EduCanon is such a straightforward and effective tool for making listening practice within and outside the classroom more interactive. If I had a pound each time I hear a classmate or tutor say the words "use authentic materials", I would be pretty loaded (I'm currently taking an MA in ELT if you don't already know). Yes, I'm on board with the whole idea of using materials that are not originally designed for language learning or teaching purposes on the condition that their difficulty level is just high enough for students to comprehend (hence Krashen's comprehensible input theory) and contextually-relevant enough that students would be able to relate and respond personally to the content. But how do we go about tweaking these authentic resources for learners to process and deduce its linguistic patterns to be able to reproduce later on? EduCanon will take this heavy load of material design off your shoulders.

I have tingles for Thinglink! As they say "a picture speaks a thousand words", I can't stress enough how great this tool is. This website lets you upload pictures and make them interactive by adding tags (just like Facebook I suppose) and linking them to web pages or videos. 

Thinglink will get your students to brush up on their reading and listening - perhaps more on the receptive skills than productive - and have them immersed in the topics of the lesson. Hovering over the tags and scanning through the websites is so lively and entertaining for students because it's completely innovative (if you compare to boring PowerPoint slides)! You can even set up quizzes or polls that you can link to the image on Thinglink making the learning more personal and dynamic.