Episode Transcript
Ixchell Reyes (00:01.782)
Looking for tools and resources to try out in the new year? We’re exploring 26 tools and resources for 2026.
Brent Warner (00:14.224)
Hello and welcome to the DIESOL Podcast where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Brent Warner, professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College. And of course I’m here with the wonderful Ixchell Reyes, award-winning educator in innovation, professional development and all sorts of other fun things. Happy New Year.
Ixchell Reyes (00:34.68)
Happy 2026, it’s the year of the fire horse. It’s a DIESOL horse, okay?
Brent Warner (00:38.736)
Fire Horse. That sounds very intense. You don’t want to see one of those running by you. yes. Okay, so, Ixchell we are trying something new for the new year, which you have actually kind of not pushed for, but you said like, hey, we we should maybe think about doing this for for quite a while, which is we’re on video.
Ixchell Reyes (00:50.336)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (00:59.64)
video. Yes, a lot of people tend to ask me why why aren’t you showing your face? I’m listening on YouTube, but I want to see your face. So you know what our faces in 2026.
Brent Warner (01:08.966)
There we go, there we go. So, yes, they can see your lovely face, they can see my face. If these are of interest to you and you’re on YouTube, I think, or maybe other social things, who knows? Yeah, so we’re back to our annual tradition, first show of the year. One tool we’re sharing for…
Ixchell Reyes (01:27.704)
wherever you’re watching.
Brent Warner (01:38.552)
each year past the millennium I guess. So we got 26 tools, things to explore, things to figure out, and we’ll see how we do with this. Again, we might have a little bit of glitchiness just because we’re trying the video thing, and so if you’re just listening to the show as you traditionally always have, it should be mostly okay, but you know.
Ixchell Reyes (01:40.915)
Hehehehehe
Brent Warner (02:04.6)
It’s, if we’re not experimenting, we’re not doing what we do on DIESOL, we gotta test these things out. Yeah, so.
Ixchell Reyes (02:09.858)
which is innovative, yeah, testing it out, pushing all the buttons, breaking all the things.
Brent Warner (02:15.264)
Indeed. All right, so, Ixchell let’s jump into it. I think we’re ready and you’re gonna go first and we’ll talk about what’s going on.
Ixchell Reyes (02:19.852)
We are ready.
Okay, so we’ve mentioned this before in a previous episode and that is a TESOL AI position statement and I just think it’s worth exploring. I think people are still not necessarily fully aware that it’s out there and if you’re looking to create…
maybe guidelines for how to use it properly or appropriately or looking a place to start from. I think this is very, very much worth exploring and printing out and passing out to all your colleagues and people who are in charge of making those decisions. We wanna be uniform, especially in the field of TESOL and how we approach AI.
Brent Warner (03:00.75)
Right. So on the page, they are a little tricky to find. It’s not immediately obvious. Statement page. It’s under English language teaching profession. And that’s where you can find that statement. So cool. All right. Yeah, all these will be linked to in the show notes. So so we’re moving forward. And my choice here, even though we’re not using this platform right now, is the Adobe podcast.
Ixchell Reyes (03:13.762)
Hmm. And we’ll have it in the show notes,
Brent Warner (03:27.918)
So if you are at a school that has access to Adobe stuff, can have, you can either make your podcast there or you can have students make their podcasts and do all sorts of like, you know, like podcasts and or social media related types of things. And so I think this is partly has been pulled out of like, you know, the express zone of things, the Adobe express, which used to be Adobe spark and all those. But again,
Pretty good stuff and then you can do lots of editing and whatever else is going on. And I think one of the nice features inside of here, especially for me and my classrooms, is the higher quality of the removing the background noise because I’ve had something like 30 students recording a podcast in a highly bouncy audio bounce room. so…
So just for them to be able to click that and just only hear their voices or mostly only hear their voices and not all the other things that are going on in the background could be a really nice option. So if you haven’t explored Adobe Podcast, we are not gonna have the time in this episode to go in depth on all the features of all the tools. We’re just kind of saying, hey, there might be some things inside of here to look at. And so that is my first zone.
Ixchell Reyes (04:42.518)
Okay, tool number three or resource number three is Vibe coding. And this is something I’m pretty excited to explore because it’s the first time I heard about it, but it’s been around for a while. And Brent, what do you know about Vibe coding?
Brent Warner (04:58.854)
I’ve experimented with it quite a bit. It’s great. So basically you just kind of start talking through in a looking for it to design So if it’s like hey, I want to make this You know spreadsheet or I want to make this You know home page or something like that and it’ll help you and it’ll develop all of these things for you without you Understanding how to code you just needed to kind of talk through your ideas and then go back and forth with it
Ixchell Reyes (05:01.614)
Hmm?
Ixchell Reyes (05:10.318)
Hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (05:16.462)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (05:27.214)
So if you wanna think of it as rearranging your furniture based on how you feel at the end of that arrangement rather than following a guide, that’s what five coding is. And Canva has an AI code generator and that’s what is showing up on our screen right now. You can simply ask for whatever it is that you want and it’ll write the code for you. So I think I want to try this out in 2026 and that’s why I’m adding five coding.
Brent Warner (05:34.266)
Ha ha.
Brent Warner (05:56.58)
Yeah, I think I’m gonna start doing some workshops on this too and you Ixchell, you and I should actually do them together Because there’s a lot of cool stuff and so in connection to that I will also show kind of my vibe coding Explorations right now, which is Gemini’s one so in Gemini canvas Same kind of thing. I think I haven’t I haven’t actually explored the can va one the Gemini canvas Thank you everybody for
Ixchell Reyes (06:00.236)
Mm-hmm. You should.
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (06:19.757)
Mm-hmm. Geez, that’s gonna be puzzling.
Brent Warner (06:22.512)
Thank you all, every single EdTech company for everyone calling your product Canvas. Why on earth do you all, 2026, okay, we’re good. So, but anyways, the area where I played with this a little bit differently is having it make pages that I can install on my website. So you do have to have a little bit of know-how to like make HTML and then upload HTML to do it this way.
But basically it’s like hey, I want to make this game or I want to make like an interactive Screen that has like quizzing and things like that inside of it. I actually met a really cool teacher That’s doing some stuff down. I think she’s in San Diego We’re gonna I’m gonna get her on the show later on you show. This is the first time I’m telling you this but she’s doing some very cool things about like
you know, experimenting with students talking into it and then they’re checking their speaking on the actual vibe coded pages and apps that she has built. And so anyways, these types of things are out there and people are really doing some cool explorations. So Gemini Canvas as an option. I’ve built a few little games and things and they’re really cool. So check it out.
Ixchell Reyes (07:15.661)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (07:33.997)
Mm-hmm.
All right, so going back to audio creation and podcasting, Lindy Hockenberry has an article on using Spotify and Brisk for students. And the cool thing is that Spotify for creators is free. I think for schools, it’s got options that you can use as a teacher. so I…
Brent Warner (07:53.126)
Mm.
Ixchell Reyes (08:04.599)
think it’s worth checking it out. I know that we’ve always done Zoom, but Spotify is worth a try. Brisk, haven’t figured out how to use for audio creation, but I thought it was interesting that that was added on there. So.
