Assessment Tool: Canvas

    Canvas is a network for educators which helps them to create digital classes, materials & assessments. Though it is not a tool that is assessment only, it includes a variety of assessment tools integrated within its system. Thanks to this feature, a teacher can use many different assessment tools to grade various assignment. For example, a teacher can create online quizzes and grade them as he/she likes, they are free to edit & customize however they want. Exit tickets can be given to students. The teacher can change the deadlines, percentages of assignments however s/he likes. Online forums/discussions can be opened by the teacher for the students. Students can do peer reviews of each other. Other integrations such as Turnitin can help the teacher for assessment. The teacher can create his/her own rubric or use Canvas' for assessments too. It is mostly about course development, but it helps plenty in the assessment of students too.

Speaking Tool: Voki

     Voki is an online, free tool where students create an avatar character and use them to talk about anything. The students can do their homework, projects or engage with each other through their avatars and their audios.

The Voki website is shown above.

The webpage also gives information on how Voki can be used.

    The students can sign up for free and create their avatar. With this avatar, they can join their classrooms or casual hangout sessions among each other. It is not only good for students but also for teachers, they can sign up as the teacher and teach their class through their avatars and as well as find designed curriculums to use for their classes made by other teachers.

Speaking Tool: Discord

 

Discord is an app that allows individuals to create groups called "servers" dedicated to a topic or just for chatting, and these servers can be divided into separate groups called "channels" that are dedicated to different topics. These channels can be put into two different categories: text channels and voice channels. These are self explanatory, the text channels are for texting and the voice channels are for individuals to speak with each other. 

A teacher could create a server for a classroom, and use the voice channels to practice speaking with the students. The teacher could also monitor the students speaking each other via muting themselves as to not distract the students while they practice. Also, as the server manager, in this case the teacher, could mute or unmute someone at any time, and they could also check if the student has lower their voice input and make it higher, so no cheating! 

Speaking Tool: Speak & Improve

    Speak & Improve (https://speakandimprove.com/) is a research project from the University of Cambridge. By using it, English learners can both improve their speaking/pronunciation by talking to the robot on the screen and also help Cambridge improve technology that will help English learners around the world. 

    The robot's called Sandi and it asks the learner some questions, then gives them a grade for their speaking. It uses new technology developed at the University of Cambridge so it can tell how well one speaks English just by listening to them. Plus, the grade that English learners get is an accurate grade on the internationally-recognised CEFR scale. This can help students understand their speaking ability for study and exams (including Cambridge exams).

Listening Video: What's the smartest age?

Comprehension check question: Why is there no single answer to the question of what's the smartest age?

Writing Tool: Ludwig

     Ludwig (https://ludwig.guru/) is a sentence search engine that helps learners write better English by giving them contextualized examples taken from reliable sources like BBC or ScienceDirect. Furthermore, it helps learners organize their thoughts and put their words in order.

    It has also a translation option where one can type a sentence in any language and the website shows if the automatic translation makes sense in real contexts. It is very useful for students of every level who want to improve their writing skills in a different language. The fact that the website acts as a corpus promotes independent discovery and learner autonomy through the exploration of authentic language. 

Writing Tool: Linguix

Linguix is an online writing tool & extension that provides grammar features, such as fixing the mistakes or improving the quality of your writing with better synonyms through AI. After checking your grammar & rewriting, it also provides a plagiarism check. However, it is not free.

This is what the user sees when he/she starts his/her writing in Linguix. Other than grammar mistakes, linguix also shows the quality of the writing as a feedback or its speech time. When one becomes a member of Linguix, he/she can make an online appointment with someone who can guide them through their writing. For students, using its alternative "Grammarly" would be better; however that is also not free.

Reading Tool: Reading Rockets

 

    Reading Rockets (https://www.readingrockets.org/)  is a nationwide multimedia initiative that provides a multitude of research-based reading techniques, lessons, and activities to assist young children in learning to read and improving their reading skills. The website's reading materials help parents, teachers, and other educators help struggling readers improve their fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

        It has an option as "Teaching Reading" and you can find many detailed options including classroom strategies, which might be helpful for novice teachers. Also, reading courses come as modules and each module focuses on a different feature of teaching reading such as fluency, vocabulary, spelling, assessment etc. 

    There are many reading topics that can help teachers to find information and assistance and the topics come with videos.

Reading Tool: Archive of Our Own (Ao3)

 

Ao3 is a website that allows users to share their creativity and read what others have written. Ao3 is actually a fanfiction sharing website, which might make it seem inadequate for classroom use to some people, but Ao3's contents and tagging system allows readers to be autonomous in their reading and learning. 

Ao3's unique tagging system allows readers to filter out what they want to or do not want to see. Readers are able to search for works that align with their interests, so they have the freedom to choose from the thousands of works Ao3 has to offer. Readers are able to select if they would perefr a light reading or not, or if they want to they can choose the language level, altough it is not very adequate. If the reader accidentally stumbles upon a work that is NSFW, the website warns them asks the reader if they wish to proceed before showing the content. This allows the readers who did not exclude the necessery tags to avoid encountering unwanted content. 

Ao3 is made by fans for fans, so the content and the grammar are not regulated or checked for errors. There is also a chance that the author of the work does not tag their work properly, so the reader might stumble upon a work that is harder for them to read based on their level. To become an author, one must be sent a digital invitation by another author, so not everyone can share their work.

In conclusion, while Ao3 can be inadequate at times, the fact that it allows readers to engage in their interests while reading in English outweighs that. 

Reading Tool: Quill Reading for Evidence

    Quill Reading for Evidence is a tool that supports students in building both language and reading skills. Having activities called "Reading for Evidence" the students read a text and then writes answers to open-ended questions based on their understanding of that text.

