FontStruct Website FontStruct is an online font-building tool using basic geometric shapes in a grid. Fonts can be downloaded as TrueType fonts and used in Mac or Windows applications. FontStruct is also a source of fresh fonts available under flexible, liberal CreativeCommons licenses. An ideal environment to teach the basics of type design. What do you think of FontStruct?

Hello all!  Yes - I know - there has been a great deal of nothing happening on this blog as of late Hopefully, I will be able to get back into regular updates! Nelson ICT conference I thought I would blog this time around about interesting discussions that I had at the Nelson ICT cluster day I attended on Friday. The great thing about these events is that I get to catch up with people from all over the place that get flown in to be part of the programme on the day. I had great chats with Derek Wenmoth (Christchurch), Dorothy Burt (Auckland), Allanah King (Nelson), and Rachel Boyd (Nelson). Data collection and league tables One of the biggest topics of conversation was around the National government’s implementation of national standards that they will then be collecting data against and the issue of whether the media will be able to get hold of this to create league tables. I have already expressed my views around league tables in my comment on Artichoke’s blog. Having seen them in action in the UK, I think they can be a very destructive force in education. What came out of our conversation was that data is not something that schools should be scared of. Dorothy pointed out that she wants to know the outcomes for students in each class within her school and if one teacher is producing better results that another teacher, she wants to analyse the methods that teacher is employing to see what it is that makes them successful. I agree that the teaching profession can react negatively against collecting data; especially when asked to use that data to reflect on their teaching practice. I can see that there is a place for authentic and formative data collection (though there may need to be more time allocated for busy teachers to get these completed - I remember trying to tidy off my running records!) My concern is the publishing of data to the public when not viewed within the context of that school. Just as I think comparing students against each other can be very counter-productive, I think schools shouldn’t be compared without knowing all the facts. We try to look at the gains a student has made rather than simply ranking them and I think that is how schools should also be judged. A school with low results nationally may have made huge gains but that would not be reflected in a league table. Other things that Dorothy touched on, both in her keynote address and during our later conversation intrigued me and got me thinking. I’ll just put a summary of some of them here and invite you to comment. Thoughts about place of e-learning We are always being asked to show that using e-learning is improving outcomes for students. Why do we always have to show that it is better than the methods we are using now? Surely if we are getting the same levels of attainment while providing students with a 21st century learning environment then the value added has been that students will be equipped to work in a modern world. Expanding our thinking in relation to cyber safety Schools feel that they are meeting their requirements in relation to cyber safety if they have internet use agreements and get parent’s permission to put content online. What about what happens to that content when a teacher leaves a school and takes the passwords with them or the site just gets abandoned but left up online? How long should images and work of children remain up? Who is monitoring this? Imagine a scenario where a vindictive secondary student finds work of another student from when they were seven on an old blog or wiki and uses this to humiliate them in a networking site such as Bibo. We tend to focus on paedophile dangers but that is a very minor risk. We need to be thinking to the future about what will happen to all this stuff we are posting. You can see Dorothy’s blog post to explore this further. I think this is an area that should be considered when putting together policies. You only have to see the number of blogs and wikis that have been left up but are no longer active to realise that this is an issue! To moderate or not to moderate blog comments Dorothy does not moderate blog comments on any of their school blogs. This goes against the advice that I normally give to people getting started with blogging. I was interested to hear her reasoning. The children comment a lot on each other’s blog posts as well as having community comment. Dorothy believes that it creates a barrier for people to leave a comment if they don’t see the comment appear when they submit it. I have to say that I find it irritating as an adult when I leave a comment somewhere only to see that it will appear after being moderated (particularly on adult teacher blogs!). They have only had three problems with comments. One was because it used text language which the school has decided is not acceptable within school blogs. The other two were negative comments - in one a teacher sucked and in the other someone in one of the photos looked funny. They have been blogging for a long time and consider the risk of problems to be low enough that the need to encourage comments through showing them instantly is more important. That isn’t to say that they don’t have systems in place to make sure that anything negative is picked up very quickly. The teacher has to subscribe to the RSS for the comments and Dorothy is also subscribed. In this way, the comments are closely monitored and are taken down very quickly if necessary. This is a very interesting approach and I can see why they would do it that way. They are lucky to have a supportive community that accepts this. I know that for some schools, explaining that comments will be moderated is the only way to ’sell’ the use of blogs to the BOT and community. What are your thoughts? Etoys - free educational download I also dropped into an Etoys workshop during the day. When I heard the title I thought it sounded familiar and sure enough I had the application installed on my Mac already (free download for all platforms). I must have downloaded it, had a play and then instantly forgotten about it again Etoys allows you to build objects and programme them to behave in certain ways. Along the way you have to learn about maths and other subject areas. This programme reminds me of similar tools such as Alice and Scratch that also involve programming characters. It certainly got my grey matter buzzing trying to work my way through challenges and I think this could be great in the classroom. My own resources Suzielinks.com gets moved and updated On a completely different topic, I have been working on changing my suzieslink.com site over to a free hosting provider while maintaining my domain name. I think this is going really well and I am tidying things up and improving as I go. While only half finished so far, you can see my efforts at http://www.suzieslinks.com  There are a huge number of useful links and resources for teachers. Check it out and be aware that the parts not yet hyperlinked will be updated in the very near future. Well that turned into a bit of a long post!! Must be making up for over a month of silence.