Brent Warner (08:19.384)
Yeah, I’ve never used Brisk. I know that that’s like a big new feature for them and everything, but I haven’t quite used it in that way. I’ve used it in other ways, so definitely worth checking out. I’ll be reading that article soon. OK, so next up is ColorVowel, colorvowel.com. And so if you’re doing like phonomic teaching, helping students with their pronunciation, you guys have all seen
Ixchell Reyes (08:21.739)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (08:48.211)
Orphanology!
Brent Warner (08:49.646)
Yeah, so if you’ve all seen the, you know, the E sound is made with green and the OO sound is made with blue, right? Like all those things, right? And so this is kind of that group has a bunch of extra resources, the people who made that up. And then now they’ve got this whole PD thing going on. But if you’re doing pronunciation stuff, if you’re trying to help your students understand a little bit more, you know, speaking and pronunciation.
Ixchell Reyes (08:56.077)
Hmm.
Brent Warner (09:14.346)
There’s a lot of cool stuff in here. You can go check out the interactive charts, all sorts of different options they have available. So colorvowel.com is a place I want to spend a little bit more time in the upcoming semester.
Ixchell Reyes (09:27.543)
Yeah, I’m excited for this one, my teacher trainees. Okay, so the next one is the presidential AI challenge for students and educators. And I don’t know if you had heard of this, Brent. I hadn’t. And again, I learned about this from Lindy Hulkenberry. So shout out to her for always giving us new things to also check out. But the issue was that looking at the guidebook,
Brent Warner (09:41.286)
Mm-mm.
Brent Warner (09:50.65)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (09:57.452)
was a little bit complex. So she created a guide. There’s another guide, an even shorter guide. But what I thought was cool is the…
I lost you there for a second. But there are three tracks and the track I was interested in was the one for creators because I think you’re supposed to solve different problems and using AI. And again, it’s something that I haven’t looked into, but I thought it was cool because it’s a challenge. And again, we’re working, we have AI integration in every tool, everywhere. So why not use it to try to solve real problems?
Brent Warner (10:30.416)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (10:34.82)
Yeah, so presidential challenge. Some people might find that problematic. I mean, it’s worth looking into. I think that’s what we’re trying to get to, Is like, hey, yeah, explore, see what it looks like. Even if you’re not really doing it to submit to the government, maybe you can take some of the ideas and see how they fit for your needs or whatever else it is, right?
Ixchell Reyes (10:36.511)
Hahaha!
Ixchell Reyes (10:46.925)
Explore it at this side.
Ixchell Reyes (10:58.797)
Yeah.
Brent Warner (11:01.926)
Or even build your own AI challenge if you’re kind of interested in something like that. think actually I’d love to do something like that with my students is like build something. Right. Maybe. Okay. I’m have to get ready to take notes on this. Okay. yeah. So speaking of government resources, I am also sharing American English at state.gov. And so this is
Ixchell Reyes (11:08.397)
I would love to do that too.
Ixchell Reyes (11:14.541)
See? See?
Yep, don’t knock it till you try it.
Brent Warner (11:30.822)
an old site that was not taken down. The it when everything else was taken down somehow. I’m not sure if it just got skipped or or whatever else is or if it’s amazing. Yeah. So anyways, if you haven’t ever used it, the American English American English state dot gov has a bunch of cool resources for, you know, for different things that you might want to do in the classes. And when you go click on the resources section, there’s like, you know,
Ixchell Reyes (11:42.121)
Or if it’s amazing and we…
Ixchell Reyes (11:52.567)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (12:01.488)
teachers guide comics for language learning u.s. culture music and games like you know and it’s not the deepest of all things but i do like that is a site okay here’s a place where i can go and grabs some real quality stuff made by english teachers who you know this has been available for many years and so it’s like you really knew their stuff and know what was going on so
Ixchell Reyes (12:05.408)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (12:24.102)
If you’re interested and you just say, I just want some ideas, want some other, you know, a couple places to go with some things that I can print out or get access to quickly, American English is great.
Ixchell Reyes (12:36.492)
And now we go to one of my favorites, which is the ELT Toolkit by our dear Brett. It is a subscription based, but it is amazing. It’s going to save you time because Brett has built out, what do you call them, modules?
Brent Warner (12:42.278)
Hey! Hey, thank you!
Brent Warner (12:58.712)
Yeah, I mean, they’re just kind of tool by tool explanations, all with like a breakdown on ideas on how to use them specifically. This is the tool. These are a couple of different ways you can use them. These are some, you know, if this one doesn’t work for you, here’s a couple of alternatives that might be valuable. And I am actually currently working on the first update to it, which should be coming out within the next couple of weeks. So.
Ixchell Reyes (13:01.536)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (13:22.924)
Ooh.
Brent Warner (13:26.938)
So there’s like over a hundred right now, we’re gonna be adding a bunch in the next few weeks and so yeah, if you’re just like the type of person that’s like, I wanna do stuff but I don’t wanna find all the tools and I don’t wanna figure out how they fit into my setting exactly, but I want some ideas, this is the place to go. And TESOL.
It’s all run through TESOL, it’s hosted by them, it’s up and it’s filterable and searchable and all those kinds of things. We’ve talked about a little bit on past episodes, but if you’re interested, yeah, TESOL ELT Toolkit is what it’s called.
Ixchell Reyes (14:02.891)
Yeah, and again, he’s just said he’s going to update, which means if things are outdated, it’ll be updated. And we love things that get updated, especially in technology. Right, Nat Tech.
Brent Warner (14:12.58)
Yeah, well actually that’s part of the reason why we did it this way is because we’re like a book is gonna be out of you know like a book with this kind of material is not gonna be long lasting right? It’s just yeah, not really but with this it’s like hey Yeah, things change companies change all those types of things so we’re like let’s make it an online digital resource And I’m pretty happy with you know the way that all the work. They’ve done to make this work, so Thank You TESOL
Ixchell Reyes (14:17.569)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (14:22.454)
Feasible, yeah. Expiration date.
Ixchell Reyes (14:35.884)
Excellent.
Brent Warner (14:38.758)
All right, so my next one is class point. Have you ever played with this show?
Ixchell Reyes (14:44.618)
No, actually, I think this is the first time I’m hearing about it.
Brent Warner (14:48.364)
So it’s kind of like Pear Deck, I guess, where it’s like you can make things more interactive. This is like if you’re more of a PowerPoint person than maybe than a Google slides. think I can’t remember if Pear Deck works with both. I know it definitely works with Google Slides. But yeah, but there’s all sorts of cool things you can go check out. You know, like you can create quizzes, you can gamify things, make interactive quizzes directly inside of the PowerPoint. And so.
Ixchell Reyes (14:52.15)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (15:02.701)
for Google, y’all.
Brent Warner (15:16.56)
They’re all just worth looking at and you know, you can see like the website’s real nice looking and it kind of helps you understand like the different features that you might use with it. But anyways, Classpoint seems like a pretty cool thing to check out. It’s kind of like the students could just click a code and they can get into an interactive version of your PowerPoint.
