A question about toolbars

Recently one of my CALL 487 students emailed me the following question:

"Hi Terrie,
I was just surfing the interweb and came across this site: http://www.eslprintables.com/

I wanted to use some material from it but it asked me to register and then sent me a link to activate my profile/registration. It then said that in order to use the site I had to download their toolbar. My question is whether or not this kind of thing is common? I have declined to install the toolbar, but I'm not sure if sites do this frequently or why they might want you to do so...."

Here was my reply:
"Many sites give you the option to download a toolbar, but don't require it. Delicioius, Yahoo and Google, for example, do this. I generally don't download the toolbar because it seems to slow my computer down and clutter the top bar of my web browser. I looked around at the site and I think you were wise not to download the toolbar. There may be nothing malicious about the site, but there are other places where you can get the same kind of resources without downloading anything, and the eslprintables.com site looked a bit unprofessional....cluttered with ads and odd notes."

You can compare www.eslprintables.com to a site such as http://a4esl.org/ to see what I'm talking about. Just as we need to teach our students to be critical "readers" of the interweb, we also need to bring a skeptical eye to our own search for online ESL resources and CALL tools.

Do you have any examples of either excellent sites such as a4esl.org, or dubious sites such as eslprintables.com, to share?

Also, don't forget to tweet links to either sites you think teachers should steer away from or sites you think are useful resources (add #ESL and #MATESOL at the end of your Twitter post to make it easier to find).

Homework for Thursday, 1/21/10

Read Chapter 3 in our CALL textbook (pdf available on our Blackboard site).

Find at least one online resource that you think would be useful in teaching SLA reading skills. This can be an online text or an actual online activity or lesson. Describe why you chose this resource and how you would use it. Make sure you include a link in the post to this resource.

Finally, add a link to this resource in your delicious account, using MATESOL as one of the tags, and at least one other word as a tag that describes the main subject of the link.

We will be sharing all these blog posts in class Thursday, so be prepared to have your entry and link projected for all to see.

Highlights of 1/19/10 class discussion

The reading for today's class, Principles of instructed language learning by Rod Ellis (2004), presents 10 principles that you should use to assess any CALL tool, lesson or activity you design to ensure effective language instruction.

Some key concepts include:
Focusing on fluency as well as accuracy,
Addressing the learners' built-in syllabus
Providing extensive input and output opportunities
Addressing learner differences
Providing opportunity to interact with L2
Assessing free and controlled production\