Guide for Organizing Online Resources for Language Teaching
Teachers play a role as reference librarians for their students, locating, assessing, organizing, and presenting resources for learning to supplement class activities and texts. For CALL teachers, this role is significant. Here are some guidelines to consider in constructing your collection of online language learning resources for your students.
Use the research you've already done in the previous activity, evaluating Web resources, in selecting and presenting you resources for this activity.
Links in this document
Web hosting for BU students (people.bu.edu)
Directory of free web hosts
Google Docs
Google Pages
Del.icio.us social bookmarking
MLL Student Links page (CELOP)
NPR podcasts
Podcast.net directory
Requirements
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Free. All of the resources you choose should be free to your students. If you include teaser material for paid content, it needs to amount to a significant body of content on its own.
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Vetted. All of your links must be vetted and annotated before inclusion.
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Criteria: Your collection is subject to the criteria you used to evaluate other sites.
Organization
The beauty and real effectiveness of your page will be determined not just by the resources you link to but how you organize and present them. It should not simply be a list of links. The Web is awash in poorly organized resources with no meaningful annotation.
Determine an organizing theme for your resources, for example:
Content
Your page should include a variety of links to many sources authentic and pedantic, for example:
news
culture (museums, music)
government
local information (transportation, tourism)
commerce (shopping, products, services)
tools (converters, translators)
information (weather, traffic)
dictionaries (L1, L2, translation)
pronunciation guide
encyclopedias
grammar reference
drills or games
publisher materials (teaser or supplements)
teacher pages
teaching/learning resources from content providers (PBS Kids, Discovery Kids, BBC Learning, CNN Classroom)
Multimedia
Audio: Streaming media, podcasts. Get the address from your favorite provider (e.g., NPR) or search this directory, Podcast.net.
Video: YouTube, Google Video, news sites, TV networks and program providers.
Communication
Include a link to information about you (the authors) as well as e-mail for user comments and suggestions.
Form
Web page. If you are familiar with creating web pages, you can make one and upload it to a web host (directory of free hosts), such as people.bu.edu, which you all have access to.
Online Web page tools. There are free tools for creating a Web page with a Web browser instead of an HTML editor. Google Pages is one such tool. You'll need a Google account (free) and, if using a Mac, you have to use Firefox instead of Safari.
Text document with hyperlinks. If you have never created web pages, then write a text document, include hyperlinks, and export as HTML. Use, for example, Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
Folksonomy (shared bookmarking site) Del.icio.us (among others) is a social bookmarking site where you can save your bookmarks online instead of on your computer, access them from anywhere, and share them with others (or keep them private). "Tagging" is the organization metaphor rather than folders. A tag is like a keyword that you attach to a link Learn more...
Considerations
Provide value as a resource guide to your students. For example, don't simply link to lists of other resources. That requires vetting on the part of students, which they aren't in a position to do.
Don't include links merely to fill out the resources; include them because they're each really interesting and worthwhile.
Language instructions, annotations, navigation.