Ixchell Reyes (15:36.95)
that is pretty cool. I’m gonna have to share this one out with my colleagues. I’m more of a slides person, but I know that there’s PPT diehards. PPT.
Brent Warner (15:40.132)
Yeah. Yeah, me too, but…
The PO, I’m gonna put my PPT together, yeah. Yeah, well, and mean, the reality is there are lots of Microsoft schools or things like that, and so it’s like, yeah, so it’s like, depending on what you got going on, if it’s a fit for you, yeah, worth checking out. Cool.
Ixchell Reyes (15:55.102)
Also true, also true. Yeah, could be limited.
Okay, so in the spirit of, again, thinking back to who our students are, how they’re growing up and what they’re growing up around, which is right now, generative AI, I wanted to take a look at how it’s rewiring the brain. So there’s a couple of really good articles, one in Psych Today and one by Fortune. And again, I think the way we approach
Brent Warner (16:16.506)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (16:30.432)
The way we approach our class or the way we design materials really has to be aligned with who our students are. Again, I say this all the time, they’re not getting older, they’re getting younger, we’re getting older, the gap is getting bigger. I struggled with trying to figure out how to turn off incognito mode and realize it’s not my problem, it was a Chrome problem. But I felt old for a second. But again.
Brent Warner (16:40.486)
Mm.
Brent Warner (16:44.08)
Hehehehehe
Brent Warner (16:53.307)
Yeah
Yeah, as we do.
Ixchell Reyes (16:59.052)
It’s rewiring our brains and my little nephews, the number one question I heard over the break was, is that real or is that AI? No, that’s AI. That’s fake. That’s AI. I just, again, they’re four years old and nine years old, which means they are very much aware of AI. That’s like a, that’s second nature to them. So again, remembering that we need to see how the brain is changing. How is it being rewired?
Brent Warner (17:08.038)
Hmm.
Brent Warner (17:27.962)
I’m glad to hear they’re questioning it even at that age though, that’s really wonderful. tell your sister good job on raising them.
Ixchell Reyes (17:29.42)
me too me too absolutely kudos to my sister and to their teachers because I’m pretty sure that they have really good teachers as well so
Brent Warner (17:41.008)
Nice, good. All right, so mine next is my first physical recommendation, and I haven’t quite found the exact one I’m looking for, but I’m telling you all out there, this is something that I am looking for, which is a big, you know, digital wall clock. You know, some people have them, you know, whatever, they have a good clock, but like, I want one that can kind of do countdown timers for things like presentations in the class. Yeah, and so what I’m really looking for is a
Ixchell Reyes (17:50.892)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (18:05.332)
that’s cool.
Brent Warner (18:10.64)
Big one, a big digital countdown timer that ideally is battery powered. Because I’ve seen a lot of good ones that are exactly what I’m looking for, but they require a plug. And I’m like, no, want it to, because we’ve got those whiteboards in our class. I want to be able to have it on a magnet and just stick it on the back wall of the whiteboard for the students who doing presentations to see.
Ixchell Reyes (18:17.108)
Hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (18:23.115)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (18:30.332)
That’s cool.
Brent Warner (18:32.454)
And so I’m still kind of searching for things if anybody out there has a good digital wall clock that does that runs on batteries Let me know I would be I would be stoked to To take your recommendations otherwise. I’m kind of looking through some possible options, but but particularly I want like they’re called the gym clocks because they have like countdown and count up timers and different things like that Yeah, so I am on the hunt, but I know there’s something out there. That’s gonna work
Ixchell Reyes (18:40.371)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (18:54.079)
Hmm, that’s cool. I never even thought of that.
Ixchell Reyes (19:03.381)
Very, very, very cool. All right, so the next tool I have is Reverso. I had not heard about this before, but it gives you translations of real text, but it’ll give you the, like, let’s say you’re looking for an idiom, not an idiom, you paste a piece of text and it’ll actually translate it, with the, not directly translate it, but it’ll give you the correct idiomatic expression in that language.
so that you can better understand.
Brent Warner (19:33.386)
so like context appropriate. because sometimes, when you see. Right, right, right. OK, that’s pretty interesting.
Ixchell Reyes (19:36.939)
Yes. Culturally, yep.
And of course you can use AI, can use chat GPT for those things, I usually have to teach my students. You can go into your AI and tell it, give me the context, give me the idiomatic expression in the language of whatever you’re searching for. But this just has everything set already. It just does the one thing and I like that.
Brent Warner (20:05.254)
Hmm nice, okay Yeah, I think at first glance. I’m just like well Why not why not use Google Translate or something, but I think a little bit more looking into this can show some Some uses for it so reverse. very cool All right, so my next one again. This is just an online resource if you do a bunch of jigsaw stuff This is it’s called ESL jigsaws calm I think they mostly kind of sell like
Ixchell Reyes (20:11.979)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (20:35.204)
workbooks and downloadable lessons and things like that but but if you’re doing a bunch of different jigsaw activities and you get it so for those who don’t you haven’t done a jigsaw or maybe you aren’t aware of what a jigsaw is this is where you have let’s say you have four different groups of four people and they’re kind of all given one set of assignments each and then you split them out so that it was all
AAAA BBBB CCCC on you know on the four groups, and then it becomes ABCD on each group so you every person spreads out and then mix out perfectly to match up So that’s your kind of basic idea of a jigsaw and then this website Provides a few and I think they rotate them out like some different jigsaw Activities that you can use with your class like some of them are cool They’re like puzzles right like like kind of breakout escape rooms style things
different things like that. anyways, take a look. Even if it’s just inspiration for like how to start building some different types of jigsaw activities, I think you could find some real fun ways for students to use them. So esljigsaws.com. You don’t necessarily need to pay for things. If you find it useful, for sure do support. It looks like a small independent, you know, team or individual going for it. But yeah, there’s some really nice resources inside of it.
Ixchell Reyes (21:58.316)
All right, and we are pausing for a moment. Are we taking a break? We’re pausing for a moment. To remind you that if you’re listening, we are trying. Okay, sorry. I didn’t know you were still recording. We’re gonna cut this out, right? Okay. We’re pausing for a moment to remind you if you are listening on whatever platform you’re using that we are trying out video.
Brent Warner (22:02.704)
Hey! Yeah, we’ll pass!
Yeah. Yeah, we are. We’re recording. Sure.
Ixchell Reyes (22:25.673)
So check us out on YouTube if you’d like to have us along with whatever chore you’re doing and leave us a comment.
Brent Warner (22:32.87)
Yeah, you can just have us on your big screen TV in the background while you’re vacuuming. YouTube, just slash DIESOL think that’s what it is, right? D I E S O L as you know. Oh, DIESOL pod. Hey, yes, of course. Very good. All right. So, Michelle, we’re going back to you.
