If you are looking for free online teaching tools, you can stop your search here. Because we have done the research for you. And we have already finished the hard work to provide you with a list of best free online teaching tools. So all you need to do is to check out these free teaching tools for esl teachers that are available for free.
If you are an esl teacher then you need to know about these free tools that can help you with your lessons. I’ll be honest, before I found these tools I was struggling. Now, I have far more time for my family and friends and also a lot more free time for myself.
Linguapress
(Vocabulary, worksheets, printables, ideas for teachers)
Linguapress has great resources for teachers. The best part is that they have resources for almost all ages. Easy, intermediate, advanced. This website is an absolute goldmine for online materials to make your class run more smoothly.
ThoughtCo
(Business English, Conversation, Vocabulary, Writing, Resources)
This website has a great collection of lessons and materials for your classes. You can find business English lessons, writing exercises, reading comprehension worksheets, and so much more. I would say this is a great source for adult learners or students looking to study abroad in an English-speaking country.
ESL Library: Dynamic Lesson Plans and Materials
ESLlibrary.com is one of the best, most comprehensive ESL online teaching resources available. While it does require membership (currently $55 for one year, with shorter subscriptions also available), many ESL teachers find this site incredibly helpful.
Membership to the site allows you full access to their lesson plan library, which has more than 500 ready-made lesson plans and more than 2,000 ready-to-print images and flashcards.
The site also takes current events and creates diverse lesson plans. This week, for example, they’ve taken the hot topic of the Ferguson, Missouri shooting to provide your students with an engaging debate topic. In this lesson plan, your students would read about, discuss and debate the militarization of police forces across the United States. How did police forces acquire so much military equipment and how is it affecting their relationship with local citizens? This topic is very current and the lesson is sure to get your students talking!
The site also has a breakdown of lessons by topic, such as business in English, role plays, writing in English, holidays, grammar stories and more.
ESL Printables: Give and Receive
ESLprintables.com is a great website for teachers who have also already made a lot of their own curriculum. It’s a resource with hundreds of thousands of ready-made worksheets, PowerPoint presentations and online exercises. The caveat here is that you must submit contributions before you can download them.
Worksheet downloads are conveniently organized by grammar, vocabulary, listening, speaking, reading and writing worksheets. In addition, they offer cinema, television, games and song worksheets. For example, under the “cinema and television” category, you could use a worksheet about “The Simpsons” that talks about hobbies—all that feature Bart and family.
The site also has a forum for teachers, where ESL instructors can ask questions, get advice and share ideas. The form is well managed and up-to-date, making it easy to take part or just skim through for ideas.
LanternFish (BogglesWorldESL): Building Vocabulary
I have often used LanternFish for young ESL learners, but it’s also a valuable site for teenage and adult learners. With hundreds of worksheets and lesson plans, it’s a helpful resource with lots of great ideas to better engage your students.
LanternFish offers flashcards, ESL exercises specifically for adults, a writer’s workshop and fun worksheet activities like word searches and crosswords for your students.
The site has a large listing of creative writing prompts, which can be really fun for more advanced students. For example, with Christmas just around the corner, they have a writing prompt titled “Christmas Elves on Strike!” They start the prompt with a paragraph that explains why the elves are on strike (no holidays or breaks, zero wages, terrible uniforms, to name a few reasons). “We, the Union of Workshop Elves, refuse to make any more toys until the following demands are met.” The students must then continue the story.
Building vocabulary through flashcards and exercises is one of this site’s major strengths. They have a collection of games and vocabulary exercises on a variety of themes from beginner to intermediate students. (FluentU also offers vocabulary lists and videos targeted at every level of language learner!)
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Click here to check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.
BusyTeacher: Warmers and Fillers and More!
BusyTeacher.org is one of the best sites on the web for ESL teachers. It has thousands of worksheets and activities available immediately for free download. No signing up, no membership and no fees (though you can purchase their entire library for about $100).