There are hundreds of web tools and apps that are available for digital storytelling. Picture A Story is one them and this tool can be added to your favorites list. This is a tool to create your own digital stories by adding different elements and recording your voice over it. First, you start by choosing your genre from adventure, fairy tales, comedy, horror, western .., then choose your background, drag and drop your characters on the scene, add as many props as you like. You can also play with their sizes. When you are done with this, you writer your story and then record your voice by clicking on "record story" button.  Here, you need to allow the tool to use the computer’s microphone. If you are happy with your story, now you are ready to share it via mail. Some ideas to use this tool: A great way to define different genres to the students. Each group can pick up a different genre, and they can rewrite the same story according to that.  Students create their unique stories using this tool, then we can create some activities around their stories.  We can choose the genre and give a story starter to the students and ask them write accordingly. This tool is great for generating creative ideas, practice speaking and writing skills.

In my role, I get to visit each of the clusters I work with and see what is happening in individual schools. This gives me the chance to see a lot of creative and interesting ideas in action. I have visited six out of the nine clusters I work with so far this year and, as there is too much to write about for one blog post, I thought I’d put together a series of blog posts to reflect on some of the things I have seen.The first in the series focuses on special needs. Working with special needs There are two schools within my clusters that are involved in special needs; one focuses on behavioural issues with primary aged students and the other deals with visual impairment across all ages. Personally, I have learned a great deal from my involvement with these schools. Behavioural issues and ICT The school that caters for those with behavioural problems has found the use of ICT to be transformational within the school. This is a school where kids come to because they need a break from the mainstream and often have a strong dislike for school. The normal ‘chalk and talk’ does not work for these kids. Use of interactive whiteboards They have found that interactive whiteboards have been a valuable tool due to their visual and kinaesthetic nature which suits the learning styles of these kids. I saw these in use in every classroom in the school with both teachers and students using them. There were a range of activities being demonstrated on these boards and you could see that they did hook in many of the students. As someone who is never sure which side of the interactive whiteboard debate I am on, I could see that here was a purposeful use for them. Websites to hook kids into learning They have found a number of websites to be really useful for developing kids confidence as they can see proof of their improvement over time: http://tutpup.com Kids complete with other kids around the world and in their own classroom on maths and other drill type of questions. They can also see their own progress as they complete levels. (I’ve previously blogged about this site) http://braingrade.com Brain development exercises and games where kids can see graphs of their progress. My brain is the size of a grape after playing the first couple of games. Hmmmmm http://readwritethink.org/student_mat/index.asp This is another of my favourites and I saw kids using this site to build a scene and then write about it without any encouragement needed from the adult in the room. The link I have included above will talk you to all the digital learning objects available on the site. The teachers said this was a very motivating site for students. Blogging The school have set up blogs for each class in the school and have found this may make the difference between a student particpating or not participating in completing work. They often ask if their work will go on the blog and if the answer is yes, they show a far greater enthusiasm for their work and will perserve to get it completed. Visual impairment and ICT Making online content accessible for all I have learned a great deal about accessibility issues for those with low vision when using websites that has changed the way I put content online. I have previously blogged about this with an entire post dedicated to making online content accessbile. Digital library for assessment What I have found really interesting is the recognition within the school of the power of capturing information in a digital form. The school are building a library of video footage of children exibiting certain behaviours so as to create an assessment bank that teachers can access to help diagnose children with visual impairments correctly. They have used Voicethread as part of this process with teachers, assessors and parents able to leave comments around the side of the video clip to help deepen the understanding of the context and diagnosis for that child. Digital evidence of key competencies All staff across the nationwide school are also being asked to use digital evidence to build a profile of what each key competency ‘looks like’ within their context. Staff collect video clips and photos to show different ways children with visual impairments demonstrate key competencies. The plan from here is to widen this out so that these examples give details on how the skills being demonstrated were developed and then what the next steps are from that point. They plan to turn this into a rich repository showing all stages of development for each key competency in their own context that teachers can use to measure progress of children against. I think this is an idea that could easily be replicated in any school setting. These are just some great ideas that I came across. I will share some more useful observations in my next post.

