BBC Learning Zone

The BBC have a vast number of useful resources for teaching and learning.

The Learning Zone is a good place to start. This page can give you access to:

Class Clips which are short video clips which may be useful in the classroom to make a point or start discussions. The are suitable clips for all levels (primary, secondary and college).

Schools Television - providing a schedule of programmes coming up and a link to Bitesize Revision resources and teacher's notes.

Language and Travel - providing a schedule of programmes coming up and links to some useful language websites.

Dictionary.com

Today's post was prompted by a discussion with some of my students about academic writing and the difficulties they have with this.

The Dictionary.com website is a very useful tool for those wishing to check the meanings of words or search foar alternative vocabulary. However is has much more to offer than this including

a translation tool and multilingual dictionary

language and grammar guides and podcasts

puzzles

and much more.

Livemocha - learning languages

Livemocha is another language learning website, offering interactive lessons and exercises and the opportunity to participate in an online community of other language learners, native speakers and tutors.

You will need to register to access all the facilities but once you have, you can learn at your own pace on a range of different activities to learn or develop your English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Hindi, Italian, Russian, or Japanese.

Babbel - learning languages

The friendsabroad social networking website introduced language learners to native speakers of other languages enabling them to support each other's language learning and build up relationships.

This site as now been taken over by Babbel another language learning site. Babbel a multimedia learning resource. In addition to the learning packages, Babbel facilitates interactions with native speakers or learning partners which enables members to practice and develop their linguistic skills. Languages supported are English, Spanish, French, German and Italian.

This is worth trying if you want to learn a language or if you teach languages.

Intute Virtual Training Suite

Aimed at both students and lecturers, these Intute Virtual Training Suite provide free teach yourself tutorials offering information about internet resources for different subject areas. Some of these include:

* Geography
* Digital Photography
* Learning Languages
* Modern Languages
* Anthropology
* Business
* Education
* Hospitality and Catering
* Leisure, Sport and Recreation
* Social Research Methods
* Social Statistics
* Travel and Tourism
* Health and Social Care
* Health and Well-being

Education, Fun and Blogging

I have spent sime time today looking at other people's blogs. What a wealth of information there is available to us just from these! I have found an etch-a-sketch website which reminded me of my youth and a site offering to teach me mandarin.

I have also found the first Chinese 3D Virtual Tourism Site - Virtual Forbidden Palace, and a game to test my skill as a supermarket manager.

There is so much more out there so why not try searching google for topics of interest. But make sure you have some spare time before you start!

Language Learning

I tried this language learning site and liked it...it offers 12 different languages - you may want to try it. http://www.mangolanguages.com/