Ixchell Reyes (22:35.888)
Hehehehehe
Ixchell Reyes (22:45.835)
DIESOL pod DIESOL DIESOL pod
Ixchell Reyes (22:57.361)
Yes. So I learned about this tool from one of our colleagues and friends of the pod, Michelle Quiter So Michelle, if you’re listening, thank you. This is called Versatext and it is a web-based language learning tool that helps you explore the text within a window. So basically you paste or upload the text you want to study. Then you can look at a word cloud. It looks very basic if you’re looking at it on video.
but the words will come up in different colors based on parts of speech. You can click on a word to see all the sentences in which it appears in the concordance, and you can see how the word is actually used. It’ll also give you text stats like frequency lists and other vocabulary information. So it’s actually kind of cool. Again, it’s one of those single use, I would say single use tools.
which of course you can probably do this on AI, why not also have one of these?
Brent Warner (23:58.554)
I mean, this is my favorite, it’s just those single use, focused… The word clouds, I actually have not totally understood like the big… People love word clouds and I’m not trashing it, I just have never really understood.
Ixchell Reyes (24:00.661)
The word clouds. yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (24:10.622)
Maybe for people who like maybe people who take information visually and remember it that way. think that helps for some of my students that maybe struggle with maybe they have ADHD or ADD and they’re able to remember a little bit easier, especially with colors.
Brent Warner (24:26.064)
Yeah, okay. So for sure, there are like the word cloud, like I said, for me, I’m not a huge word cloud fan, but the concordance in there and the leveled readers and all these different things are really cool. So I am definitely going to be adding this versatile T-I-L-E to some things to explore for me as well. Cool.
Ixchell Reyes (24:33.288)
Yeah, you don’t need to use the word cloud. Yeah, absolutely.
Brent Warner (24:50.79)
All right, so my next one is Helperbird, which is kind of makes PDFs and web pages more accessible. I think there’s a lot of really interesting ways to play around with this. like it can do. We’ve talked about these kind of things way long time ago, you show like these distraction free reading. Like we’ve talked about what’s what was that beeline reader and like like making things easier to read, more accessible, et cetera.
Ixchell Reyes (25:11.124)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (25:19.91)
They have all sorts of ways to interact with the documents and so you can see, you know, there’s some reading features, writing features, so it can do like text to speech, voice typing type of things, grammar support, etc. So it’s just like if you need some accessibility things going on, there are a number of great tools that do things, which I really encourage people to explore and see what’s out there. You know, we’ve talked in the past about Read &Write, which is a great accessibility choice.
Moat is building in a lot of cool stuff into into their features But helper bird is another cool option that might be really valuable for a lot of people so helper bird comm
Ixchell Reyes (25:58.955)
Yeah, it’s the first time I heard of it, so very cool. Alrighty, so I work with teacher trainees and they have to take phonology and it’s not very fun for them to go back and teach to their students. Oftentimes they worry about their pronunciation, but this website has a ton, sorry, the name of the website is phonics and stuff.com.
And it’s got a lot of games to help students understand phonemes, morphemes. There’s interactive phonics games where you’re matching sounds to letters. There’s blending. That helps a lot of our Asian background students. There’s the quotable readers and read along stories where you can practice the pronunciation. Most of it is free. And then there is an optional, of course, membership.
but it’s got a lot of sentence generators. Also, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the speech therapy. They’re like grids with pictures, and then they’re supposed to target, like for example, consonant blends or consonant vowel, consonant patterns. And so you’ve got that already in there. So you could create it, but it’s tricky and it’s time consuming, and it’s already in one place that targets those things. So I’m just…
Happy it’s free because it will help students.
Brent Warner (27:26.918)
Very cool. Yeah, I like the look of this and I think there’s some… I have to be careful when we look at these because I’m like, just want to start jumping right into all the links. But yeah, we’ll do that later. Yeah, okay. All right, cool. So my next one is another physical thing, which is… I’m kind of playing around with how to do this, but basically those foam ball blasters, like those Nerf gun type of things.
Ixchell Reyes (27:37.027)
Yeah, nope, nope, nope, you explore later.
Ixchell Reyes (27:50.666)
man.
Brent Warner (27:55.384)
And so what I’m thinking about is like ways to make kind of like fun games with these things where you could like, for example, maybe you put numbers on the foam balls and then you kind of like, wouldn’t like, obviously don’t point the gun at your students, know, but like I’m thinking like popping. Yeah, well, like popping, popping these little foam balls into the air and then like if a student catches it and they get the number and then that’s the challenge for them to do or yes, yes, yes, because that’s actually what I was. was.
Ixchell Reyes (28:00.17)
Hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (28:10.229)
You’re going to have rules.
Ixchell Reyes (28:20.467)
like one of those t-shirt blasters.
Brent Warner (28:24.666)
The reason I thought of this was first because I was looking for a t-shirt cannon. But they’re out of my price range. But then I’m like, okay, well, this might be a kind of a cool way to do some things for students. And then if you just sharpie some numbers onto these, you could go endlessly. Whatever it is the number is, then you have some sort of different game, some different bingo, some different points, whatever.
Ixchell Reyes (28:25.034)
Mm.
Ixchell Reyes (28:28.57)
Why?
Ixchell Reyes (28:48.074)
points, a number of questions.
Brent Warner (28:50.66)
Yeah, like all sorts of endless things and it’s a kind of a way to make it more interactive and maybe you could like If you trust your students, you could have like one student be the like popper, you know and so i’m just trying to think of like ways to make guns like fun interactive physical a little bit more, you know, some some real movement around the classroom things like that, so And these things are like 20 bucks
Ixchell Reyes (29:01.674)
If you trust your sister.
Ixchell Reyes (29:09.544)
Yeah, of course. Yeah, absolutely. You can always point it at a target so it can bounce right back and then catch it.
Brent Warner (29:15.942)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly like you could also say like hey shoot it in the trash can if you make it in the trash can you get some point you know like Endless kinds of things for like a simple gun toy that might be fun to play with so So yeah
Ixchell Reyes (29:20.584)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Very cool. Okay, so the next tool I have, some people may have heard about it. Maybe we’ve mentioned it before, but it’s Ideogram and it’s in AI that focuses on images. And the reason why this comes up more often than other AIs, at least for now until AIs get a little bit better, is that if you ask for particular text, the text tends to come out accurate, more accurate than others.
Brent Warner (29:36.592)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (29:54.469)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (29:57.99)
I would just like to throw that one out there. If you’re not using ideogram, ideogram is actually pretty cool. actually, I usually go through three different AIs to see which one has the better images. And ideogram has always been fun. So another tool to explore.
Brent Warner (30:09.894)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah it the text one the text thing I mean that has is still an issue with some of the AIs where they don’t quite put the text you’re looking for this one has always been for whatever reason very very strong with like getting the words that you want in there so cool all right I am going to share a book I don’t remember if we talked about this in the past
Ixchell Reyes (30:17.981)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (30:24.583)
More accurate, yeah.
Hmm.
Brent Warner (30:38.5)
But we’ve definitely talked about Ilka Koska and she did her book with Rachel Toncelli and Josh Pais. It’s called Artificial Intelligence, Real Teaching, A Guide to AI in ELT. I read this book when it came out. I think it’s good, big picture, so you don’t have to worry about being perfectly timely. It’s about kind of understanding bigger choices.
ethical integration, all of those kinds of things. And it’s not very big, you I mean, it’s not super long. It’s definitely, you know, you could kind of sit down and get through it. So check it out. Artificial intelligence, real teaching, a guide to AI in ELT.
