that your student teenage pen pals would have something significant to add to any of the ongoing projects on ePaLs, then sign them up! In the process of collaborating with students who are from other cultures and hold, at times, very different belief systems – the students could end up learning far more valuable lessons than they could ever imagine.

The best feature of this service, by far, is the secure email system that it provides to all students who are part of the service. The email system is called “SchoolMail” and the features include monitoring and content control, privacy, free email accounts, virus protection – and best of all an instant 8-language translation feature, much like Gmail’s new translation feature that Varun reviewed recently.

Finally, a social network that not only encourages teenage pen pals to connect internationally, but it’s also a well designed portal that protects the safety and security of those students. Not only does this service allow students and schools to make full use of the power of social networking, but it also serves to move the global community one step further from border walls and conflict, and that much closer to a global community of online friends who respect each other.

Do you know of any other safe, high-quality pen pal websites for students? Did you ever have an International pen pal when you were in school? Share your opinion in the comments section below.

Image credits: Linda Cronin (away till Friday)

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Here are ten amongst the many we can turn to for quick reading.

Thinkexist

I have met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you’re twenty minutes – Oscar Wilde

A compilation of 300,000 quotations by over 20,000 authors should be enough to last a lifetime. The quotations are arranged around tabbed Quotations (which give the top user rated quotations), Authors, Topics, Keywords (an alphabetical index) and a Contributors listing. Thinkexist has a search box which lets the user search by a word. Though a user needs to do a free registration to go beyond the first four pages.

You can suggest a revision, send a quote as an e-card, comment on a quotation or bookmark it. Thinkexist quotations can also be added to a website/blog through a copy-pasted HTML code. Get a daily quote in your email for free or get one printed on your T-shirt at a cost at the online store. Thinkexist takes the power of sayings quite seriously.

Quotes.net

I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse – from The Godfather

Could a website on quotations be named anything else? The site lists thousands of quotations which can be browsed, searched, heard and translated to several languages. A user can search quotes by Author, by Subject or from Movies.

A small pointer at the end of each quote takes it to its individual page where one can click the voice icon to hear it aloud, translate it through a dropdown, rate it or add it to your bibliography. Even though not all the translations are word perfect, this is a nice feature.

Quotations Book

Keep true to the dreams of your youth – Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

A very neat website with a community feel. Search for a quotation or pick it up by People or Tags. You can send it across to friends or discuss it at the website forum (quaintly called the Village Inn).

QOTD (Quotes of The Day) can be added at numerous places – websites, blogs, Facebook, Windows Vista Sidebar, Pageflakes, iGoogle, Netvibes and even as a plug-in on Skype. And of course, you can get it by daily email and feeds too.

Famous Quotes and Authors

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow – H. G. Wells

25,000 quotations from 6,700 sages is a large resource and all that is neatly arranged around the usual Topic, Author and Most Popular. If a website only has to be about the sayings of the wise and famous then this is it. But I wish they had a QOTD mailing list.

Litquotes

All things are ready, if our minds be so – William Shakespeare

Quotations gleaned from the great works of literature. Although Litquotes does not have a huge collection yet (about 1,900), its focus on literary quotations arranged around Topics, Book Titles and Authors gives us some gems.

The website also has a gift shop though for now it seems a bit limited in range.

Quotes Daddy

If you can’t convince them, confuse them – Harry S Truman

Another Web 2.0 site with a warm interface, it features over 1,000,000 quotations. It lets you add, share and even create your own quotes. The service is enhanced by customizable widgets and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) which can be added to blogs and websites.

The one feature you might like to try out immediately is the random Gmail signature quote which inserts a quote as a Gmail signature using the Quotes Daddy feed.

Quotiki

Ah, beer. So many choices, and it makes so little difference – Bender Bending Rodriguez

Quotiki is a Wiki for quotations. And just like any Wiki you can submit, edit, rate and collate quotes.

As of date, the Wiki shows a collection of 1,300+ quotes and rising. The site is typically simplistic with a search box and tabs which allows you to find quotes by Sources, People, Tag and Users.

Quotes4all

When women go wrong, men go right after them – Mae West

Surprisingly, this site does not announce itself by its name on the landing page. There’s just a random quote and the author photo. Quotations can be narrowed down by Authors, Topics, Voting or a Random choice. There is an Animation section which simply are Java applets displaying scrolling quotes.

The one feature I find handy is in the Preferences section – I can filter the quotes by size (small, medium or large). You can opt for a mailing list to get a QOTD and also use the Tools section to integrate quotations with your site, iMac dashboard or the iGoogle page.

Quotegasm

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead – Benjamin Franklin

A user-powered quotations site with a very simple but easygoing interface. Still at a nascent stage, it is advertised as the YouTube for quotes as it lets users put in new quote, edit existing quotes as well as rate, review, share, categorize, and bookmark quotes. That means you have to register which is a five second process.

Quotag

At Google, we have a saying: launch early and iterate – Google

This web service is not a straight out quotations site. It is in fact a service which allows us to ‘save, manage and share the most remarkable quotes people find while browsing the net.’ A simple bookmarklet allows us to mark the text in the browser, add tags and include it in our Quotag account for sharing. All user harvested quotes can be read by the tags. One can login to the site using a Google account. iPhone users have it good as they can import the quotations and read them on the device.

These 10 websites should be more than enough to give us a glut of great quotes.  Or do you know of any other good quotation websites? If so then speak out in the comments below.

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Studeous allows you to communicate, download, upload, discuss, and pretty much keep up with your coursework. As a teacher, you’ll be able to register, set up a class page, and get an “enroll” link that your students can use to sign up and register for the class. You then have a multitude of features at your disposal. You’ll be able keep track of all your students in a roster and easily update grades online. You can also update information regarding homework, events, tests, etc. and even create a drop box, which provides a place for students to upload assignments.

Another feature is a test generator, which has a simple interface to easily create practice tests online that can be graded automatically. Additionally, the service includes the ability for you to share files with your students. Audio files can be created into podcasts, which students can subscribe to via RSS or iTunes. In case you have to quickly send out a message to your students, Studeous lets you send them text messages, provided that they input their mobile numbers into their profiles.

As students you can check all the information provided by your instructor. A great implementation on this site is a discussion board, allowing you to talk about assignments, homework, etc, with fellow classmates and teachers. There’s even a live chat option, letting you communicate with users outside of class, and an effective messaging system that works much like email. You can also look up your grades online, create study groups and events, and access course listings.

Both teachers and students have personal pages that they see when they log in. This page serves as their primary “dashboard” from where they can harness Studeous’ services. The interface is clean and intuitive. There are also privacy options, allowing you to hide certain information from others accessing, such as your email address or phone number.

Academic institutions spend tens of thousands of dollars each year on services that Studeous does better, and for free. This means that schools with a limited budget can have access to this excellent and versatile service. Both teachers and students will enjoy Studeous to enrich their academic experience in an easy-to-use and integrated place.

However, right now it only lets you register schools within the United States. It will be nice to see an update on this that will allow schools from all over the world to register, particularly with schools from poorer areas that might not necessarily have the means to purchase something like Blackboard.

Studeous is planning a massive over-haul on the website over the summer. They will have new features and implementations that will dramatically improve the site and will be greatly beneficial when classes start up again in most places this August. I really recommend Studeous for anyone looking to change their Learning Management System for the better.

So what do you all think, especially any teachers and students out there? What’s your experience with the current services your school uses? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

By: David is a creative individual trying to find his place in this world. Visit his tech blog, Beta Cubed – B^3

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