You’ll periodically find some dead links, but you’ll also find many excellent categorized ones.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Favorite Sites.

It’s a perfect way for English Language Learners to do their math and, through listening skills, developing their language abilities.

I’ll be adding it to the Math page on my website.

Thanks to Casey Mayfield for the tip.

After they all signed-up for email accounts, it was a fun little exercise to get them feeling competent and confident with the computers. On our class blog, you’ll be able to see subsequent scaffolded online activities.

We’re in the computer lab twice-a-week for one hour on each of those two days. Our other Intermediate English class will be doing the same — they will be making their own talking animals tomorrow for posting there.

I like Brainpop a lot, and believe that it’s well worth the money for teachers of World History and United States History. Since they added closed-captioning to their animations last year, their movies became especially accessible to English Language Learners. I’ve included them on a number of “The Best…” lists. In fact, I’ve defended Brainpop from attacks in Is Brainpop Bad For Students?

I’m not teaching any Social Studies classes this year, and I felt I couldn’t make the case for our school to renew its  subscription. In my mind, at least, their movies covering other subjects just didn’t feel like they brought enough added-value to student understanding to be worth the cost (however, I could possibly see science teachers feeling differently).  My students and I liked them, but there just seemed to be enough other free or lower-cost alternatives out there.

I have to say I feel the same way about their new ESL animations.  I’ve got a number of critiques about it,  including the lack of ability for users to record their voices and compare it to how it’s pronounced correctly.   I’ll have my ESL students check them out since they’re free for now, but I believe there are plenty of lower-cost or free alternatives that bring equal — and in many cases, greater — interactive language learning opportunities.

For alternatives, check-out U.S.A Learns, the number one ranked site on both The Best Sites For K-12 Beginning English Language Learners and The Best Sites For K-12 Intermediate English Language Learners list, all the other sites on those lists.  You might also want to read The Best Sites Where Students Can Work Independently & Let Teachers Check On Progress.

As always, though, I’m open to hearing alternative points of view.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Stories.

Read The Words lets you convert any text – from a document, blog, or website – into audio with your choice from a variety of voices. You can then embed the voice player into your site. Unfortunately, it only lets you record something for no longer than 30 seconds for free — you have to be a paid member for anything longer.

Don’t worry about the description — it’s an excellent listening and reading game.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games.

I’ve placed the link on my website along with a ton of other alphabet activities under Alphabet (ABC’s).

As always, though, I’m happy to be shown a different perspective.

This list shares what I think are the best chatbots out there. I’m going to have my students try them all out later this month, and will report their assessments. The main difference that I can see is that, though most are text-only, the first two provide audio for the “bot side” of the conversation.

Here are my picks for The Best Online “Chatbots” For Practicing English (the first and the last ones are my favorites):

Why not try talking to Dave at EFL Classroom 2.0. The bot speaks and shows the text from the “bot side,” and the computer voice is pretty decent.

My Bot asks questions and answers them by showing text and providing audio through a computer-generated voice that isn’t that great.

During Christmas time, you can talk (text-only) to Santa Bot.

(By the way, I learned about these first two from Özge Karaoğlu, an EFL teacher in Turkey)

You can talk to a virtual Bear Bot

You can talk to a — I kid you not — “Socratic Zen Conversationalist.”

Pasadena City College has developed the ESL Robots Project.  Students first listen and read dialogues related to shopping,  getting an apartment, and dealing with a hotel clerk.  Then, students use the information they learned to “chat” with virtual staff in each of the three settings.  It’s quite an innovative exercise.

George is a “chatbot” recommended by Alicia Rey. One feature that I neglected to mention in that post is that you can email a record of your conversation with the “bot.” It doesn’t actually have its own url (you’d have to copy and paste it on a blog or online journal from the body of the email), but it could be a very useful asset for English Language Learners and their teacher.

Now for the site that I believe brings some added value –Virsona. It’s a relatively new tool that lets you re-create and interact with historical figures. I think it’s a brilliant idea. Users decide on a historical or fictional figure, and program a “talking bot” that visitors can chat with using text. The site is still in the experimental stage, and the bots that were available were very limited in their ability to communicate. However, if and when the site develops and more people participate, this part of the site would certainly be accessible to English Language Learners. Creating your own talking bot would take a student’s learning to an entirely different level.   The process seems fairly complicated now, but if they simplify it a bit it seems to me that high-level Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners would be able to do it.

Nik Peachey has also written a useful post about it, in addition to a lesson plan using the site.

David Deubelbeiss at EFL Classroom 2.0 has been working on some innovative ideas regarding chatbots and English language teaching. I’ll be writing a separate post about that in the future, and then be adding his resources to this list.

Suggestions and feedback, as always, are welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

It’s now gotten even better with the addition of videos. Video Snapshots for ESL/EFL Students show short video clips along with comprehension quizzes for students to take.

I’m adding the site to The Best Listening Sites For English Language Learners.

Thanks to Ressources Pour Le College for the tip.