The official website of Quill Reading for Evidence

The presentation of the feedback process from the main page

    Below, we see an example of Reading for Evidence. On the right is the text and on the left is question with its answer box. The student reads, writes his/her answer and then clicks "get feedback". A Feedback Bot (an AI bot) automatically evaluates student responses. It serves custom feedback—per prompt—to coach students to strengthen their writing and better represent evidence from the text. Designed for students in 8th-12th grade, each activity takes 15-20 minutes to complete.

An example of a text and its answering process.

Feedback from Quill. It continues to give feedback until the student does the required thing.

    While the students work with Quill, the teacher can assign students the reading texts, as well as see their process. Seeing their process helps the teacher see what the students are missing and help them fix the problem.

Authority of the teacher pt.1

Authority of the teacher pt. 2

Vocabulary Tool: Urban Dictionary

 

Urban Dictionary is a free website that allows users to learn the meanings of every day, or newly formed, slang by givin gexplanations and examples. However, the data is provided by users themselves and is not regulated. This means that while Urban Dictionary can be a great tool for learning every day vocabulary, false information could also be spread using it. 

An account is required if you want to post, but its not necessery if you wish to access information. Urban Dictionary is easy to navigate, it provides users with information about how many people agree or disagree about what was shared, or if it is correct or not, with the like and dislike buttons under every post. Since Urban Dictionary is not regulated, some explanations for the given vocabulary may not be comprehensible to an L2 speaker due to the individual making the explanation including certain words, phrases or references in the name of humour. 

Vocabulary Tool: Learning Chocolate

     Learning Chocolate is a fun, free website that helps learners -especially beginners and children- to study vocabulary through fun games & activities. Here is the website:

    The website has an easy interface to navigate. When the student opens the page, he or she can choose any topic they like from clicking on pictures or clicking "click here to choose" that is next to "categories". Let's choose a random topic as an example:

    On this page, the student can see pictures of family members, as well as their written form and he/she can hear their pronunciation. The student can learn & listen to family members as much as he/she wants to, there is no limit. When the student is done with this part, he/she can move on to the match ups, fill in & dictation parts.

Match up 1: Matching the audios

Match up 2: Match the pictures with the words

Match up 3: Match the pronunciations with pictures

Fill in: Students write the family members

Dictation: Write what you hear

    The student is free to work on these parts as long as he/she wants to. The activities are the exact same pictures from the original vocabulary part so it is easy for students to remember. The student can go back to the original page if he/she forgets a word in order to remember it, but the game always restarts when this action is done. Overall, this is a fun gaming website to memorize & learn new vocabulary through pictures, pronunciation and matching.

Vocabulary Tool: Lexipedia

    Lexipedia (https://www.lexipedia.com/) is an online visual semantic network with a dictionary including the searched words' thesaurus (synonym), antonym, and fuzzynym (connotation) reference functionality. The website presents words' with their semantic relationships displayed in an animated visual word web. Other than English, it supports 5 languages; Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

    The noun, verb, adverb, and adjective forms of the searched word are also represented with different colors, so the students can see the definition of the word they searched in different forms when they click on those colored dots in the semantic diagram. Besides, every word comes with an example sentence which enables students to see the words in different contexts. As former English language learners and future teachers, the presence of fuzzynyms is a feature that we usually do not encounter in basic hard-copy dictionaries, so Lexipedia gives the students the opportunity to learn about the connotations of words with the visual word web. 

    For instance, when they search the verb "swim", the fuzzynyms that will pop up along the verb would be the ones below that we can see in purple, several of which are sail, drown, go down, etc. 

    When used by language teachers for vocabulary building, the visual aid of Lexipedia allows students to unintentionally see and learn many different words and contexts related to the word they are searching for.

 

Grammar Tool: Grammarly

 

    Grammarly is a writing aid in the cloud that checks texts for spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery errors. Artificial intelligence is used to locate the problem and look for a suitable substitute. Users can also alter their language's style, tone, and context according to their preferences. Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider launched it in 2009. The Google Docs-optimized beta version of Grammarly's browser extension was released in 2018. By the year 2022, it will be offered as a desktop application download, a browser extension, and a smartphone keyboard. 

Grammar Tool: Duolingo

    One of the most popular apps with its famous green owl, Duolingo can teach any language in phones and in desktop, it is also available to use for both individual student and in a classroom setting. Go to Duolingo from here.

The look for Duolingo's main webpage is like this:

When clicked on any topic, Duo gives the basic grammar rule as a "tip", like the one below:

After giving th grammar, student can click on "practice" to put his/her new knowledge on a pedestal, and Duo will give fun, simple activities like this:

Here in the beginning, Duo tests whether the student can distinguish a feminine noun, a grammar rule he gave in "tips". As the students makes progress, the activities also match the progress and become harder.

    For classroom, a teacher can create his/her own class Duo and follow students' progress, give them topics, activities and homework like below:

    Overall, Duolingo helps students to not only make progress as an individual but also with their peers as it heavily focuses on grammar and make students do repetition, translation all based on grammar as well as giving the rules. Since it is also cartoon-like, it is a fun tool that does not bore students.

Grammar Tool: British Council

    British Council (https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar) is an online grammar-learning website that provides language learners to practice their English grammar with clear grammar explanations while allowing them to test their understanding with its exercises after each grammar topic. It has lessons regarding all levels and the learners can easily find out which level they are in by taking a quick grammar test. 

                                                                                                                                                                              

    With interactive exercises under each subject, it enables students to actively participate in the class by discussing the answers with each other in the classroom environment, so the teacher can benefit from these exercises as, for example, an end-of-unit assessment test. The website also has detailed grammar lessons in text form including plenty of examples.