I’ve been gone for about a week, and have been trying to catch-up today with everything that can pile-up in one’s absence. Here are a few Web 2.0 applications that have recently begun:

Clueray is an interesting looking search engine. It appears to have a bunch of bells and whistles that I’m still trying to figure out. It’s another tool that shows website images in search results, and that’s what makes it most useful to English Language Learners (in my book, at least). I’ve placed the link with other accessible search engines under….Search Engines on my website.

This Is My Jam lets you make a quick and easy mix of short snippets of your favorite songs, and then allows you to embed or link to it. English Language Learners can create a mix, and then write about what songs they chose and why. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the site, but it may be possible that students could access music inappropriate for the classroom. I’ve placed the link under Student Songs.

Spongefish (which I learned about from Mashable) is a new site that allows you to create instructional presentations in a variety of multi-media formats. There are a lot of these kinds of how-to sites around. Spongefish seems to have a step-by-step process for creating an instructional presentation that might be a little more helpful to English Language Learners than some of the others, though.

Every week there seems to be another site that lets you create instant chatrooms for collaboration in real-time. Chatterous is another one that appears indistinguishable from all the others I’ve posted about and have listed on my website under Collaboration Sites — Real Time. Too bad the time zones don’t work for our Sister Classes project or something like this would be really helpful.