Treasures Website Treasures is a reading/language-arts resource specifically designed to help teachers teach by providing engaging activities for students at all levels. The content is designed to help teachers save time and keep students motivated and focused. What do you think of Treasures?

Offline+Web is a cool app that lets you back up your favorite web pages to your phone to read it later offline. With this app, you can now back up, organize and share all the web pages you’d like to be able to consult at all times and in all places.  There are many other apps that you can use in this way. They are great for surfing on a webpage with limited or no internet at all. It’s great to have it on the phone if you are travelling a lot.

The second blog post in the series of ideas from clusters is half written but it is taking a back seat while I just share a few fun and educational games I’ve been playing. I followed a link on Twitter which took me to a directory of free flash games and there was an educational category. I had a go at playing quite a few of them and here are some of my favourites. Clicking on the link will take you to the site to play the game. Numeracy Tower blaster - probably my favourite game I played. Very strategic - have to get the blocks in correct order before computer team. Click here to play this game Maths Power - have to choose numbers to make given answers. I’m not very good at this one! Can’t scan the numbers fast enough and get panicky with the countdown. I’m not going to share my score Click here to play this game Literacy Could see the kids loving this one but I am hopeless at games involving mixed up letters. Still others will do better than me I expect. Spiderman 2 - Web of Words Click here to play this game A very simple game to teach young children to match uppercase and lower case letters with Pooh Bear. Pooh’s Match ‘n’ Munch Click here to play this game Other subjects This one looks to have been designed for med students and involves cutting open a knee for surgery but I could see older kids being fasinated as they learn how to perform the knee surgery. High level comprehension exercise with a real life context. Click here to play this game Brain Safari - a variety of problem solving games Click here to play this game Music game - learn the notes and their position on the keyboard. Click here to play this game Treasure Dive typing game - type the words on the sharks before they reach you. Click here to play this game There are more on the site and I didn’t play them all so you could go and try some more out. http://www.y8.com/tags/Educational/1

Here are my favorite posts from March!! Enjoy exploring!! Teleprompter in the Classroom: Learn how to use an online prompter in class. Vocabulary Practice With Word Hippo: Such a fruitful dictionary tool! Create Text Activities With Textivate: Create various and many different type of text activities. Create Online Flyers: Do you need online flyers? Here is the post for you to read!! Create your flyers in less than a minute!! Create Customizable QR Codes: Looking for good looking QR codes? Then, this post is just for you!! Create Interactive Quizzes With YouTube Videos: Use 5 different YouTube videos and questions about them in transitions. Click to learn more! Animated Videos With Wideo: A new tool for creating your own animations! Practice Grammar With Technology: A list of web based tools to learn and practice grammar. Poetry With Technology: A neat list of web based tools and applications to let our children write their poems. Creative Writing With WordTamer: Learn how to write stories by exploring the funfair on WordTamer! and yay, I am nominated for ELtons 2013!!

RSSinclude Website  RSSinclude is an RSS reader widget that lets you display text and images from RSS feeds. When creating a new RSSbox you decide on which type of layout and which RSS feeds to use. Convert RSS to HTML, Javascript or PHP. Include RSS on Facebook. What do you think of RSSinclude?