Ixchell Reyes (31:21.905)
Excellent. All right, the next tool I have is sadly now called FameLac. It used to be TV Garden, it is now called FameLac and I hope that’s not like a predictor for where it’s going. But it is a website where you can click on any part. So it’ll come up with a globe, the in a world map and you can click on any country and it’ll give you
Brent Warner (31:32.165)
TV Garden.
Brent Warner (31:39.269)
Mmm.
Ixchell Reyes (31:51.946)
TV from around the world and I like this tool because my students can go in there and look at different types of English and I like it because I go in there and look at all the different countries that have different acts or different Maybe versions of Arabic for example, and it’s pretty cool You can you know watch and see how other cultures what other cultures are showing on TV and I think that that is pretty cool and so fame lack
Brent Warner (31:53.989)
Mm.
Brent Warner (32:19.224)
the
Ixchell Reyes (32:19.941)
is something worth exploring.
Brent Warner (32:22.757)
Very cool. I like it. mean, yeah, I’m with you. I hate the name, but TV TV garden. What a great name fame lack terrible name Can I just say to all of you out there who are out there changing your names? Stop it. Just stop changing your names Okay Great next up
Ixchell Reyes (32:27.273)
TV garden was amazing.
Ixchell Reyes (32:38.633)
Ha
Brent Warner (32:45.549)
So if you use DraftBack in the past, DraftBack was a great way if you’re using Google Docs with your students and kind of having a way to heat map and track their writing process and show them what’s going on and be aware if they’re doing things like massive cut and paste from other sources, et cetera. But a lot of people were bummed out that DraftBack converted to a subscription model.
Ixchell Reyes (32:48.093)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (33:03.411)
Dun dun dun.
Brent Warner (33:13.733)
a know $40 a year. I don’t have a problem with subscriptions with information that is updated. I do have a problem with subscriptions for services that really don’t take any extra work from time to time. so draft back was kind of that. Like they never really updated anything. You know a few times when they had to like align with new Chrome requirements but like not actually changing the.
the content or the product at all and that doesn’t cost them anything for me to run it on my computer. So to me, I’m like, not really into that. I would have happily paid for a endless user license, right? Like a one-time purchase, but anyways, they decided to go a different way. So process feedback. Yeah, process feedback is the new one. I love it. It’s very deep. It’s way deeper than I’m ready for and it’s a little bit
Ixchell Reyes (33:58.409)
Too bad. Process feedback.
Brent Warner (34:08.837)
kind of, you know, engineer looking when you get into it. It’s like, my God, there’s so many different things going on. It would be nice if there was like a little easier to understand and a little bit kind of less, less granular feedback. I mean, it’s nice to have the granular, but like, it’s still just like a lot to look at. But at the same time,
Ixchell Reyes (34:14.023)
haha
Ixchell Reyes (34:25.181)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (34:31.173)
It goes through, helps students see like, how long have you been spending actually working on this? And it’s really designed in a different way, which is to say like, it can help students understand their writing process more. And it’s meant to help them through that process, not just to be like a, caught you cheating kind of thing. Yeah. And so that’s why it’s called process feedback, right? And so it’s like, well, what’s going on with your writing? What’s happening inside of here?
Ixchell Reyes (34:48.297)
Play drives, yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (34:54.173)
Hmm?
Brent Warner (34:58.009)
How are you taking the time to think through these ideas, et cetera? So processfeedback.org created by educators. It’s all over the place and really worth looking at, especially if you’re worried about, hey, are my students doing too much with AI in their writing? they thinking through their work themselves, et cetera?
Ixchell Reyes (35:18.023)
Very cool. All right. We’re on 23 tools. 23. Okay. So my next tool is esl-bits.org. And I learned from Michelle Quiter again about this tool. I’m constantly looking for resources for my students, for them to read along with the audio. And though YouTube does have a lot of stuff, sometimes it’s messy for them.
because they have to sift through playlists and some of it is not interesting. It’s not stuff that I would read, but this place has a lot of graded readers with audio and they’re by levels and a lot of the stories are maybe more current. They’re not just the classics. So.
Brent Warner (36:01.605)
Hmm Yeah, love it. It is a little old-fashioned looking like old web You know like web 1.0 kind of look going. Yeah But you know Wonderful like this is this is the type of stuff I I get so bummed because it’s like it’s so easy to dismiss things because it’s like old frames and doesn’t look modern and new But like there’s so much good stuff out there that people have made that just doesn’t necessarily
Ixchell Reyes (36:08.017)
Yeah, like HTML-y type.
Ixchell Reyes (36:29.597)
Yeah, and if you’re out there and you’re the creator, you please update it? At least the font color.
Brent Warner (36:37.261)
Can I suggest some vibe coding to make this look modern and new you don’t have to change any of the content All right, cool, so my next one is grouper I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at this but But so there’s been a couple of these types of things in the past There’s been like shake school and a few things. This is basically like you
Ixchell Reyes (36:41.226)
Vibe coding. Vibe coding would do it.
Ixchell Reyes (36:53.074)
Never heard of it.
Brent Warner (37:01.375)
you put your students names in there and then you can put in some different, you know, basically like defining aspects of like, you know, things that you want the thing to know about them, like their gender, how profession they are, what their background language is, whatever else it is. And then you can click a button and it’ll rotate and it’ll make groups for you, like the best distribution of possible groups for you. Yeah. So like, so then, you know, and you can create your own
Ixchell Reyes (37:21.865)
Ooh, this is cool.
Brent Warner (37:28.841)
you know, ideas so it doesn’t just have to be the ones that they have. Like you can be like, you know, I want to do, you know, colors of shoes that students wear and you could do that, right? So like whatever you wanted to do. But like it comes up with some some pretty good common ones that you might break things down about. Like you can categorize your students by, know, like you get this basically a spreadsheet and you just put the different ones inside of there for each of them.
Ixchell Reyes (37:32.008)
Right.
Ixchell Reyes (37:37.801)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (37:54.053)
It’s fast, it’s easy, and then all you have to do is click a button and it’ll make a group for you. And a really cool feature inside of it is say, you can also go in and say, do not ever put these two students together. So yeah, like, I mean, it’s like, you’re like, I hate to say that I have to do that, but yeah, of course. Yeah, we need a little classroom management sometimes. And so you know, these two students don’t work well together or perhaps work too well together. And so you end up
Ixchell Reyes (37:58.461)
Very cool.
Ixchell Reyes (38:05.979)
that’s good. Yeah. We don’t want mutiny. No, you have to.
Brent Warner (38:23.885)
you can do things like that kind of distinctions as well. it’s called grouper, g-r-o-u-p-e-r dot school.
Ixchell Reyes (38:33.16)
Okay, so my last one for 2026 is, I guess they’re toys to keep our students more calm and redirect their energy. So many of you know them as fidget toys or toys for the brain, but my students love Rubik’s cubes and I have all different types. I’ve also tried to find different ones for the ones that get frustrated by the Rubik’s cubes.
