Thing 12

I decided to check out Quizlet first. I made an example ESOL lesson that could be used with beginners. What I liked best about this is that there is voice recognition capability with some of the activities. There are better websites for making practice games, but I haven't found ones with good voice recognition. This way students who have to work on their speech will have to practice until the computer recognizes what they're saying. I tried mispronouncing words and the computer is very forgiving, unfortunately. Still, if their speech is super difficult, this might help. One downside to this is that there is no modeling for the kids. You can't click, hear the word, and try it yourself. Still, this is a decent site as you're practicing the vocabulary you need where on other sites, they may have voice recognition for words that don't relate to your vocab of the week.

I could use this for French, too, but the production would have to be in English. The program doesn't recognize spoken foreign words. Still, I could have students reading French and responding in English for initial practice to learn the vocab.

For social apects of Quizlet... you could have online chat or subscribe to a community. For example, you could set up a series of quizzes under Ms. Bathurst's French I. The kids would subscribe and be able to look at all the quizzes available. Now, say that Jimmy and Sean are on at the same time. They can use an instant messaging (IM) on the site and write to each other while they are logged in.

For my second tool, I decided to check out Timetoast. This site was ok if you have specific dates. I noticed that there is no option for a range of years and the site will plug in a day and month even if you don't want it to. For example, you want to say something happened throughout a certain year, it won't post just the year. Or there was an event from February to March, you can't have non-specific dates or show the range. I liked how you could upload pictures quickly and easily. You could label the pictures and be able to click for more information. One of the timeline examples was bilingual, so you could read in English, then click for more information in Spanish. So, you can add whatever description you want. You could also add links to the information on your timeline. You could link to articles, for example. The only real problem I saw with the site was the dates.

For social aspects, you could leave comments for the creaters. If there is a question or you want to point out errors or just say this looks great, you're able to do that.

One of the big projects I do with my French 2 classes is a timeline using past tense. Below is an example with Johnny Depp. Students have to choose one person and write out what the person did using passé composé. We tried doing this before with PowerPoints, but not everyone knew how to use the program or they turned out weird because the students tried to do too much with graphics, sounds, etc. This is nice, clean, and simple to use. From the description and examples, Dipity does more, but Timetoast would be great for those kids who aren't tech savvy. Offering both options would be a great way to accommodate for different types of learner abilities.