Introduction I was approached recently by Karen Schweitzer as she wanted to be a guest blogger on this blog. She picked a topic that she thought teachers would find useful - information on social networking sites that we can use as educators. Thanks to Karen for approaching me about posting and sharing her knowledge below. 20 Social Networking Sites for Teachers - by Karen Schweitzer It has never been easier for teachers to network online. The web hosts thousands of online communities and forums for teachers, administrators, librarians, and other educators. Here are 20 social networking sites that are particularly popular among teachers. TeachAde - TeachAde is the first social networking site created specifically for teachers. The site combines social networking with teacher resources to create a useful online tool for educators. The Apple - This site is a free social networking community for current and future teachers. Special features include message boards, lesson plans, videos, and up-to-date news. Classroom 2.0 - This online community for educators has become a place for teachers to come together and share information about web 2.0 tools and other education technology. Classroom 2.0 also offers live webinars and online events. NextGen Teachers - Teachers can network with one another and discuss new ways of educating and learning on this social networking site. The English Companion - The English Companion is an online community for English teachers who want to meet new people, network, and share ideas. We the Teachers - This education search engine and online community can be used to find other teachers and network. We the Teachers is also a good place to share lesson plans and resources. TeacherLingo - TeacherLingo is an online blogging platform for educators. Teachers can start their own blogs or network with other teachers through forums and comment sections. Google Teacher Community - This Google Discussion Group keeps teachers in the loop on Google’s K-12 education initiatives. It also serves as a forum for teachers to ask questions, share ideas, and discuss hot topics in education. Applebatch - Abblebatch is a K-12 teacher community. Teachers can find jobs, build their network, and share education resources. TeachersRecess - TeachersRecess is a free social network with many useful resources. Teachers can communicate online, share lesson plans, get news, publish a personal blog, and buy or sell teaching tools. PBS Teachers Connect - PBS Teachers Connect is a place for site members to meet up and share ideas. The site also provides a wide range of teaching resources for the classroom. ProTeacher Community - This online community was created for K-8 teachers who want to communicate and network with each other. ProTeacher offers blogs, forums, and chat capability. ClassScene - Designed specifically for schools, ClassScene is an online repository/community for photos, videos, and more. The site can also be used to generate revenue and collaborate with the school community. Education World - Education World is an enormous site with thousands of resources for educators. Teachers can use it to ask questions and network. Tapped In - Since 1997, Tapped In has served as an online meeting place for K-12 teachers, administrators, and librarians. Thousands of educators gather on this site to share stories, ideas, lesson plans, and resources. Teacher Focus - Teacher Focus is an online community/forum for teachers. The site also offers lesson plans, news, and other education-related resources. Edublogs - Edublogs is more of a blogging platform than a social networking site. Nevertheless, it is a great way to connect and interact with other teachers. Diigo - This section of Diigo hosts nearly 5,000 bookmarks for educators. Teachers can go here to discover and share education-related articles. Twitter - Twitter wasn’t designed specifically for educators, but it is a good place to network with teachers, students, and parents. Delicious - The largest and most popular social bookmarking site on the web, Delicious is an excellent place to find and share online bookmarks with other teachers. Guest post from Karen Schweitzer, the About.com Guide to Business School. Karen also writes about accredited online colleges for OnlineColleges.net.

I will be leaving tomorrow for IATEFL conference in Liverpool. I will be co-presenting a session called "Break the Ice - Warm up the Class" on Wednesday. I am looking forward to meeting some of you there!!  and of course, I will back in five days with news posts and series!!

ABCya Website ABCya provides educational kids computer games and activities for elementary students to learn on the web. All educational games are modeled from primary grade lessons and enhanced to provide an interactive way for children to learn. Grade level lessons incorporate areas such as math and language arts while introducing basic computer skills. What do you think of ABCya?

Yes - I have maintained a bit of a blog silence for awhile now as I was in the final weeks of pregnancy and focused on getting things organised for our new arrival. I can now announce to the world that we have a new baby girl called Zoe. She arrived last Saturday and here are a couple of pictures of her. Obviously blogging is not a priority at the moment so you can expect things to be a little sluggish for a while but I do plan to get back to posting when the dust has settled! Zoe catnaps on Dad Zoe and Mum Zoe and Dad bond

Creating a book can’t be easier today! There are many tools that you can use to narrate your own stories, and here comes Picture Book Maker which is a fun and a cute tool to tell your stories. The illustrations and the text that you write are hand drawn. There are many backgrounds, props and characters that you can choose from. You can also change the actions of the characters. When you are done, you can save it to the gallery, mail it or print your own story.  How to use  this tool: Students can create their own books around the animal characters. Give the first page as a prompt and ask students to come up with their own stories. Create your own story and ask students to change the ending or write what happens before the story. Enjoy this tool in and out of the classroom!