So I recently found magnetic cubes. They’re like little just cubes that you can form things with and there’s puzzles you can do. And also there’s fidget links. So a lot of these are made for students who have a lot of energy and maybe need to manage that energy while they’re sitting in a long class. Again, I’m very big on letting them channel that so that they are not bothering someone or channeling it elsewhere.
Brent Warner (39:19.321)
Mmm.
Brent Warner (39:27.193)
Yeah. Do you find that it’s useful in the class? Like that it actually makes a difference for them? Huh.
Ixchell Reyes (39:29.84)
Again, absolutely. For me, yeah, absolutely. I’ve had students who tell me, can I borrow this and take it home? And then they’ll come back and they’ll continue fidgeting with it. But I’ve had students also who told me they had ADHD or dyslexia and they couldn’t focus. But when they had that thing, that manipulative in their hand, and it could be something like squishy. So it doesn’t have to something noisy. I also like the little keyboard clickers. You can just type in
Brent Warner (39:53.221)
Right, right, right.
Ixchell Reyes (39:58.493)
keyboard clickers or just a lot of brain puzzles. Students will sit there and they’ll do a little longer without disrupting or without losing their focus if they have something in their hand. And again, I’m talking about adults. I recently got myself a fidget spinner for my phone. It looks like it’s a like the little phone stand, but it’s actually a very silent fidget spinner. so sometimes you’re waiting or you’re nervous and you’re just fidgeting with it. It helps to channel that energy.
Brent Warner (40:01.701)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (40:26.957)
Nice, very cool. Okay, so mine last one will also be a physical one, is basically it’s a Dopp kit, which is a canvas satchel essentially. Their travel kits are different. Yeah, so.
Ixchell Reyes (40:40.58)
a canvas settle.
Brent Warner (40:43.897)
So I bought one of these, the one I’ll have the link to is from Herschel Supply Company, if you guys know Herschel. I actually got mine from Vans several years ago, but just some sort of like bag, and basically what I use is it’s to hold, it’s like a giant pen case, right? But I put a ton of expo markers and I put like some regular pens inside of there, and just a few little things that either I want.
Ixchell Reyes (40:50.041)
Mm. Mm.
Brent Warner (41:09.059)
to distribute to my class or if my students say, hey, I don’t have a pen or pencil or whatever, I always have something available for them. It’s the only thing I actually carry with me to school or to my classroom every day is like this is the one thing that I always have with me. And so it’s like, and I’ve used it every day for years and I don’t think about sharing it very often. And so it’s like, but it is very, very useful to have. just a, you know, it’s probably a…
Seven inch long bag by you know two or three inches wide and just stuff in as many pins as you can And whatever else you need that that you would carry normally really like it find it very useful So you can look it up as a dop kit I would recommend just getting a little better quality one of the last you a bunch of years and And I like I said, I use it every single day
Ixchell Reyes (42:06.107)
All right, it is time for our fun finds. After all those 26 tools, if you’re still not satisfied, this time I have a Whitney Hansen poetry journal. If you don’t know who Whitney Hansen is, she’s on Instagram. I think she started off on Instagram, but she’s got some amazing, I would say modern poetry, very short, but inspirational.
Brent Warner (42:10.309)
Alright.
Ixchell Reyes (42:32.808)
And she came out with a poetry journal in the style of you’ve probably seen the reels where people say in my language we say or in English we say this but in my language we say that and she has a journal that is in English we say that in poetry we say and I think that is such a great writing prompt. So I’m actually going to incorporate it into my writing classes so go out there find it to journal.
Brent Warner (42:44.026)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (42:54.201)
nice.
Brent Warner (42:57.871)
Very cool, very cool. Nice. So mine is, so right now it’s been really rainy in California and you’ve maybe even seen this on the news, but one of the things that happens is a dumb little problem, which is your reverse camera on your car might often get kind of clouded with little dots or foggy or whatever else it is. And so I saw this.
Ixchell Reyes (43:07.496)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (43:20.754)
Hmm.
Brent Warner (43:23.599)
video on YouTube and this guy is basically showing like a couple of different techniques for dealing with that and the one that I liked the best was just so simple was just take a tiny little slice of potato and rub that potato on the you know on the little reverse camera and then you got like several weeks of just it’ll droop like the the water drips will just slide right off and it won’t fog up and everything like that so if you just if you’re cooking potatoes
If you’re throwing away a couple of slices of peels and things, just grab one of those little peels, dry off your camera lens on the back of your car and rub that potato on it and you’ll be much better. Rub that potato. That’s your goal. That’s your New Year’s resolution for 2026 is to rub that potato. So cool. That is it. 2026, we made it. Unbelievably, somehow.
Ixchell Reyes (44:01.25)
Rub that potato.
You
Ixchell Reyes (44:20.964)
And if you made it through the end of this show, thank you.
Brent Warner (44:24.281)
Yeah, give us a like. If you’re following the YouTube thing, then give us a thumbs up on the video or subscribe to the channel or anything like that, right? There’s all sorts of little ways that you can support us if you like, including the show notes. show where can they find the show notes.
Ixchell Reyes (44:43.784)
You can find the show notes and other episodes at DIESOL.org/131 for episode 131. You can also find us on most socials at DIESOL pod.
Brent Warner (44:56.963)
right? You can find me out there at @BrentGWarner.
Ixchell Reyes (45:01.414)
And you can find me at @ixy_pixy_ that’s two underscores.
Brent Warner (45:07.633)
All right everybody, thanks so much. We’re looking forward to exploring more with you in the new year and supporting our students and making sure everything is good. So happy new year once again. See you guys.
Ixchell Reyes (45:09.402)
You
Ixchell Reyes (45:18.984)
Happy New Year!
Looking for tools and resources to try out in the new year? We’re exploring 26 tools and resources for 2026.
Brent Warner (00:14.224)
Hello and welcome to the DIESOL Podcast where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Brent Warner, professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College. And of course I’m here with the wonderful Ixchell Reyes, award-winning educator in innovation, professional development and all sorts of other fun things. Happy New Year.
Ixchell Reyes (00:34.68)
Happy 2026, it’s the year of the fire horse. It’s a DIESOL horse, okay?
Brent Warner (00:38.736)
Fire Horse. That sounds very intense. You don’t want to see one of those running by you. yes. Okay, so, Ixchell we are trying something new for the new year, which you have actually kind of not pushed for, but you said like, hey, we we should maybe think about doing this for for quite a while, which is we’re on video.
Ixchell Reyes (00:50.336)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (00:59.64)
video. Yes, a lot of people tend to ask me why why aren’t you showing your face? I’m listening on YouTube, but I want to see your face. So you know what our faces in 2026.
Brent Warner (01:08.966)
There we go, there we go. So, yes, they can see your lovely face, they can see my face. If these are of interest to you and you’re on YouTube, I think, or maybe other social things, who knows? Yeah, so we’re back to our annual tradition, first show of the year. One tool we’re sharing for…
Ixchell Reyes (01:27.704)
wherever you’re watching.
