Rosetta Stone

I enjoyed the demo of Rosetta Stone but I think that it is very repetitive. It would work as a supplementary lesson but not as a single learning tool. It got really boring after a short while. I was really looking forward to learning spanish and I thought that this program could help me but I became very distracted. If you missed one cue it gets you behind in the lesson and you have to go back and repeat what you have already done.
This demo should be done in a quiet room with nothing going on and somewhere where you can concentrate only on what is going on with the program.
From what the demo gave it was very interactive and easy to follow so I think that it would be good for ESL students and not really overwhelming. The only problem is that it focuses on vocabulary and not so much context.
Overall I thought it to be a good program for review but not as a lesson.

ESL Commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw_kHH3zJGY

Check this out for a good laugh!

Stop Plagarism

I found a cite that once we teach our students how to use it, it may help stop the use of plagiarism in a paper. http://citationmachine.net/ This site has fields where students just have to type in the information that they know and then copy and paste what it spits out to them and put it right in the paper. This is a life saver even for me. APA, MLA whatever else there is that is constantly changing...I can't keep up. The website takes care of it all.
The only thing is that we teach the students not to cut and paste yet that is what you need to do to cite the websites, journals, books probably and easily.
I hope that you can all benefit from this best kept secret as I have!
Enjoy!

ESL website review

The site that I chose to review is http://a4esl.org/. When I was working at Lakeshore Catholic School the teacher who was mentoring me used this site so, I decided to check it out for myself. I found it very good because it assists you in making a quiz for your students, it has academic activities for students as well as fun vocabulary activities like crosswords. This site could help if you needed something for the students to do in a pinch. So if you are supply teaching and the teacher left you nothing, you could send the students to this site until you got yourself organized with a lesson.
The TESL Ontario website has a lot of ESL learner websites where students can practice many skills and teachers can find resources for their classroom. I will be looking at more of these websites but if you the reader would like to explore some more options go to: http://www.teslontario.org/new/links/links_learners.htm
There are so many more but for beginners it is best if you just keep them in one spot on the internet as it can be overwhelming to have to search. Just be careful with the TESL ontario website because there are some activities were students just read and others where they need the technology to listen. Makes sure before you send your students somewhere on the web that you first check it out for yourself so that you can anticipate problems and be ready!