Internet is a great source for teacher to boost four skills of our students as well promoting their active word learning. Here are some tools to help us: Free Rice is a world food programme that donates 10 grains of rice to help end hunger for every answer that you give correctly. This is a very meaningful way of practicing vocabulary with kids. Confusing Words is a collection of 3210 words that are troublesome to our students. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused. Word Spy is an online dictionary where you can find the new words that are added to English. GraphWords  is an online thesaurus that helps you find the meanings of words and show connections among associated words. You can easily see the meaning of each by simply placing the mouse cursor over it. Knoword is an online game that tests your vocabulary by matching the definitions with the right words. Vocabulary is an online dictionary and a web tool that lets you improve your vocabulary. VocabGenii is an online vocabulary game where you create a word that matches the definition provided from the unscramble letters. Rhymer helps you to find words that will rhyme with the word that you have provided. Quizlet is a flashcard learning websites where you can create flashcards y sets for a wide-range of subjects.  PhotoMunchrs is an online game where you need to "munch" the pictures that correctly illustrate the word. Enjoy! More to read: Build Your Vocabulary With Web Tools  

"Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better. " Creative writing activities has always been my favourites in English classes. They are great and meaningful ways to stimulate creative thinking  and motive our students to write!  Today, I would like to introduce you a blog which is a great way to promote writing activities in the classroom. It is PhotoPrompts where you can find creative writing starters  with a picture and a prompt for you to think about to write. What a lovely way to make kids write on different topics!! Here are some ideas to use this in education: Decide with your students on the picture prompt that you would like to write. Choose one of the prompts and turn it into a project. When students finish writing their story, vote for the best one! If you think the prompts are a little bit difficult for your students, try writing yours! or even ask your students to create their own prompts. How fun is that! It’s amazing how people can inspire you with their ideas! Thanks to them as they are certainly making the world a better place for me and for you!

Story Sharing Web conference is starting tomorrow! If you are interested in learning more about storytelling, this will be the right event for you! It is completely free, and you can register here: http://storysharing.eventbrite.co.uk/ There are many friends and great educators that will be presenting there. You can check the conference program here. I will also be doing a talk called "Once Upon a Tool" where I will be talking about easy web tools that you can use as story starters with your learners. My session will be at 12:00-12:30 (GMT) and 14:00-14:30 with Turkey time. You can check your time zone here. Looking forward to meeting you all there online! Stay inspired!

Internet has been a great source for storytelling activities. Here are some of the web tools that you can use as story starters with your learners. Piclits is web tool that presents you with a random picture and a long list of words such as nouns, adjectives, verbs and universals. You simply drag and drop the words onto the picture that describes it. When you finish, you can email, blog or share your story via different social networks. You can also choose freestyle which lets you write your own words on the picture. In the classroom, decide on the words that describe the picture and use it as a story starter. PhotoPrompt is not a web tool but a blog where you can find creative writing prompts to motivate your students in writing! Simply, vote for a creative writing idea and let the creative ideas sparkle in your class. StoryBird is a web tool where you can create your own collaborative story book using professional artists’ illustrations. You can give the first page of a Storybird story that contains a picture and the beginning of the story and ask your learners work in collaboratively to complete the story.  WordTamer is an interactive virtual carnival where you can develop characters, setting or a plot for your story. In each step, you can print out your story or watch videos to help you as you develop your story. In the class, develop your stories together with your students. OneWord is tool which gives you one word, as the name suggests, as a story starter. You try to write a story using the given word in 60 seconds. When you finish, you can publish your story and get a link to share it. Use this web tool as a story starter in the classroom. BuildYourWildSelf lets you create your own wild self by attaching animal parts to a human body. When you finish, you can send the picture as an email. Use the wild safe you have created as a story starter. Ask questions to build your wild self’s character and let the story begin. TheStoryStarter is a simple but an effective tool that generates story starters. Just click on the button and get the first line of the story. It can be "The grandma was walking in the bank.". Write the rest in the the classroom. Wordle is a famous web tool that generates "word clouds" from text that you provide. Copy and paste a story and ask learners to guess the story by asking them some guiding questions. Let them write the story, when they finish, give them the real text and compare their stories. Find the similarities and vote for the best version. Voxopop is tool to create collaborative and threaded audio discussions that enable users to record their speaking for others to listen and respond to. Simply, record your voice with the first line of your story and ask your learners to leave their audio messages by building on each other’s sentences. Scholastic Story Starters is an online machine that randomly generates a story starter for you. Choose your theme , grade and then spin the wheel. Your story starter can be "Write three wishes of a giant milkmaid whose tears turn things to stone." The tool, then, lead you to start writing your story. You can download or print your story when you are done. Spin the wheel in class and get your story starter. Your learners are sure to come up with many creative stories using these prompts. FiveCardFlickr is a website that shuffles Flickr photos and lets you build a story choosing 5 pictures and write a short story. When you are done, you can save it or share it with other. Use this website to choose your 5 pictures. The rest is in your students’ fingers. Let them come up with their own stories. Tell a Tale is an iPad app provides you the first and the last sentence of a story with three pictures that you need to use as you tell your story. Get your iPad in class, touch the app and get your story starter and set your imagination free.  Enjoy the stories!