Brent Warner (01:38.552)
each year past the millennium I guess. So we got 26 tools, things to explore, things to figure out, and we’ll see how we do with this. Again, we might have a little bit of glitchiness just because we’re trying the video thing, and so if you’re just listening to the show as you traditionally always have, it should be mostly okay, but you know.
Ixchell Reyes (01:40.915)
Hehehehehe
Brent Warner (02:04.6)
It’s, if we’re not experimenting, we’re not doing what we do on DIESOL, we gotta test these things out. Yeah, so.
Ixchell Reyes (02:09.858)
which is innovative, yeah, testing it out, pushing all the buttons, breaking all the things.
Brent Warner (02:15.264)
Indeed. All right, so, Ixchell let’s jump into it. I think we’re ready and you’re gonna go first and we’ll talk about what’s going on.
Ixchell Reyes (02:19.852)
We are ready.
Okay, so we’ve mentioned this before in a previous episode and that is a TESOL AI position statement and I just think it’s worth exploring. I think people are still not necessarily fully aware that it’s out there and if you’re looking to create…
maybe guidelines for how to use it properly or appropriately or looking a place to start from. I think this is very, very much worth exploring and printing out and passing out to all your colleagues and people who are in charge of making those decisions. We wanna be uniform, especially in the field of TESOL and how we approach AI.
Brent Warner (03:00.75)
Right. So on the page, they are a little tricky to find. It’s not immediately obvious. Statement page. It’s under English language teaching profession. And that’s where you can find that statement. So cool. All right. Yeah, all these will be linked to in the show notes. So so we’re moving forward. And my choice here, even though we’re not using this platform right now, is the Adobe podcast.
Ixchell Reyes (03:13.762)
Hmm. And we’ll have it in the show notes,
Brent Warner (03:27.918)
So if you are at a school that has access to Adobe stuff, can have, you can either make your podcast there or you can have students make their podcasts and do all sorts of like, you know, like podcasts and or social media related types of things. And so I think this is partly has been pulled out of like, you know, the express zone of things, the Adobe express, which used to be Adobe spark and all those. But again,
Pretty good stuff and then you can do lots of editing and whatever else is going on. And I think one of the nice features inside of here, especially for me and my classrooms, is the higher quality of the removing the background noise because I’ve had something like 30 students recording a podcast in a highly bouncy audio bounce room. so…
So just for them to be able to click that and just only hear their voices or mostly only hear their voices and not all the other things that are going on in the background could be a really nice option. So if you haven’t explored Adobe Podcast, we are not gonna have the time in this episode to go in depth on all the features of all the tools. We’re just kind of saying, hey, there might be some things inside of here to look at. And so that is my first zone.
Ixchell Reyes (04:42.518)
Okay, tool number three or resource number three is Vibe coding. And this is something I’m pretty excited to explore because it’s the first time I heard about it, but it’s been around for a while. And Brent, what do you know about Vibe coding?
Brent Warner (04:58.854)
I’ve experimented with it quite a bit. It’s great. So basically you just kind of start talking through in a looking for it to design So if it’s like hey, I want to make this You know spreadsheet or I want to make this You know home page or something like that and it’ll help you and it’ll develop all of these things for you without you Understanding how to code you just needed to kind of talk through your ideas and then go back and forth with it
Ixchell Reyes (05:01.614)
Hmm?
Ixchell Reyes (05:10.318)
Hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (05:16.462)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (05:27.214)
So if you wanna think of it as rearranging your furniture based on how you feel at the end of that arrangement rather than following a guide, that’s what five coding is. And Canva has an AI code generator and that’s what is showing up on our screen right now. You can simply ask for whatever it is that you want and it’ll write the code for you. So I think I want to try this out in 2026 and that’s why I’m adding five coding.
Brent Warner (05:34.266)
Ha ha.
Brent Warner (05:56.58)
Yeah, I think I’m gonna start doing some workshops on this too and you Ixchell, you and I should actually do them together Because there’s a lot of cool stuff and so in connection to that I will also show kind of my vibe coding Explorations right now, which is Gemini’s one so in Gemini canvas Same kind of thing. I think I haven’t I haven’t actually explored the can va one the Gemini canvas Thank you everybody for
Ixchell Reyes (06:00.236)
Mm-hmm. You should.
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (06:19.757)
Mm-hmm. Geez, that’s gonna be puzzling.
Brent Warner (06:22.512)
Thank you all, every single EdTech company for everyone calling your product Canvas. Why on earth do you all, 2026, okay, we’re good. So, but anyways, the area where I played with this a little bit differently is having it make pages that I can install on my website. So you do have to have a little bit of know-how to like make HTML and then upload HTML to do it this way.
But basically it’s like hey, I want to make this game or I want to make like an interactive Screen that has like quizzing and things like that inside of it. I actually met a really cool teacher That’s doing some stuff down. I think she’s in San Diego We’re gonna I’m gonna get her on the show later on you show. This is the first time I’m telling you this but she’s doing some very cool things about like
you know, experimenting with students talking into it and then they’re checking their speaking on the actual vibe coded pages and apps that she has built. And so anyways, these types of things are out there and people are really doing some cool explorations. So Gemini Canvas as an option. I’ve built a few little games and things and they’re really cool. So check it out.
Ixchell Reyes (07:15.661)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (07:33.997)
Mm-hmm.
All right, so going back to audio creation and podcasting, Lindy Hockenberry has an article on using Spotify and Brisk for students. And the cool thing is that Spotify for creators is free. I think for schools, it’s got options that you can use as a teacher. so I…
Brent Warner (07:53.126)
Mm.
Ixchell Reyes (08:04.599)
think it’s worth checking it out. I know that we’ve always done Zoom, but Spotify is worth a try. Brisk, haven’t figured out how to use for audio creation, but I thought it was interesting that that was added on there. So.
Brent Warner (08:19.384)
Yeah, I’ve never used Brisk. I know that that’s like a big new feature for them and everything, but I haven’t quite used it in that way. I’ve used it in other ways, so definitely worth checking out. I’ll be reading that article soon. OK, so next up is ColorVowel, colorvowel.com. And so if you’re doing like phonomic teaching, helping students with their pronunciation, you guys have all seen
Ixchell Reyes (08:21.739)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (08:48.211)
Orphanology!
Brent Warner (08:49.646)
Yeah, so if you’ve all seen the, you know, the E sound is made with green and the OO sound is made with blue, right? Like all those things, right? And so this is kind of that group has a bunch of extra resources, the people who made that up. And then now they’ve got this whole PD thing going on. But if you’re doing pronunciation stuff, if you’re trying to help your students understand a little bit more, you know, speaking and pronunciation.
Ixchell Reyes (08:56.077)
Hmm.
Brent Warner (09:14.346)
There’s a lot of cool stuff in here. You can go check out the interactive charts, all sorts of different options they have available. So colorvowel.com is a place I want to spend a little bit more time in the upcoming semester.
