Online to Offline: 

Improving Classroom Lessons

Compiled by Deborah Healey

This is a selection of websites for online or offline resources. They offer a range of items, including lesson plans, online activities, web page creation resources, and offline possibilities.

Lesson plan sites

  • Houghton Mifflin Education Place - In addition to support for Houghton Mifflin textbooks, this site offers lesson plans for grades K-8 and graphic organizers to print out.
  • EnglishClub.com - lesson plans by level
  • EverythingESL.net - Lesson plans, mostly for primary and secondary students, by topic
  • ITESL-J - thousands of links to ESL/EFL lesson plans
  • PiZZaZ: People interested in zippy and zany zcribbling by Leslie Opp-Beckman - an extensive list of links to writing resources and lesson plans, including poetry, stories, reports, and more.

    • Vocabulary/language arts

  • Crossword puzzles to use online  (see links to crossword puzzles for offline use in Handouts)
  • Dave’s ESL cafe by Dave Sperling - quizzes and other activities. Some caution urged with the discussion boards - the comments may not be suitable for younger children. Sample quizzes:
  • Educational games at Houghton Mifflin Education Place - for example, students can guess definitions for obscure words or create their own definitions for the words of the week or create a "mad lib" to practice parts of speech onlin at Wacky Web Tales
  • Grammar Practice Park from Harcourt School Publishers has more online activities, not specifically for ELT.
  • ITESL-J's getting acquainted dialog by Vera Mello
  • Grammar quizzes at ITESL-J - for example, see two about Australia at http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/quizzes/9801/mg-australia.html and http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/quizzes/9801/mg-australia2.html . The HTML quizzes can be saved to disk for use offline. You can select by skill and level. If you save quizzes to disk a lot, please ask the authors for permission.
  • ITESL-J: Conversation Question Guide - suggestions for questions to spark discussion or writing and handouts for classroom use
    • Poetry links-
    Japanese sounds for Haiku inspiration
    Create your own pseudo-Haiku
    How to create "sausage poems" - good for low-intermediate and up.
  • Terry the Terrible Teacher - error correction practice online
  • Mystery stories to read online or offline - new ones daily and weekly

    • Science

  • Online movies about health, science, and technology at BrainPop. Users can watch up to three movies per day for free. See the sample page about deserts.
  • Global warming and climate change - follow a team of researchers through the rain forest in Costa Rica.

    • Collections of links that sort by topic

  • EL Easton - large compendium of links by topic. No explanation of what’s at each link, but there are a lot of them.
  • ESL Study Hall by Christine Meloni - links are described and organized by skill area
  • ESL Independent Study Lab by Michael Krauss - links organized by skill and level. Designed for secondary level and adult learners.
  • Harcourt School Publishers offers math and reading activities. The samples are free; more activities are available to those who buy Harcourt textbooks. A nice online math glossary for primary and middle school grades is the Animated Math Glossary - print out some pages to use offline, as well.
  • Internet Public Library Youth Division - more links for primary and secondary students and teachers. A good link for young children is UpToTen - some games, songs, and activities to use online for free, as well as pictures to color online or print to use offline; you can also order the commercial versions to use offline.
  • Kids Domain - another site for primary and secondary school teachers, with articles and lots of software to download organized by age group and by topic.
  • KidsClick! - search sites selected by children’s librarians by topic. This says what grade level each site is for and whether or not there are images. A good site for those concerned about safe content.

    • Creating handouts

  • Crossword puzzle makers
  • Word search makers, etc.
  • Boggle - print out the screen and see how many words students can make

    • Media sites

    Use clip art for handouts, sounds and movies for web pages and PowerPoint presentations. PowerPoint requires .wav format files for best results.
     
  • Clip art
  • Movies
  • Sounds

    • Creating web pages for online or offline use

  • Use Netscape Composer - this is part of Netscape Communicator.
  • Microsoft Word: select Save as HTML from a Word document. This creates large files.
  • Download Half Baked Software’s Hot Potatoes. Free for educational use. This creates multiple choice and short answer, cloze, and scrambled sentence exercises and crossword puzzles that can be run offline or online.

    •  

     

    Return to the Online to Offline page
    Go to The Attic, Deborah Healey's home page
    Go to the English Language Institute home page
    Go to the Oregon State University home page

    http://www.onid.orst.edu/~healeyd/qatar/onlinetooffline.html
    Last updated 16 March 2002 by Deborah Healey, deborah.healey@orst.edu