Your blog is boring? Some people may actually like it that way! Here is  the world’s dullest blog which I have read on Mike Harrison’s blog recently. A super creative and a clever person has been keeping that blog by writing simple and really boring things to talk about such as: "I decided to go for a walk. I set off in my chosen direction. Eventually I returned to my starting point." or "A window was slightly open. I decided that I did not need it to continue to be so. I closed it and securing it using the window handles." The blog posts are short, mostly in past tense and very easy to understand, boring but fun to read! and we can find different ways of integrating this idea in our lessons. Students can dramatize the blog posts. Ask students to come up with their own dull blog posts in a similar way. Some ideas can be: Students can add more description to the chosen blog posts. Create a worksheet and ask students to match the titles with the descriptions. Students can leave comments on the blog. Give different dull titles to the students and they come up with the dullest blog post in groups. Vote for the dullest one. Enjoy exploring the dullest blog in the world with your students!   

Teacher TV The UK have a number of fabulous online resources for teachers and one of my favourites has to be Teachers TV. There are a huge number of videos on almost any teacher topic you can think of with matching downloadable resources. As a registered member, I get email updates and went and watched this video linked to from their email about teaching poetry. There are a number of great ideas in this lesson and all the materials used in the lesson are available for download from this page as well. You can even download the resources from the video player itself at the point in which they are mentioned in the video so you can decide if you would like that resource. http://www.teachers.tv/video/38046 Check out their huge bank of videos designed to help teachers upskill.

Reference.me Website Reference.me helps you build a trusted network of professional connections where relationships actually mean something. Strong professional links, well leveraged, can give you a broader and more efficient spectrum of opportunities. What do you think of Reference.me?

I love the ways that we can use the avatars that we have created for a variety of educational purposes.  They certainly bring fun and joy to our lessons. Here are my favourite avatar makers: If you are a fan of Simpsons, here is an avatar maker that lets you simpsonize yourself. SouthParkStudios allows you to create South Park characters’ avatars. RasterBoy is another avatar maker that you can create an avatar from the beginning. You can fully customize your character, play with the colors and attach different objects to your avatar. With Mini-Mizer, you can create lego characters and download them. DoppelMe is another favourite of mine, though you have to sign up to be able to use all the features. It is fully customize and you can add accessories and objects to your avatar. BuildYourWildSelf is one of my favourite web tools that can also be used for creating avatars. FaceYourManga is another avatar maker that you start from scratch to create one. and here are a few ideas to use avatars in education: Avatars makers are very easy to use so you and your students can easily create them. If you don’t want to use your students’ real pictures for safety reasons, avatar makers are great way to replace. It’s a great way for students to create their unique avatars to represent their personalities online. Students create their avatars and talk about why they have chosen them. Teachers can gather all the avatars of the students and students guess which avatar belongs to whom.

Christmas wiki I am a self-confessed Christmas freak. There is nothing I like more than putting up a tree and getting out the tinsel. That love of the festive season has spilled over into my online life through a Christmas links wiki I set up a few years back that has links to all things Christmas. Every year, I pull it up and dust it off and see what needs updating etc. It always gets a huge number of hits around this time of year so I thought I’d bring it to your attention. Christmas wiki PBWorks It is also the time that I catch up with PBWorks given that pretty much all of my other wikis are with Wikispaces. While I generally prefer Wikispaces, I have to say that PBWorks is still a pretty good tool with some features that Wikispaces lacks. One of these features is the ability to create folders and nest pages within them. While my Christmas wiki isn’t big enough to need this function, I could see that this would be very useful for one of my bigger wikis such as educational software where I have created index pages for different sections - the folders would then help to keep my pages organised and easy to navigate with people able to use the navigation panel on the wiki to move around the folders and access the pages within them. I also like the formatting options for tables in PBWorks. The ability to set the width of tables being the biggest advantage over Wikispaces. There are other very useful features such as  page level access and easily backing up the wiki but these are subscriber only options and at $99US per classroom wiki, that is not a cheap option. Still, overall this is still an excellent wiki alternative for teachers. Mrs Pancake I’m also reminded of the Mrs Pancake website as I have linked to her Christmas resources. She has really created a wonderful site with very high quality printable downloads for all kinds of topics. Go check it out. Baby is calling so back to being a Mum!

Google Currents Google Currents lets you browse, read, and share favorite content, presented in a swipable magazine format. Your favorite publications, tuned for your tablet and smartphone. What do you think of Google Currents?

Zoomerang Website Zoomerang provides you with unlimited surveys & polls, 12 Questions / 100 Responses and real-time results online. Wide range of question types available. What do you think of Zoomerang?

