Enhancing interaction, communication, and learners' autonomy with some tech tools.

On one of the last weeks of this online course we still learn new ways to use technology in teaching. I am sure there are tons of resources online to be discovered, and we , as teacher, we are long-life learners that need to discover new tools constantly. But so far I have learned about some interesting sites to enhance interaction, communication and autonomy. 

Blogger.com , nicenet.org , or google sites give you the possibilities to have online spaces to interact, communicate, evaluate, practice and promote autonomy. These three sites let you communicate and interact with students and parents. On blogger.com posts can be publish and students or anybody can add comments. Google sites allow you to have a site of your course, like we have in our online course. I found this tutorial about becoming an e-teacher using Google sites https://sites.google.com/site/becominganeteacher/home . And last, but not least we have nicenet.org that permits you to have discussions about topics, share links and assignments.

Make exercises online to print out

• Tools for educators - word search, bingo, crossword puzzles, and board games: http://www.toolsforeducators.com/ 
• Lanternfish - flash cards, bingo games, matching, multiple choice exercises to print out: http://bogglesworldesl.com/
• Easy Test Maker (paper tests):http://www.easytestmaker.com/default.aspx

Make exercises to use online or offline on a computer or to print out

• Hot Potatoes - download this program at http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ to use it on your computer. It's easy to use and lets you create matching, cloze, scrambled sentence, and multiple choice exercises and crossword puzzles.
• Exercises at http://eolf.univ-fcomte.fr/index.php?page=technically-interesting-hot-potatoes-pages
• Crossword Puzzle Games - create crosswords to save and use on a computer or print out: http://www.crosswordpuzzlegames.com/create.html

Make exercises online to use online:

• Web Poster Wizard - free website for teachers and students to use as part of a course. It uses a very plain format, but it's very easy to create something with text, one graphic, and links on each of 4   pages:http://wizard.4teachers.org/
• SMILE- a variety of web-based activity generators. Requires a free registration. Click on "I am a new user" on the opening page in order to register. The applications here are quite interesting, but they take more time to learn to do.http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/mimea/smile/v2/index.php

ANVILL is a free Course Management System (CMS)  that has an array of possibilities. ANVILL is a speech-based toolbox for language teachers and its core are very modern web-based audio and video tools from duber dot com and the University of Oregon: Voiceboards, LiveChat, and Quizzes and Surveys and  TCast. Teachers can create media-rich lessons. There are templates for audio, video, and image tasks; there are also tools for text-based discussions like blogs and forums. Whether you're linking to existing web content, or uploading your own texts or media files. 

I have a lot to work on developing sites or activities for my courses, but it is really encouraging to work with tools that can enhance communication, interaction, autonomy and most importantly learning.