Neat sites

I've been digging around looking for interesting sites I might want to include in my web portfolio. I've found some pretty neat things that I can see myself using in ESL classes. They offer interesting ways for students to practice using English--reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Here's one where you can read the headlines from newspapers all over the world:
Newseum

Here's one that lets you draw comics. I think ESL students might enjoy being creative with this:
make believe
I tried my hand at comic writing--it's not very good, but it was fun: my comic

Comic Creator is similar to makebeliefscomix.

This one helps students learn spelling through interactive games. It has an audio file so students can hear how the word is pronounced and it gives an example of the word in a sentence.
spelling

Sketchcast acts like a whiteboard where you can sketch, draw, write, or whatever.
What makes this more interesting is that you can record audio as you are sketching. This would be a good opportunity for students to practice speaking.

Clover lets individuals to write vignettes including animation.

This site allows students to create multimedia presentations. You can use audeio, video, still images and text to put together a digital show:
surweb

I've used ask.com many times but now I know about answers.com. This is a tool that let's you get definitions of words as well as other information just by highlighting the word. You download the software onto your computer. This could be a very handy tool for English learners to easily find definitions of unknown words as they read webpages.
answers

Many students don't take the time to proofread their work. This is probably more true of ESL students. And even when they do proof their papers, they don't see many errors. Here's a site that helps students practice proofreading. It can be a nice exercise for developing grammar skills as well.
proofreading

Those are some of the recent sites I've found that will let my ESL students practice English in a number of fun, interesting, and educational ways.