Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar Online
September 2005

At the study place you can make multiple activities and store them under a class name. But I like the easy format of the activities and I like how you can order tasks for the students to do. It has a fun tutorial too!

The Study Place is a quite comfortable way of creating a lesson. The design of the page is neat and easy to navigate. It uses "drop down" lists to help the novice in the process. It also gives you different options to manage students' responses. You can send them to the students' portfolio; receive them in your email, both or just forget about keeping track of that. It has "true/False" multiple choice, view picture, cloze, writing assignment among other types of activities

The only quasi-disadvantage is that you have to register students in the class in order for them to access the activities. So you must remember to do that.

One disadvantage is that there is a limited number of options in the topics list. Exercises or activities per unit are limited too –only three. If you want a longer lesson you have to start a new lesson, create the exercises and save it with the same name but add the number 2 to distinguish it from the former lesson. Another disadvantage is that you have to register all your students in order to let them use what you've done. If each group has more than forty students uploading two or three groups take a long time.

I liked the Worksheet Wizard b/c it really produced professional-looking, neat, clean worksheets. It has a nice format and you can put links on the worksheet-- you have quite a few formatting choices. It just makes nice worksheets quicker and easier that doing all the formatting yourself on Word or whatever.

Lessons can be created on the site worksheets, and web documents. Users can also include graphics on any of the documents created. After creating, it is possible to add your email address for contact. The data base of existing worksheets is great

Hot Potatos is free if you swear you're an educator & will make everything (yikes!) you produce with it freely available to everyone on the web. It has tools to produce crossword puzzles, quizzes, clozes, matching exercises, and scrambled sentences. You can use them to make things like reading comprehension exercises.
The crossword feature allows you to input the answers and the clues & then have the software automatically produce the puzzle & number the items appropriately **.

It includes a wide variety of exercises that can be uploaded to a website or saved on a local hard drive to use with the students. The advantages to Hot Potatoes is the exercises are interactive.

HP is not a favorite of mine b/c it took a long time to figure out what to do. So HP is ok and I will use it for shorter quizzes, etc, but not extended assignments.

They come out attractively produced, but the mechanisms are a bit clunky. There may be lots of errors in your trials
**However, doing it this way tends to produce much larger puzzles than you could choosing the configuration manually. This is a disadvantage because the larger something is the less likely it is to appear nicely on a monitor.

The only real problem that I experienced with this program is the email portion. I still have not been able to configure the website or the pages properly so that the results will be sent to my email once a student has completed the exercise. You will also have to have basic knowledge of HTML to use this on a website

Some may consider having to register a disadvantage, although it wasn't a complicated process. Once registered I found the site to be easy to navigate and I liked the appearance of it a lot. There is a lot of variety in terms of the types of exercises that can be made.

The Discovery Channel website is a great website for developing quick vocabulary exercises. I really love the word searches, crossword puzzles, and unscramble the word exercises. The website also has a list of vocabulary words in case you need one for a particular topic, although it is not extensive.

however they must be saved to word processing

There are a few disadvantages, depending upon how you look at it, to using this site. The activities are not online exercises. Once you create them you have to print them for your students or make them available to be printed. You can not save your activities unless you pay or cut and paste them into Microsoft Word

Game-O-Matic /

Smile

Quia is a fantastic tool. There are plenty of activities that can be created fairly quickly or you can choose from the thousands of activities that are shared. Quia is excellent for giving online exams and everything is scored and recorded. It is worth the $50.00 and it makes a teacher's life much easier.

Quia is very user friendly. The technical support is excellent and they respond very quickly to inquiries. Users are able to create several different activities after inputting data one time. For me, this saved time and provided me with activities that I could use to assess the retention of materials by those enrolled in my courses. Additionally, test can be created in Quia. Course participants get immediate feedback which I really think is useful. A break down of each test item can be obtained for the teacher's records. Users will also find a data base of created activities for use.