Wordle

http://www.wordle.net/

Purpose:

A Wordle is a creatively designed collection of words taken from a text with the most frequently occurring words appearing in large print. The website also allows users to work with texts written in a host of other languages such as French, Spanish and Dutch.

Relevance:

A Wordle can make vocabulary and grammar learning more interesting.

It facilitates group work.

It allows both teachers and students to be creative when working with texts or vocabulary lists.

A Wordle can be used to encourage use of the target language in the classroom.

This tool can also be useful in giving feedback to students about common spelling or grammatical errors.

Tip:

A Wordle can be an interesting way to start off a grammar lesson. Select a text from a newspaper, song or magazine. Create your Wordle and distribute among students. Ask students to work in groups to identify a particular grammatical structure, suggest a rule indicating how the structure operates and, using other words in the Wordle, create examples of grammatically sound sentences. Once you are satisfied with the results, introduce the original text and have students compare their sentences with those found in the text.

Limitations:

It is not possible to save a Wordle in a jpeg or pdf format. 

Todays Meet

http://todaysmeet.com/

Purpose:
This user-friendly website provides a free basic service that allows teachers to create a virtual log of questions, answers and/or suggestions raised by students while engaged in group work. 

Relevance:
If you believe that language learning is enhanced through giving/receiving feedback or through social interaction then this tool should prove quite useful.

Tip:
In the classroom context, you can use this tool for realtime record keeping. Consider for example, the traditional brainstorming activity. This usually involves students calling out ideas while you take note of them on the board. This can be time-consuming, disorderly and pointless if students do not themselves write down the ideas. Using this tool can therefore help with classroom management, rather than calling out their ideas, students can simultaneously enter their thoughts online which will then be automatically updated and saved online, with the possibility of downloading and distributing for later review. 

Limitations:
This tool's most obvious limitation is that it is only available online. Classrooms must therefore be equipped with Internet-access in order to use it.

Also, in larger classes, it becomes difficult to ensure 100% student participation, since pair work can easily result in one student taking the lead while the other does not participate.