Vocabulary work

http://englishinteractive.net/

I poked around on this website for a bit and had these thoughts.

1). For low level students, pictures with audio is pretty great. It is always helpful to hear how a word is produced while being able to look at a picture and the name of the item. These types of things are good for personal review and/or enrichment.
2). The "quizzes" just ask the student to write the name of the item next to the pictures. There are no sentences where the item is used in context, nor do the tests as you to fill in a missing word from a word bank. I'm not sure if students would necessarily remember these words unless the instructor included some other dimension that included some deeper processing of these words.
3) This seems to be some sort of English for specific purposes website, but I can't exactly tell what the theme is. Some better cohesion between the items on the website would be good, but that's just an opinion.


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Voice of America, not just American propaganda

http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/index.cfm

Voice of America

This is a site that I found a long time ago, but I only just explored it last night in any great detail. This site is a daily news site that is an offshoot of the radio station broadcast into many regions of the world (admittedly as propaganda, but still a good English source). The stories contained would be good for reading for comprehension. With graded English like this, students would have a good handle on most of the content words and be able to read, answer questions, and have group discussions. This website is good because it allows for a decent daily selection of articles on relevant news topics that are written in a version of graded English. Written in the same format as the radio broadcasts, these articles have some length, so they allow for depth of idea, but they also seem to use higher frequency words so as to be understood by a large audience. This seems as though it might be good for an intermediate class to use before transitioning them to non-graded VOA website (the regular English edition).

Another good reason to use this is that the website features the ability to listen to many of the posted stories so there is an added audio component.

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Previous Experience with CALL

Working in an underfunded ESL program where we were excited to get notebooks and chalk, I consider myself pretty far behind in the CALL field. Most of my learners did not have access to a computer, and we as a program didn't have access to a computer lab. Outside of helping students set up email accounts at the public library, we tried to avoid the topic completely. I'm not completely illiterate--I can debug a computer, create a PowerPoint presentation, download a podcast, and follow cables and wires to figure out why the printer isn't working, but previous to UIC, my exposure to academic technology was limited. My first introduction to Blackboard was at Tulane University while I was working there, and I was mystified by it the first time I saw it. I'm looking forward to learning as much of this as possible.

My question: using computers in a classroom seems like a great idea, but how do you ensure that all of your students are on the same technology page? If they aren't, how do you ensure that those students don't hold other students back?