Some Helpful Links for Teachers

The links on this page 

•     are all ones that I have visited and found useful in my work
•     are limited in number because I find a really long links page makes me think "Life's too short for this"
•     are accompanied by my comments
•     will be checked regularly (but if you find any 'dead' ones please let me know)

The big sites that have their own lists of links

 Dave's ESL Cafe: 
http://www.eslcafe.com/
Opportunities for chat, discussions, finding hints and ideas, and of course links.  Huge site.

Linguistic Funland 
http://www.tesol.net/tesl.html 
Everything from e-pals, jobs and articles to materials, activities and links galore

Sites that make a teacher’s life easier

http://school.discovery.com/
This is the schools’ site of TV’s Discovery Channel.  There’s lots here that I’ve found really useful although it’s not specific to EFL or ESL. You’ll find teaching tools, clipart, a worksheet generator, quizzes, lesson plans, and the really useful Puzzlemaker.

  www.lyrics.com 
Need song lyrics?  I’ve always found what I needed here.  Be ready to fight off the pop-ups though!

  http://web.uvic.ca/hcmc/clipart/  
Clipart, but especially for low level EFL/ESL classes ( it has pictures representing prepositions for example) 

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/
Useful stuff for any teacher.  I use their country outlines (in the geography section) and pictures to label.

  www.insideout.net/register.htm

Need a lesson quickly?  As long as you're registered there are some good ones here.

English to Go
www.english-to-go.com/english/ 
Instant Lessons based on news articles from Reuters.

ESL-go: English as a second language learning and teaching.
www.eslgo.com/
A free ESL site for teachers and students.  Includes a forum where students can "chat" and lots more useful stuff.

Teaching Issues

 The Internet TESL Journal
http://iteslj.org/
Good for articles on wide range of subjects.

  http://www.teflfarm.com
A large and rather ‘in yer face’ site but with lots of useful stuff including articles by big names (Mario Rinvolucri, Scott Thornbury, Catherine Walter, Peter Viney)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/teachingenglish/index.shtml Teachers’ site from the BBC World Service.  Sensible articles, and you can send in questions, etc.

Online material to use with students

www.bellenglish.com 
There's a wide range of exercises for students, an assessment test, vocabulary exercises such as Label the Picture, a language learning game, and a lot of exercises at all levels working on grammar, reading, writing, listening and vocabulary.  In addition there's an FCE course, a business English course on Telephoning, a chat room, bulletin board, e-postcards.  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/index.shtml 
This is an excellent site.  Students can listen to and read the news at the same time and there’s a glossary to help.  Then they can send in their own comments which may be published.  Lots of other features too.  I like Lingo, which contains slang and colloquial expressions listed by subject.

  http://www.learnenglish.org.uk/index.asp
This is the British Council’s site which is also very good.  There is a weekly theme (and an extensive archive of these).  Also English for Kids, song lyrics, tests, games, grammar, links etc.

  http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/
All sorts of activities here.  The text to speech is fun: you type in a dialogue for example and the computer reads it to you.

Computer skills for teachers

  Phil Brabbs’ Homepage

http://www.volny.cz/brabbs/

A range of worksheets to help you improve your computer skills.

Downloadable Authoring software

Hot Potatoes
 http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/
Make your own crosswords,, matching activities etc for students to do online

Teachers Pet
www.teachers-pet.org
Allows you to easily remove all punctuation, capital letters, vowels etc from your text.

There are more online-available exercise development tools here.

Other miscellaneous resources

  Hotels
http://www.infotel.co.uk/
Hotel details anywhere in UK and worldwide.  Useful for hotel descriptions. 

  Jobs
http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/
Job adverts organised by category.  Especially useful for business English.

Horoscopes
http://www.horoscope.com/
For future tense work.

Lives
www.biography.com
Background information for balloon debates etc

Weather
http://weather.yahoo.com/  
For teaching weather vocabulary etc.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/glance/default.asp
For the latest stats about the UK.