Colin Gallagher's List: English Learning Related

A Visual Vocabulary site that aims to help you to build your vocabulary through hand-drawn, situation specific cartoons, drawings and sketches.

A Different Way to Read Great Literature!


This site is an experiment in teaching great literature in a very different way. Using Google Earth, students discover where in the world the greatest road trip stories of all time took place... and so much more!

AwesomeStories is a gathering place of primary-source information. Its purpose - since the site was first launched in 1999 - is to help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites.

Sources held in archives, which document so much important first-hand information, are often not searchable by popular search engines. One needs to search within those institutional sites directly, using specific search phrases not readily discernible to non-scholars. The experience can be frustrating, resulting in researchers leaving key sites without finding needed information.

AwesomeStories is about primary sources. The stories exist as a way to place original materials in context and to hold those links together in an interesting, cohesive way (thereby encouraging people to look at them). It is a totally different kind of web site in that its purpose is to place primary sources at the forefront - not the opinions of a writer. Its objective is to take the site's users to places where those primary sources are located.

Record a sketch with or without voice. Explain something, have fun, or create art.
Then embed the sketch player in your blog or point people to your sketch channel.

Early childhood education - UpToTen offers over 1000 age-appropriate learning games for kids aged up to ten !

WordSift is a tool that was created primarily for teachers. Mainly, think of it playfully - as a toy in a linguistic playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts, and to help create an opportunity to talk and play with language.

WordSift helps anyone easily sift through texts -- just cut and paste any text into WordSift and you can engage in a verbal quick-capture! The program helps to quickly identify important words that appear in the text. This function is widely available in various Tag Cloud programs on the web, but we integrate it here with a few other functions, such as visualization of word relationships and Google searches of images and videos. With just a click on any word in the Tag Cloud, the program displays instances of sentences in which that word is used in the text.

For teachers, the tool offers a quick way of assessing the text that he or she is using for instruction. Teachers assess students, and the most successful teachers use this information to guide their teaching. So why not assess the text as well? By using WordSift, teachers get a heads up on key vocabulary appearing in the text, and can line instruction up with what might be challenging for students.

Are you going to be giving students some reading about photosynthesis or the Industrial Revolution? Paste the text into WordSift to see the most frequent words your students will encounter in the text. If you have access to an LCD projector in your classroom, you can share WordSift's results directly with your students. Since WordSift integrates search results from Google images and YouTube clips into its display, you can quickly show students what chloroplasts or textiles look like with just one click.

Choose a word. Find a picture to describe that word. And write a sentence to use that word in relation to the picture! Easy!

My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, save it online or print it out in the Library.

A guide to what books are out there that are suitable for certain age groups. etc.

A fun way to start a story for particular grades. Type your name, spin the wheel for the story starter. Pick your format. Write your story.

A visual collection of near extinct words. Interesting!

Search for words in a 3D cube

For higher grades. Detailed resources activities for stories, poems.

simple. you'll see one word at the top of the following page.
you have sixty seconds to write about it.

as soon as you click 'go' the page will load with the cursor in place.

don't think. just write.

Where Kids Write, Illustrate, and Publish Their Own Books

Listen and watch a range of illustrated stories, fairy tales and fables.