My Two Cents
General Esl
Title.
Paragraph.
Grammarman
Excellent comic. for kids.
Breakingnewsenglish
Fantastic website for students and teachers alike. Updated every 3 days (previously daily and for a brief period at two levels), this site takes a news story from VOA and creates a whole series of activities related to the 2 paragraph story.
Unfortunately, VOA is one of the outlawed websites here in China so access via a proxy is the only way possible.
Onestopenglish
A professional site with great lessons and ideas for teachers. Used to be free, now however most of the site has premium content which is to pay for.
Still some great lessons to be found in the lesson share section.
Bogglesworld
I'm not 100% but I think this site is no longer updated. Still, if you dig about, there are some real gems to be uncoverd here. I particularly like the graded reading exercises.
Pronunciation
international.ouc.bc.ca
All your minimal pair needs. Well actually not all... but a good deal. Including listening, minimal pairs, description of articulation, dictation, info gap and dialogue... and as if that weren't enough.... tongue twisters to boot.
Uiowa - phonetics
Only the best phoneme practice website ever!.Includes all standard english phonemes (AmE), with cross section of head. Step by step guide to articulation - video of each phoneme being pronounced and pronunciation in initial- middle - final position (where possible). For teachers to brush up on their phonemes and students to practice in the security of their own homes.
Teaching Tools
yappr
Great idea - wish I'd thought of it. Short videos with translations in multiple languages. Great for a quick fix of language learning. Learner orientated - but with a little imagination, teachers can make much of this fantastic site.
Listen and Write
Another amazing resource. This is dictation plus. You can upload your own content for students to practice, or use their extensive collection. Again for those in China, the VOA ones are not available - seemingly not even via proxy. Which is a crying shame.
Web Hosting
Weebly
I guess it goes without saying I'm a fan. In the past year, I've experimented with dreamweaver; rapidweaver; iweb; coda; and a host of other text editors.
For simple blog/hosting needs this blows the others out of the water in terms of ease of use.
This web app has given me my life back.
I recommend it for anyone.
Globat
I have nothing good to say about globat. I think they are the worst company I've dealt with in a long time.. and I live in China!
I did get in touch with hostgator... they seemed really helpful (even though I'm not a customer) and they even advised me not to bother with their services as they couldn't guarantee quality service for my location.!