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WordMagnets is a really useful tool that students can either use alone on a computer, or that you can use in class with a projector or IWB. Here's a short video showing you how to use it. You can download a copy of the video here and copy suitable for iPod here . WordMagnets is a simple tool that allows you to paste text into a field and then click a couple of times to change the text into word tiles a little like fridge magnets that you can drag and rearrange. Here's a text that I quickly copied in from an article about J. K. Rowling. I clicked on 'Next', then ignored the opportunity to change the background and clicked 'Next' again and I had these randomised word tiles that I could then drag to recreate the text. This is a great tool that has some really useful features. You can type in and add words to the text, or you can delete word tiles from the text by clicking on remove then clicking the words you want to get rid of. You can also change the colour and...

I've always liked sites that take images and enable you to do something interesting with them. Pim Pam Pum seems to be a company that is remarkably good at helping us to make the most of Flickr images, and I particularly like this little tool called Bookr . Bookr enable us to create nice interactive image books with text captions. Here's an example that I created based on the poem 'In White' by Robert Frost. I found the words to the poem on Poem Hunter here: 'In White' You can see the full size version here: In White by Robert Frost The books are really simple to create, you just need to type in a key word to find the images you want and then drag them onto the pages and add your text. Here's Bookr video tutorial to show you how easy it is. You can download a higher quality (4.9Mb . mov) version here: Bookr Tutorial You can download a version for iPod (5.6 Mb) here: Bookr Tutorial So how can we use this with our students ? Poems - Like my example above...

What can you do with a web cam, 12 seconds of live video and some EFL ESL students? Well quite a lot when you start to think about it. 12 Seconds TV is a new website for microbloggers! Unlike it's text based equivalents, Twitter and Plurk , 12Seconds TV enables users to post 12 second video clips. Apart from that it is very like any other microblogging site. You can sign up to follow the feeds of other users and comment on other users' video clips. 12 second TV also integrates with Twitter so that you can configure it to post links to your video clips into your Twitter feed. The image above shows how to record a 12 seconds TV clip. Click the image to enlarge How to use this to create video materials for EFL ESL students Here are a few ways you can use 12 Seconds TV to produce materials for your students or to get your students producing English. Vocabulary record / word of the day - You could ask your students to create a video vocabulary record using a12 second clip to rec...