One especially helpful offering is their 360 free “warmers and fillers” which include warm-up activities and ice-breakers to get your students engaged quickly from the start of your lesson. One of their warmers is the “How Was Your Weekend” activity. Sure, it’s boring when you ask it every Monday. But the idea here is to give the students the identity of a famous person on a slip of paper (or let them think of their own). In pairs, the students ask questions and try to guess one another’s identity based on what they did over the weekend.
The site also offers great advice for ESL teachers, interesting creative writing prompts and much more.
Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab: Listen Up!
This online listening lab is the perfect resource for listening exercises in your ESL classroom. Audio is important, and as ESL teachers, we need to introduce other forms of listening exercises to our classes in order to improve student focus.
The audio listening exercises are organized by level of difficulty (easy, medium, difficult) and are listed by topic. Topic examples include “Clothing Styles,” “Car Rental,” “Breakfast Recipes” and “Friday Night Mishaps.”
Each lesson includes a short audio clip (usually less than two minutes), a quiz, vocabulary activities, post-listening exercises and online investigations, which ask the student to research the topic further online.
For example, in the audio exercise “Joe’s Hamburger Restaurant,” the speakers are a hamburger restaurant worker and a customer. There is an item on the menu called “Everything But the Kitchen Sink,” and the customer asks the worker to explain this phrase. The customer continues to place his order. At the end of the audio, there are quiz questions (which can be taken by the students online for a score or read aloud together). Other activities include multiple-choice and short-answer questions, as well as other post-listening exercises.
The site also has 20-minute ESL vocabulary lessons and longer videos that feature more in-depth interviews and conversations, perfect for your more advanced students.
All students learn in different ways, and these five resources can help you find what works best for all levels, and all different learners!
So add these websites to your ESL tool belt today—you’ll wonder how you ever got on without them!
FluentU
What I like about FluentU is that it really does take real-world videos that fluent English speakers would watch and turns them into teaching tools. They have a nice, natural approach to learning English that eases the students into both the language and the culture.
They have hundreds of entertaining videos that your students will enjoy watching. They have all been annotated and the words have example sentences and definitions. Their interactive tools are my favorite aspect of the app. This can be a great tool to keep your students engaged between live sessions with you.
For example, if the student clicks on the word brought, this is what they see:
Asana
This is an excellent free tool to plan out any lesson or project. It allows you to stay in touch with students and keep tabs on their progress in an easy and efficient manner. You can use it to easily breakdown any lesson or project into easy to digest and manage pieces.
I also use it to keep track of my ideas and notes on new lessons and as a place to set deadlines for my students where they can go and ask any questions they might be struggling with.
Watch this video by Jack Askew to see a little more of about how Asana can be used as a tool for online ESL teachers.
Off2Class
Off2Class is a powerful tool for online ESL teachers. You will have a massive library of speaking, listening and reading activities right at your fingertips. Off2Class will show you exactly how to teach the material in a way that is both interesting and fun for the students.
You can also use our placement test to see just where your students are in terms of their progress and level of fluency.
Last Pass
And last but not least I use Last Pass on a daily basis. While this isn’t exclusively a tool for online ESL teachers, it is one that can make a teachers life a lot easier. I find that with all the different sites I use as teaching tools, remembering all the different passwords can be a challenge.
Last Pass will generate and then remember all of my passwords for me in one place and will auto-fill all of my login details for each site. It is hands down the fastest, easiest and most secure way to generate and store your passwords.
Conclusion:
The online teaching tools are one of the most important resources for ESL teachers wanting to learn English in foreign countries. These teaching tools should be utilized for teachers who want to teach English because it helps prepare material for the typical classroom. One of the best ways that you can use these beginner tools is by giving your class a presentation on certain topics. This gives time for your class members to ask questions and also a way they to learn new vocabulary because they are only seeing what you write on the board during the presentation.