Online Resources

Comprehensive Hotlist of Online Audio Resources

Online Audio and Beyond by Jen MacArthur offers a comprehensive list of links to audio materials including radio, podcasts, and other resources.

Other Resources for Listening and Speaking

The program iTunes has a number of academic-focused resources for both language learning and educational purposes in their online store. Ifyou have a copy of iTunes, browse through the podcasts to see what you might find personally interesting. Most of the educational podcasts (including lectures at many well-known American and British universities) are free. Here are some that I have found and enjoy tuning into:

• The Princeton Review Vocabulary Minute
• Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
• Merriam Webster's Word of the Day
• The News Hour with Jim Lehrer
• NPR Talk of the Nation
• 60-second science by the Scientific American
• Stanford Technology Ventures Program
• Harvard Business School's HBR Idea Cast
• Dr. Bonner: Anatomy and Physiology
• American Public Media: Garison Keiller's Writer's Almanac

Digital Stories offers ideas and tips for integrating technology with storytelling and drama in your classroom.

Pronunciation

About.com has a collection of useful websites

Some good tips for accent reduction from Accurate English

A guide with sound bites of the sounds of English (British and American pronunciation included) at Anti-Moon

For a fabulous review of the sounds of English, including animated demonstrations of the organs of speech as well as sound files of the phonetic alphabet for English, visit The University of Iowa's phonetics page.

British Council has a fun and interactive pronunciation chart for listening to and practicing the sounds of English.

A fun English "pronunciation test" that includes all of the sounds of English and some of their opaque spellings can be found in this poem called English is Tough.

Here is a hotlist of Pronunciation Resources on the Web that is very comprehensive.

Okanagan College Pronunciation/Listening Webpage

Technology in the Classroom

Pbwiki lets you quickly set up your own free, hosted, password-protected wiki to edit and share information.

Moodle is a course management system designed to help educators who want to create quality online courses. The software is used all over the world by universities, schools, companies and independent teachers. Moodle is open source and completely free to use.

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Online Audio and Beyond: A pbwiki guide to using audio in the EFL classroom.

Odeo is a free on-line audio publishing site.

SurveyMonkey is a revolutionary new tool to create and publish custom surveys in minutes, and then view results graphically and in real time.

Filamentality is a fill-in-the-blank tool that guides you through picking a topic, searching the Internet, gathering good Internet links, and turning them into online learning activities. Support is built-in along the way through Mentality Tips. In the end, you'll create a web-based activity you can share with others even if you don't know anything about HTML or serving web pages.

Puzzlemaker is a service provided by Discovery.com that allows you to make word puzzles (and other kinds too!) for your students.

Have you found other tools that are useful for teaching speaking and listening? Send them to Jenn at uhler@ut.ee and she'll post them here for others to see!