If you are living in Istanbul and interested in learning how to integrate technology into your lessons, British Side in Istanbul is offering  a technology course for teachers! The course will take 6 weeks, 18 hours total.  It will start on Monday, the 25th of February. Please check this link for further information. Please mail me to get 10% off the price. Seats are limited so the first six people will get the discount. Enjoy your day and stay techie!

If you are looking for a way to practice vocabulary with your students, here comes a very effective web tool  that will help you to save your time. It is EasyDefine.  It helps you to create your own word list to share it with your students or create different activities with a few clicks. After writing a list of words that you would like to work with your students, EasyDefine generates their meanings. If you like, you can print them out and share it with your students or you can send it as an email to your students to be more eco-friendly.  This is not the only thing that we can do with this web tool. There are many extras that you can try with your students. For example, you can generate the synonyms of the words that you have chosen. You can create an online quiz for the students so that they can try their vocabulary knowledge. The quizzes can be true/false, multiple choice, synonyms matching, definition matching etc. Easy Define also lets you generate flashcards which you can print out to play many different games with your students. The tool also gives us the chance to create different types of vocabulary worksheets with the words that we have written. They can be definition matching, true/false or multiple choice activities. It really saves a lot of time as EasyDefine does everything for us. How to use it in education: Just let the parents learn about that web tool so that they can create activities to practice English with their children at home. They don’t even have to know a word of English to be able to use that web tool. If you want to create some extra work for your students, generate different lists and activities, take them to class with you. Give them to the early finishers to complete. This tool is completely free and easy to use. It’s sure to be a favourite on my list! 

If you like storytelling and doing it a lot in the classroom, Tell a Tale is an app that can bring joy to your lessons. The best part is that, even you have only one ipad, you can still play it. This app is for two or more students, so it is perfect for a class. You simply take turns in telling your own unique tales. The app gives the first line of the story, three pictures to weave into the tale and the last line to end the story. If you do not like the idea, you can start a new story.   How to integrate it to your lessons: Start telling the story with your students and record their voices as they build up the story. Share it on your blog if you have one. Build up your story. When you finish, ask your students to write it down. Put the students in groups and ask each group to create a story with the same prompts. Each group shares their stories with the rest. It is a simple idea but it’s a powerful tool to use in the classroom. It’s completely free and compatible with iPad.

If you are looking for an app to create your own stories, or to use it with your students, here comes StoryKit which is an easy-to use app that will boost the creativity in the classroom.  StoryKit lets you create your own book, adding your own pictures or drawing, writing the text and even recording your voice that goes along with the story. You can also add text boxes, sounds or images. You can edit , order or reorder the pages. When you are done, it is automatically saved on your device, but if you like, you can send it to StoryKit and they will get you a link to share the stories with others. You can also choose to use one of the stories that are on Storykit such as Three Little Pigs, Three Little Bears … and you can recreate these stories with your own additional characters.  How to use StoryKit in class: Ask your students to recreate one of the stories that you have read this year with additional characters from different stories. Students can create a book of their holidays, families, likes/ dislikes. They can create a book of their school year. Students can create a picture dictionary using this app.  Students create an app version of the stories that you read in class. Students can create an alternative ending for the story using this app. Students read each other’s stories and leave comments. This app is free and is a must on your digital storytelling lists!

Here comes another way to tell our stories using an app: Scribz. This is a fun and a creative way to share our stories with easy steps. Take three pictures or get your pictures from your gallery and add captions to these three pictures with maximum 80 words. Then, use the "film noir" template and share your stories with others on different social networks or post it on your blog immediately. You can mail it as well. How to use it in education: Ask your students to introduce themselves in three pictures and post it on your class blog. Students can create a 3 picture story about different topics such as families, pets, likes, favourites. They show it to each other in class and talk about it. You can vote for the best ones. Students walk in the school, take pictures and create their 3 pictures stories. You vote for the best one that tells about the school. Ask students to find pictures of a pet, family, birthday etc., ask them to create a  Scribz with these pictures and post them on your blog. Then, go to your blog and use these posts as story starters.  By the way, this app is free and good to have it!  

In A to Z web tools series, we are coming to the end. The letter is:T TheStoryStarter is a simple but an effective tool that generates story starters. TodaysMeet is a back-channel room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions and share ideas. Textivate allows you to automatically generate multiple different exercises using the text that you have provided, ranging from fill in the blanks, missing words to scrambled sentences. Take Me Back.to is a time machine tool that will take you to the past and tell you what happened on that day. ThankUz is a tool to write online "Thank you" card and send it to others. Tricider is a brainstorming tool where children can answer the questions and also vote for each other’s statements or where they can go against them writing why. Twurdy lets you find texts that suit your students’ readability level. Tinypic is a free image hosting site where you can upload your pictures and get a link for that to share it with others. Toondoo lets you create your own comic strips. TinyLists is a tool to create a sign up list or a to do list. TextLayOut is a tool to create a heart or a maze that are shaped with the words that you have written. Text2Speech is another free online text to speech converter. Tikatok is an online platform to write, illustrate and publish online stories. Twiddla allows you to mark websites, graphics and photos or you can use a blank canvas to brainstorm. Tgether allows you to communicate in small groups by emails. Timetoast is another site to create time lines and share them on the web with others. TimeGlider lets you create your web-based timeline software to create and share history and project plans. Stay tuned.