Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly.  As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:

* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.

* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.

* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded).  If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.

* provide some language-learning opportunity.

* not require any registration.

You can find previous installments of this series with the rest of my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year.  Several hundred sites have been highlighted in these past lists.  A number of them are examples of “viral marketing” by companies.  You can read how I use these tools as language-learning activities in the article Samuel Jackson, My ESL Students, And Me.

Here are the newest:

CREATE A TALKING STORYBOOK ADVENTURE: You can personalize your own talking storybook at The Tale Of Despereaux: Storybook Adventure. After you answer a few questions, the site creates a personalized virtual “pop-up” book and provides a link to it.

SEND SOMEONE A “TIP”: Career Builder has created a web tool called Anonymous Tip Giver. I’m not too thrilled with its intent — to send anonymous suggestions to better via an audio message — but it can be adapted for use as an English language learning activity.  You first choose one of several strange-looking characters to deliver your message, and then can type in your message and choose the voice in which you want it spoken. You can also decide to record your own message with an 800 telephone number if you choose. Next, you can send it to the intended recipient anonymously, add your own name and email, or just get the url of your completed message to post on a student or teacher website/blog.

SEND AN ANIMAL E-CARD: The National Zoo at the Smithsonian has a great collection of E-Cards. Not only are there a lot to choose from, but finished cards are hosted by zoo’s server and appear to stay there indefinitely.

CREATE A NEAT-LOOKING ESSAY OUTLINE: aMaps let you create a visualization of a basic essay form — state your position and provide reasons, along with examples. After completing a scaffolded outline, you’re provided with a pretty neat looking visual picture of what you’ve developed, along with the embed code. You can also email the link to a friend or teacher for posting on a blog or website, and then people can respond to what you wrote.

As always, feedback is welcome.

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