Top Italian Web Apps and more

Here's one for our resident Italian teacher in the class. Read/Write Web is an educational technology blog that I follow. Actually, it's more like a technology blog, but I find so many of the posting relevant to education.

In this post the author describe some Italian applications and describes the state of Web technology in Italy.

Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Here is an interesting website for advanced grammar. It is a Blog/Podcast that covers really interesting grammar points.

The blog is a transcript of the podcast, which may help those of you who have trouble following the audio version. Actually, it even helps me because I need to see these things in print to really understand them. I assure you that these are points that I need help with all the time. This is one of the reasons I brought 4 of my best grammar books with me to Seoul :)

Grammar Girl's podcast is clear and she speaks at a moderate pace. It's slow enough that it will be easier for high-intermediate/advanced English langauge learners to understand, yet it's not so slow as to bore either the advanced learners nor their native English speaking teachers.

Enjoy.

Dan

Co-link

Thanks to Autono Blogger for pointing this one out.

I don't think that I have the time to add this function to my websites right now, but it's really a fascinating approach. Co-link essentially adds a menu to each of your links. That menu lists possible sites to visit. That's nothing special. What's great is that it also allows users to add links to the menu.

Just imagine. You visit a website and they link to a resource that you don't think is very good or you think that they also need to link somewhere else. You can just add a link there.

Now the down side. There doesn't seem to be any controls for managing these links. Let's face it, not everyone out there is looking to add value to your site. It would be nice if there were some tools to mitigate those nasty folks.

A site like Blogger could add this kind of control and use the same interface that they have for comments. Maybe even link moderation, just like they have comment moderation.

Maybe it's more trouble than it's worth, but I still think that it is even more than neat tech, it's a useful tool.

Welcome to CALL fall 2006

Hi Folks,

Welcome to the CALL Class blog. I'll use this blog solely for posting reviews and "how to's" of technologies and resources that I find useful for langauge teachers. For the first few postings, I'll cover some of the sites that we are using in this course including Moodle, Blogger, & Wikispaces.

Your role as a reader (and student) is to read the postings, check out these technologies, and comment on my postings. Comments can range from, "that's great...." to "how do I..."

Let me know if you have any questions.

Google Librarian Center

Some really good printable posters from Google on how to better use the search engine to find what you want to find.

My first Amazon/BookSurge self-publishing project

How would you all like to publish? Imagine a class putting a book together and having it available on Amazon.com! This could be really cool and the stripped down version is only $99 (though I'm not sure who would pay it)

This is a blog/web posting of the process that this guy followed to publish his own book on Amazon.

ULRTMT - Skype Version Now Supports Real-Time Translation

This is a very interesting utility that could be a great communication tool (not solution) for all of us.

Supposedly, this translator will translate, in real-time, one language to another in a Skype chat. Yet another reason for me to switch to Skype. I could even chat with my mother-in-law!

Most of the modules are BETA versions, but they might be worth a try.