Welcome to October. Though the column this month features Halloween as its topic, I’ll be introducing a variety of sites—something for academic searching, a place to be creative or let your learners get creative, and a tool that just might save you some time.

Halloween

On the train the other day I saw a poster for Disneyland with that unmistakable orange and black design. Disneyland has really embraced Halloween as one of its seasonal themes, just one of many signs that students in Japan are now familiar the festival and its imagery. The history of Halloween is more interesting than just pumpkin faces, however, and can be good content for an English lesson. Here are two sites that you can use as a resource, or even send your more advanced learners to.

CBBC (BBC News Learning Site) has a nice short summary of the festival and its history and images.

History.com’s Halloween page is a wealth of resources including videos, background information, pumpkin carving suggestions, and related stories.

A Free E-book Search Engine

It is remarkable how many books are now being released online for free these days under the Creative Commons license, usually in pdf form. I have recently downloaded Opening Up Education, edited by Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar, and A Designer’s Log: Case Studies in Instructional Design by Michael Power. And recently I came across a new search engine for e-books, which should make it even easier to find free books online. It’s called Free E-Book-s.

Get Creative

Looking for a nice writing project for your learners? Storybird gives you the tools to write storybooks (like children’s picture books) online. Artists post their work at the site and you can just browse for images to use, choose a few, and write a story. The results are simple (as in not so much written text) but are surprisingly sophisticated. The completed stories can be viewed online and in the near future you will be able to print out your stories too.

Save Some Time

The Scholastic Vocabulary Quiz Maker: Here is a vocabulary test making robot brought to you by Scholastic. Go to the page, input your vocabulary (just the vocabulary, not the definitions or examples) and let the system create a vocabulary test for you. The system provides the definitions for you. And you can select the grade level of difficulty to control the difficulty of the definitions. It’s all in English—sorry, no translations are allowed—but it makes a test that you can easily adapt (copy and paste and edit) for use with your own learners.