Tools

Web 2.0 Tools for Students

Multimedia: TED

Address: www.ted.com

Description: The TED website contains videos of many hundreds of talks by the world’s leading innovators in a wide array of disciplines. The talks are inspirational, impressive, and demonstrate the cutting edge of technology and ideas. These videos are provided in a format that is ideal for adult English language learners. Each video has subtitles in many languages, all of them translated and edited by large numbers of volunteer contributors around the world. In a text box next to the video, an interactive transcript can be seen. If a student clicks on a sentence in the transcript box, the video will play at that point in the talk.

Multimedia: NPR

Address: www.npr.org

Description: The National Public Radio website contains news, art, entertainment, music, videos and discussion forums. The “podcasts” page holds an incredible archive of audio programs. Because NPR affiliate radio stations are largely listener supported, the programs are a reflection of American culture and values. This website is a useful source of information and listening practice for adult English language learners.

Multimedia: OPB

Address: http://www.opb.org/

Description: The Oregon Public Broadcasting site is a multi-media rich website providing full-length videos, podcasts, blogs, forums, and transcripts of shows pertaining to international, national, regional, and local issues. Adult English language learners will find the podcasts particularly useful as they can download them and listen to them repeatedly on their mp3 players. Many such students find the “Think Out Loud” program quite useful because it not only has discussions for them to listen to on a wide range of issues, but the forums provide an ongoing discussion in which they can take part.

Multimedia: Princeton University WebMedia

Address: http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/

Description: This website provides lectures, live events, special events, podcasts, and student showcases of material produced by Princeton University, consistently one of the world’s highest-ranking universities. Through this website, students anywhere in the world can virtually enter the classrooms of some of the most famous professors and lecturers in the world. This website is extremely useful for any adult learner of English who wishes to study in an American university. The lecture style, content, and language provide an ideal situation to prepare for success in the American system of higher education.

Multimedia: The Hub

Address: http://hub.witness.org

Description: The Hub is a “participatory media site for human rights.” It is a fully-interactive fully-multimedia site where users can upload, view, comment on, and share videos, audio, photos, and text concerning human rights issues. Content on the Hub is provided by individuals, human rights groups, networks, and organizations. Users can also connect with groups or create their own group to address a human rights issue. It is a highly-secure site and the confidentiality of users is guarded jealously so users do not have to worry about retaliation. This website is an amazing tool for students because it personally involves them in human rights issues around the world. Adult English language learners will find this site especially useful because human rights issues in their home countries are often a topic of intense interest.

Multimedia: CNN

Address: www.cnn.com

Description: The website of the popular news organization provides up-to-date news, commentary, and entertainment in the form of videos, text, and graphics. Most news stories have “From the Blogs” links where discussion forums provide students with a chance to interact with the stories that are important to them, as well has read commentary by knowledgeable sources. Also, each story has an “Explainer” button where students can find more background information about a story, along with links to related information.

Multimedia: iReport

Address: www.ireport.com

Description: A user-generated news site where all the news stories, both text and video, are submitted by non-professional journalists. It is the creation of CNN news, so stories which a CNN editorial process deems suitable are marked “ON CNN” and thus providing them with some credibility. This site would be an ideal tool for student news projects because although the stories are unedited and unfiltered, feedback is provided in the form of comments and viewing statistics. Also, stories of extraordinary significance or interest are shown on CNN regular programming. Thus, the prospect of a worldwide audience even beyond the internet could inspire greater care and creativity in the production of content.

Multimedia: BBC

Address: www.bbc.co.uk

Description: The leading international news organization website provides text, audio, and video new stories. This website is ideal for adult English language learners because it is extremely easy to navigate and the stories are written in the most simple and direct form of the language to cater to an international audience. There are also pages specifically designed for English language learners, such as online courses, vocabulary learning sections, and language quizzes.

Multimedia: Open Culture

Address: www.openculture.com

Description: This website sees itself as “The best free cultural & educational media on the web” and is extremely rich in multimedia content. It has podcasts and videos of lectures from famous speakers and professors at the leading universities in America. Adult English language learners will find the “University Video Collection” page especially useful when preparing to go to an American university.

Multimedia: Dave’s ESL Café

Address: www.eslcafe.com

Description: This website is the longest-running and most famous resource page for teachers and students of the English language. Teachers can find teaching resources, lesson ideas, and jobs. Students can study grammar, idioms, vocabulary, pronunciation, and a host of other things online. There are also student forums where students go to ask for help from professionals and other students concerning anything related to the language. There are videos, photos, and podcasts for teaching and learning.

Multimedia: Wikimedia Suite – Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikimedia

Addresses: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page, http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Description: The Wikimedia Foundation has created several tools that are extremely useful for adult English language learners. Wiktionary is a dictionary created and edited by users around the world. Wikibooks is an open-source textbook site in which users can read, contribute to, or edit a large number of textbooks on a wide variety of subjects. Wikiversity is an open-source online learning community. Wikimedia is the answer to the lack of video, audio, and other multi-media content in Wikipedia entries. It is an enormous collection of public-domain or creative commons license multimedia content.

- cc 2009 Jonan Donaldson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.