Then there is Vozme, an amazing web site for Spanish teachers. Teachers or students can copy and paste or type Spanish text into the web site and then hear it read back to them. I am told by many Spanish teachers that the reader’s voice is terrific, absolutely perfect Spanish. Students can copy in segments of papers they are writing to hear them spoken aloud, or teachers can copy and paste an article from a Spanish newspaper, or a poem, or a section of a novel for students to read and listen to simultaneously. The sound files can be saved as mp3 to be downloaded into an ipod or e-mailed to others.

Yet one more interesting site is Overstream. Overstream allows students and teachers to add subtitles to youtube videos. Students can provide the foreign language text for a French or Spanish video, or they can mute the sound of a commercial, music video clip, or coming attraction of a movie to provide foreign language subtitles. Easy and very cool!

[slideshare id=171995&doc=delicious-1195485905226551-4&w=425]

First off, Delicious is a great place to back up all of your bookmarks; everyone backs up their files, but if you lost your laptop, wouldn’t you be crushed if you lost all your favorites from Internet Explorer or Safari or Firefox. Delicious provides that backup. You can then access your bookmarks(favorites) from any computer. But it is much more than a backup location: it is social bookmarking. So what does social bookmarking mean? First off, it means that you can share your bookmarks (all or just a selected group) with friends, family, colleagues and students. One classroom use of delicious is a group research project, allowing students or you to post good web sites. Students can write descriptions of the web sites they chose as part of a media literacy project.But there is even more. Social bookmarking allows you to view the bookmarks of others, so you can search for a specific topic to see if others have created a useful list, saving you the time.Then there is the advantage of tags. Tags is the web 2.0 word for categories. The advantage to normal saving of bookmarks or favorites within your web browser is that you can easily and quickly add multiple tags to each bookmark. Why is this good? Then you can easily find and sort your bookmarks. For instance, in my browser, I have a category for Web 2.0 sites, but in delicious, I can tag then as Web 2.0 plus education, plus integration, plus graphics, plus video, etc.I am now convinced that delicious is worth the time.

I am also constantly finding terrific KML overlays created by other users that can then be integrated into classroom content. My recent finds are one on the Bayeaux Tapestry, one on the spread of the Black Death, and another on population growth throughout the world. Two sites to find these files are The Google Earth Gallery and Google Earth Community Forums.

I worked with one teacher who came up with a great lesson plan for Ancient Egypt. We flew to the Ancient Pyramids and zoomed in on them in 3-D. Then she zoomed out to show the contrast between the desert location of the Pyramids and the fertile Nile Valley and to discuss the rationale for the location of the Pyramids. We then downloaded from the Google Earth Gallery a great KML file on King Tut’s tomb. The best part was that we planned the lesson in one forty minute meeting and she used in for the next class. She was thrilled.