Free online tools and apps that can help your students

Tech tools became part of our everyday life, so it is only natural that a number of websites and apps aiming at helping the learning process have mushroomed in recent years. There are so many options of apps and Internet tools available out there that it is quite an ordeal to sieve all the options until you find what you are looking for.
Here are some options that I find interesting not because they have been designed for teaching purposes, but rather because learners can use them on their own in order to complement classroom work and develop their language skills.
Speedreader
Increasing the rate of reading is one of the greatest challenges our learners face. In the classroom, we often encourage them to skim texts for general information, and the website Speedreader can help them do something along those lines. You can copy and paste any text onto the webpage in order to have it displayed word by word. The settings can be adjusted so as to increase or decrease the speed in which the text is displayed. If you do have access to the Internet and a projector in the classroom, it could be used during lessons as well.

Feel the music
Learners frequently ask us to play songs in the classroom, right? The recently launched game Feel the Music allows them to do that on their own, in a fun and competitive way. It works sort of like a gap-fill exercise, with players clicking on the word missing in sentences as they appear on the screen and a wide range of songs from many different styles is set to please all musical tastes. Even though I wouldn’t use it during lessons, as only one student would be able to play at a time, it is a great way to encourage learners to be in contact with the English language outside the classroom.
Flipboard
We always tell our students how important it is to read texts in English, often asking them to look for texts related to areas of their interest. Flipboard, available for IOS, Android and Windows Phone is basically a personalized magazine that makes the process of finding sources of text easier. Users select the topics of their interest and articles on those topics (as well as post by friends in social media) are displayed on their mobile devices. As learners have access to a range of texts on their own mobile devices, reading can be done in the classroom as well as outside.
Speech recognition tools
Even though most speech recognition software was not originally designed for English learners, they can be a great tool for the practice of pronunciation. Free versions are available for Google Chrome users, such as dictation.io, and Mac users can actually use the built-in speech recognition for word-processing software (instructions here) in order to start dictating the text they want to write. Analysis of the text that comes out can raise students’ awareness of their own shortcomings in pronunciation, helping them autonomously work to improve it.
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Rubens Heredia is an Academic Coordinator at Cultura Inglesa São Paulo, where he is responsible for early-in service and in-service teacher development initiatives, such as coaching and mentoring. Having transitioned from a BA in Law to becoming a DELTA holder and ICELT tutor, he has been working in EFL for 13 years.