Thing #19

This was so much fun! What intelligent and creative people these designers are. I am definitely marking this page of awards to share with teachers. Two sites I want to share are Lulu and LiveMocha:

Lulu at http://www.lulu.com/ is a publishing tool. How many times have students asked if you know how they could publish their work? Believe me, English teachers get asked this all the time. This site provides for cover design, formatting, editing, ISBNs, printing, buying, and selling their work. This would be a great motivational tool for teachers who assign written work. If students think their work will be published, they will work harder on the product. I see this as a collaborative tool for the visual and language arts. I plan to show the art and language teachers. I will also share it with our yearbook sponsor. I will put this site in my faculty newsletter because you can make cookbooks, calendars etc. with this publishing tool.

Another site I liked was Livemocha at http://www.livemocha.com/
It offers free foreign language courses with self study lessons, text and audio chat tools, and connection with a community of native speakers. Two of the languages are Chinese and Russian. I wish I had known about this for our Russian students. They were often sent to the library because the teacher was not able to accommodate their needs during testing. I could sign them up for a beginning course in English on Livemocha. I’ll have this ready for this coming fall. My ESL teachers will really like exploring the possibilities of Livemocha. I looked at the English courses. There are 4 of them. The first 2 take 50 hours each. The second 2 take 30 hours each. You go at your own pace. If I were traveling to a foreign country, I would consider taking an online Livemocha course in the language of the country to which I planned to travel. Highly motivated students will find this a helpful tool.