Recently in General Category

I submitted a couple of pieces of writing to Twilocity, a site that reviews and checks MS Word documents by running the writing through some macros.  They were returned in a short time and the results were good.  The blurb on the site says that their review should take you up to the next grade level and is aimed at American college students, but there's a lot in the report that comes back that could benefit ESL learners.

For people using Firefox, there's a superb add-on Zotero to help you organise your research, create bibliographies, reference lists, etc, complete with a number of styles.

ESLJudge claims to be a site that 'allows ESL schools and teachers to resolve disputes professionally and fairly', which is a laudable aim.  However, it certainly does not live up to its lofty aims and is unlikely ever to do so.  It was launched far too early, which in itself is probably enough to strangle it at birth. 

Lingro is a site that offers a useful translation tool. Enter the URL of a site or page, then choose the language you want to translate words into and you can click on the words you don't know and bring up a pop-up box with a translation.

Over at the TeflTrade blog, Sandy McManus has received another legal demand for material critical of a school to be taken down from his site. This time, his blog host received a letter alleging defamation from Mr Paul Lowe of Windsor TEFL, who appeared in this blog here and also replied to what I said here. In the first case, Abbey College, Malvern demanded that a post that contained a critical description of their summer schools was removed. The original text had appeared on Dave's ESL Cafe and Sandy had reposted it after it was pulled from Dave's.

Professor Mark Davies of the Brigham Young University set up a superb site to access the British National Corpus (BNC). Easy to use, fast, packed with features and intuitive, it is by far the best concordancer on the web in my opinion.

They are definitely firing on all cylinders at the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) conference this year. A motion was put forward yesterday that

deplores the very real problem of cyber bullying in schools and demands the closure of sites encouraging such behaviour

The Simplified Spelling Society recently had a discussion with Professor Vivian Cook about whether English spelling should be simplified. English spelling is chaotic, but I found the society's arguments weak.

Interactive whiteboards, heralded as a breakthrough in teaching, have come under fire as possible risks to eyesight. While the claims that TV and computer screens would ruin people's eyesight have largely not been shown to be the case, it is possible that there is a risk here.

Sandy MacManus of the popular TEFLTrade blog recently wrote to IATEFL, the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, asking them what they were doing to protect ESL teachers in the UK.