Using YouTube for Vocabulary Development

An ELT Notebook: Using YouTube for Vocabulary Development

Nice lesson plan and a good way to get feedback on your lesson plans. Put them up on your blog and ask people their opinions of the lesson plan. You'll notice that someone commented on this the next day saying that they already used it.

Dan

Five Flashcard makers online

Virtual=Real: Five Flashcard makers online

Thanks to Elizabeth Hansen-Smith reporting on a posting by Larry Ferlazzo.

This is a list of online flashcard makers. For many reasons, I would say, "why bother?" It seems that this is just a prime example of needlessly taking the physical and putting it online.

However, like many online services, the benefit is largely in the portability of the "cards". I, for one, have hundreds of Korean flashcards (traditional notecards). The problem is that I couldn't possibly carry these around with me. However, I have a computer connected to the Internet just about everywhere I go. Faced with a little free time, online flashcards would be a great, productive way to fill that time.

Some of these allow sharing (i.e., Web 2.0), which would be beneficial both for sharing your lists and for viewing what others are studying.

Dan

SuperMemo 2004

This is a neat-looking software reviewed on TESL-EJ (a nice journal with many practical articles for language teachers).

The software seems a little overpriced in today's market, but the features are quite useful. It is basically a flashcard program, but it has a lot of features that you aren't likely to find on the free ones, including support for HTML and multimedia (I don't know if you can embed something from Google Videos or YouTube--that would be nice).

Given the price, I don't think that I'd buy it, but something like this to provide ongoing review of language learning is a good idea. An approach like this is something that we should encourage our learners to do.

Dan