Week 2
Types of CALL tools and evaluating

This week, we talked about different types of tools available for teachers and students and how to evaluate them.

There are some softwares or website prepared specifically for language teaching. Softwares such as Rosetta Stone can  be purchased and they can be used as a whole class or individually. On the other hand, websites are usually free and they provide lots of different activities. Still, there are some websites where users need to pay to use the 'premium' features. Livemocha or EnglishCentral are some of these.

There are also some other tools not specifically for language teaching but teaching in general. These are good to prepare flashcards, quizzes or for other testing purposes.

And there are many others that can be applied to language teaching. Using different web tools to prepare presentations, exposure through online newspapers and video channels can be used.

While using these tools, we need to evaluate their appropriateness for our needs and purposes. There are several checklists that can be used for this. So before using a tool, it is important to spend some time in order to find out if we want to use that tool or not. In my next post, I will be evaluating a tool using a checklist I have prepared with some other teachers.