If you are looking for a tool to create a good looking infographic, meet with Easel.ly today. It’s a very simple tool to create colorful and simple infographics on anything they you want. After you register, click to create a new one. You can choose a new visual template or start with a blank one. Click on the objects and drag them on your canvas. Move and scale them. Play with the colors, add shapes and text. You can also upload your own pictures. when you’re done, save it and share it with a link, get the code for your blog or download it to your computer as a picture. How to use this tool: Students can summarize a research or a survey that they have done in groups. Assign students to create different infographics on different topics and present them in class. Show your students different infographics and discuss about the hidden data on the infographic. Students prepare their own questions, ask others, collect data and summarize the data by using this tool. This tool is a good way to use technology both for educational and social purposes.

I have had a free VRoom with Elluminate for awhile now which I have to admit that I haven’t used as it only allowed for three participants to use it at a time. Still, I kept in tucked away as possibly being useful at some future point so was interested to get an email from Elluminate asking me to register with a new service called ‘Learn Central’ which is being sponsored by Elluminate or else I would loose my VRoom. Learncentral logo I dutifully followed the link and signed up on this network (and you can too at www.learncentral.org). What I instantly found very exciting is that they are offering the use of Elluminate meeting tools for free through the Learn Central platform to hold meetings for up to 300 participants! I copied the information below from the website written by Steve Hargadon who is a well known ICT educator: LearnCentral allows educators to use a free public Elluminate room to hold large webinars or group meetings.  To qualify, the events must be 1) education-oriented, 2) free (you’re not charging those who attend), 3)  recordable, and 4) open to anyone to attend.  We’re really excited to see what you do with this capability, and are hoping that it allows you to regularly gather other educators around curricular interests in "historic" ways. The current instructions are below.  This is a new service, so your feedback and help are greatly appreciated! Before Scheduling a Meeting We ask that you go through the live or recorded free Elluminate training (http://www.elluminate.com/support/training/index.jsp) before hosting a session, and suggest strongly that you attend another session as a participant to see how an Elluminate session works.  Please don’t go in without any actual experience-it won’t be good for you or your attendees!  :) This is an honor system, but we do ask that you are prepared as we don’t want these free sessions to reflect poorly on Elluminate! To Schedule a Meeting To schedule a meeting in the LearnCentral public-use Elluminate room, please create the event using the calendar for this group by going to the events tab here and clicking on "Create Event."  Please check the calendar first and take care not to schedule over another event.  Please also leave at least 30 minutes before and after each event (so that you and the organizer who follows you both have time to come into the room to prepare before your events). The URL to put in the calendar event, or to give out to others to attend, is https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=lcevents&password=Webinar_Guest. You can also use this shortened version: http://tinyurl.com/lcparticipant.  Participants do not need to be members of LearnCentral to attend the event, but please encourage them to join! Once your event is scheduled in the group calendar, you are welcome to also add it to the calendars of other groups you are a part of.  If you believe your event might be of interest to the LearnCentral community as a whole, please email me at stevehargadon@elluminate.com so that I can place it on the community calendar.  You also need to email me for the moderator log-in information of this is your first time holding a LearnCentral Elluminate meeting. Please keep meetings to under two hours in order for others to be able to use the room.  If you need a session that is longer than two hours, please contact me directly.  Also, the LearnCentral Elluminate room has limit of 300 participants.  If you believe that you will need to accommodate more than this number, please contact me directly as well. I think this is a great service as normally it is fairly expensive to book an Elluminate session. I would have found this useful when running online meetings for ICT PD this year and I’m sure others could find great uses for it too.

If you want to add fun and joy to your lesson with some music, here is a great web tool for this! It’s called LyricsGaps. With this tool, you can watch and listen a song, fill in the gaps of the lyrics using different tools. There are hundreds of songs that you can choose from in different languages. When you find your song, you choose a game mode. It can be karaoke, where students sing the song in a karaoke mode. You can choose the quiz, where the lyrics of the songs are in a multiple quiz form. Here, students listen and choose the correct words in the lyrics. Or, you can choose a level among beginner, intermediate or expert and the lyrics of the words come again like a quiz where the words are in a drop down menu. As the students listen to the song, they choose the right words.  You can also create a teacher’s account and create your own quizzes for your students with the words that you have chosen. When you are done, you can share the customized quiz with your students.  Also, when you click on any word, it gives you the definition of it which makes this tool much better! How to use this tool: Choose different level of songs for your students and let them try different game modes. Let your students create their own games modes for each other.  Have a kareoke party in class! Enjoy singing and listening the songs!