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I recently revisited Phraseum , an app which I first discovered and reviewed in March 2014. I’m glad to see that the tool is still around, has gathered a loyal following and has developed both in terms of design and functionality since that first review . In this article I’d like to show you some of the new features and also share some ideas for how you can use it. Let me start though by recapping what Phraseum does. Phraseum is a tool that students can use to capture lexical chunks, collocations and expressions while they read online text. It helps students to collect these expressions into theme based phrasebooks that they can then use to revise and share their learning.  Within the platform there are also a number of features to help them learn the phrases, these include tagging of phrases and links through to Google translate. Phraseum also records the source of the phrase so that students can go back and find the phrases in their context.  A new feature that’s been ...

I spend a lot of time looking at different web-based tools and apps and thinking about if and how they can be used for learning. Sometimes it takes some thought and at other times it’s really obvious. With Phraseum it was instantly obvious that this was a really great tool for learning. Phraseum allows you to collect words, phrases and sentences from anywhere on the web while you you browse and organise them into social phrasebooks. Phraseum is a browser-based tool which can be activated from your browser toolbar. Simply create an account and then drag the ‘Clipping button’ bookmarklet to your favourites bar on your browser. Once that’s done you can just collect any words or phrases that you find online by highlighting them and then clicking on the bookmarklet. This opens up a window where you can add tags to the phrase and add your own private notes and annotations. The tags could be a definition, translation, part of speech or something about the context in which it could be used....

There are now a number of online video sharing communities that are specifically designed to support the development of language and communication skills. These websites don't just provide us with video content, but also the tools to help us make authentic video accessible to learners. Dotsub Authentic video can be very challenging for language learners so at times it is useful to have translation in subtitles or a transcription of the text. Dotsub is a website that enables users to upload and add subtitles to their videos. The site is community based, so you can upload your video and request that someone else translates it for you, or you can also help other people by translating or transcribing their video. You can also import videos from YouTube to add subtitles to them. To find out more read: Subtitling your video clips LangoLab LangoLab is a video sharing website designed for anyone who want to learn or teach any language. Users upload videos and add transcripts. Learners c...

I love the power of images and their adaptability for teaching, so I can't say that I'm upset to be almost overwhelmed with really great tools for exploiting Flickr at the moment. The latest of these is Flickriver , an incredibly simple Flickr search tool that creates an endless webpage (just keep scrolling and the page keeps getting longer!) of Flickr images based around either a search term or whatever it finds interesting on the particular day you visit the site. This is great because it provides you with and endless stream (or I should say river) of images as you scroll down the page. You can keep scrolling and pull in thousands of images to the page. This is what it looks like. I started by just scrolling through the random images that appeared when I opened the page, then I went back and typed in 'sport' to see what images would appear. How to use this with our EFL ESL students This is a great tool to use with a projector or an interactive whiteboard as we can p...

I've just found this very useful tool that allows you to compare words and phrases and how they are used online. It works very simply by taking the two words or phrases that you type in and searching through Google to give you the results for each word. It tells you which is the most popular and how many pages each one appears in. There are a few other tools around which can do a similar thing, but I prefer Google Battle , (an alternative is Google Fight ) because it shows you a nice graphic of a smiling face and a sad face for the winner and loser, and because it also supplies links to the Google results, which means you can have a look at the context in which each word or phrase appears. This can supply valuable information about the way we use words in different contexts and their lexical grammar. Here's an example comparing 'operate on' with 'operate in' The very first result for 'operate on' shows that it is being used in a medical context. If you ...

I have to admit that when I first saw Bubblr , I thought it was just a simple tool for adding speech and thought bubbles to images, but when I started to try it out I discovered that it can do far more than that. You can use Bubblr to search through Flickr images, then drag them onto an image line and create a long sequences of images with text /speech bubbles / thought bubbles etc. These can then be printed, saved online or embedded into a blog. This quick tutorial shows you how it's done. Right click to download an .mov version Bubblr tutorial So how can we use this with our EFL ESL Students? Possibly one of the easiest ways to use this tool is like a picture dictionary. If you have a data projector in your classroom you can use it live to cross-check vocabulary and ask your students which they think is the best image to depict a word. By the end of the class you could have a sequence of images that represent all the new words students have learned in that lesson and then simpl...

I've just discovered Wordle , which is a really useful site for creating word clouds. The word clouds are created by entering either a text, URL or del.icio.us user name into a field. The site then generates a word cloud based on the frequency of key words in the text or webpage. Here's what a word cloud based on the URL of this blog looks like. The word clouds are really easy to create and can be printed up for classroom use or saved to a gallery on line. To see how this is done watch the tutorial movie below. How to create a Wordle word cloud You can download a higher quality Quicktime version here (Right click and the 'Save as') Or download for i-pod / i-Tunes here How to use this with EFL ESL students This is a wonderful flexible tool to use with students. Revision of texts - You can paste in short texts that your students have studied recently. Show them the word cloud and see if they can remember what the text was about and how the words were used within the tex...

I’ve just seen this new website called the Carbon Account . It’s sort of an ecology 2.0 social network. Once you register you fill in details about your household and your travels, the meter readings for your bills and the amount of miles you travel in your car etc and it will then calculate your carbon emissions for you. You can see what the carbon emissions of other users are too and work at reducing your carbon emissions. You also have the option to network with other site users to offer support and encouragement, so the site is a bit like a weight watchers for the environmentally sound! If you want to see how it works then take a look at the video on the site at: http://www.thecarbonaccount.com/ The site also has some well written information on what carbon emissions are and how they are calculated . The site owners can also help set up special accounts for groups and give tips on reducing emissions. This is a really good site to base a class project on. Collecting and inputting t...

I've just been looking at a useful websites called Gifup that enables users to quickly and easily create animated gifs / image sequences like the one below. This seems to me a like a really useful way of revising and teaching vocabulary. What are the sports? This is a gif that I created to revise some sport vocabulary. It took about 3 mins to make using images from Flickr. Here's a tutorial movie showing how I made it . (1.2Mb swf) It was very simple and just involved searching around my key topic and selecting a few images. Then a couple of clicks and the site generated my gif and gave me an 'embed code' to add it to the site. (See my previous tutorial to find out how to embed images and video into webpages on your desktop) How to use this with students Collect up gifs related to any vocabulary area you want to teach or revise. Embed them in an html page on your desk top and start a collection. Each time you add new ones send the html page to your students. (They will...

This is a really nice tool that I have just discovered. It's called PhotoSoup and it generates wordsearch activities based on any topic in just seconds. It's very simple and works on images from flickr . You simply type in your topic and the site automatically generates a word grid and image clues. You then have 90 seconds to find all the words. You can get hints and even get it to show you the answers. Watch a short video to see how it's done . (499k swf) How to use it with students This is great for vocabulary revision, especially with higher levels. Students could even learn some new vocabulary from it. It would look great on an interactive whiteboard (IWB) or you could give students a collection of vocabulary themes and get them to work on their own. Good to use as a filler for students who finish early What I like about it It's free Each wordsearch it generates is pretty much unique The timing adds an element of motivation and competition to it It's just so s...