Ixchell Reyes (09:27.543)
Yeah, I’m excited for this one, my teacher trainees. Okay, so the next one is the presidential AI challenge for students and educators. And I don’t know if you had heard of this, Brent. I hadn’t. And again, I learned about this from Lindy Hulkenberry. So shout out to her for always giving us new things to also check out. But the issue was that looking at the guidebook,
Brent Warner (09:41.286)
Mm-mm.
Brent Warner (09:50.65)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (09:57.452)
was a little bit complex. So she created a guide. There’s another guide, an even shorter guide. But what I thought was cool is the…
I lost you there for a second. But there are three tracks and the track I was interested in was the one for creators because I think you’re supposed to solve different problems and using AI. And again, it’s something that I haven’t looked into, but I thought it was cool because it’s a challenge. And again, we’re working, we have AI integration in every tool, everywhere. So why not use it to try to solve real problems?
Brent Warner (10:30.416)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (10:34.82)
Yeah, so presidential challenge. Some people might find that problematic. I mean, it’s worth looking into. I think that’s what we’re trying to get to, Is like, hey, yeah, explore, see what it looks like. Even if you’re not really doing it to submit to the government, maybe you can take some of the ideas and see how they fit for your needs or whatever else it is, right?
Ixchell Reyes (10:36.511)
Hahaha!
Ixchell Reyes (10:46.925)
Explore it at this side.
Ixchell Reyes (10:58.797)
Yeah.
Brent Warner (11:01.926)
Or even build your own AI challenge if you’re kind of interested in something like that. think actually I’d love to do something like that with my students is like build something. Right. Maybe. Okay. I’m have to get ready to take notes on this. Okay. yeah. So speaking of government resources, I am also sharing American English at state.gov. And so this is
Ixchell Reyes (11:08.397)
I would love to do that too.
Ixchell Reyes (11:14.541)
See? See?
Yep, don’t knock it till you try it.
Brent Warner (11:30.822)
an old site that was not taken down. The it when everything else was taken down somehow. I’m not sure if it just got skipped or or whatever else is or if it’s amazing. Yeah. So anyways, if you haven’t ever used it, the American English American English state dot gov has a bunch of cool resources for, you know, for different things that you might want to do in the classes. And when you go click on the resources section, there’s like, you know,
Ixchell Reyes (11:42.121)
Or if it’s amazing and we…
Ixchell Reyes (11:52.567)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (12:01.488)
teachers guide comics for language learning u.s. culture music and games like you know and it’s not the deepest of all things but i do like that is a site okay here’s a place where i can go and grabs some real quality stuff made by english teachers who you know this has been available for many years and so it’s like you really knew their stuff and know what was going on so
Ixchell Reyes (12:05.408)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (12:24.102)
If you’re interested and you just say, I just want some ideas, want some other, you know, a couple places to go with some things that I can print out or get access to quickly, American English is great.
Ixchell Reyes (12:36.492)
And now we go to one of my favorites, which is the ELT Toolkit by our dear Brett. It is a subscription based, but it is amazing. It’s going to save you time because Brett has built out, what do you call them, modules?
Brent Warner (12:42.278)
Hey! Hey, thank you!
Brent Warner (12:58.712)
Yeah, I mean, they’re just kind of tool by tool explanations, all with like a breakdown on ideas on how to use them specifically. This is the tool. These are a couple of different ways you can use them. These are some, you know, if this one doesn’t work for you, here’s a couple of alternatives that might be valuable. And I am actually currently working on the first update to it, which should be coming out within the next couple of weeks. So.
Ixchell Reyes (13:01.536)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (13:22.924)
Ooh.
Brent Warner (13:26.938)
So there’s like over a hundred right now, we’re gonna be adding a bunch in the next few weeks and so yeah, if you’re just like the type of person that’s like, I wanna do stuff but I don’t wanna find all the tools and I don’t wanna figure out how they fit into my setting exactly, but I want some ideas, this is the place to go. And TESOL.
It’s all run through TESOL, it’s hosted by them, it’s up and it’s filterable and searchable and all those kinds of things. We’ve talked about a little bit on past episodes, but if you’re interested, yeah, TESOL ELT Toolkit is what it’s called.
Ixchell Reyes (14:02.891)
Yeah, and again, he’s just said he’s going to update, which means if things are outdated, it’ll be updated. And we love things that get updated, especially in technology. Right, Nat Tech.
Brent Warner (14:12.58)
Yeah, well actually that’s part of the reason why we did it this way is because we’re like a book is gonna be out of you know like a book with this kind of material is not gonna be long lasting right? It’s just yeah, not really but with this it’s like hey Yeah, things change companies change all those types of things so we’re like let’s make it an online digital resource And I’m pretty happy with you know the way that all the work. They’ve done to make this work, so Thank You TESOL
Ixchell Reyes (14:17.569)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (14:22.454)
Feasible, yeah. Expiration date.
Ixchell Reyes (14:35.884)
Excellent.
Brent Warner (14:38.758)
All right, so my next one is class point. Have you ever played with this show?
Ixchell Reyes (14:44.618)
No, actually, I think this is the first time I’m hearing about it.
Brent Warner (14:48.364)
So it’s kind of like Pear Deck, I guess, where it’s like you can make things more interactive. This is like if you’re more of a PowerPoint person than maybe than a Google slides. think I can’t remember if Pear Deck works with both. I know it definitely works with Google Slides. But yeah, but there’s all sorts of cool things you can go check out. You know, like you can create quizzes, you can gamify things, make interactive quizzes directly inside of the PowerPoint. And so.
Ixchell Reyes (14:52.15)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (15:02.701)
for Google, y’all.
Brent Warner (15:16.56)
They’re all just worth looking at and you know, you can see like the website’s real nice looking and it kind of helps you understand like the different features that you might use with it. But anyways, Classpoint seems like a pretty cool thing to check out. It’s kind of like the students could just click a code and they can get into an interactive version of your PowerPoint.
Ixchell Reyes (15:36.95)
that is pretty cool. I’m gonna have to share this one out with my colleagues. I’m more of a slides person, but I know that there’s PPT diehards. PPT.
Brent Warner (15:40.132)
Yeah. Yeah, me too, but…
The PO, I’m gonna put my PPT together, yeah. Yeah, well, and mean, the reality is there are lots of Microsoft schools or things like that, and so it’s like, yeah, so it’s like, depending on what you got going on, if it’s a fit for you, yeah, worth checking out. Cool.
Ixchell Reyes (15:55.102)
Also true, also true. Yeah, could be limited.
Okay, so in the spirit of, again, thinking back to who our students are, how they’re growing up and what they’re growing up around, which is right now, generative AI, I wanted to take a look at how it’s rewiring the brain. So there’s a couple of really good articles, one in Psych Today and one by Fortune. And again, I think the way we approach
Brent Warner (16:16.506)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (16:30.432)
The way we approach our class or the way we design materials really has to be aligned with who our students are. Again, I say this all the time, they’re not getting older, they’re getting younger, we’re getting older, the gap is getting bigger. I struggled with trying to figure out how to turn off incognito mode and realize it’s not my problem, it was a Chrome problem. But I felt old for a second. But again.
Brent Warner (16:40.486)
Mm.
Brent Warner (16:44.08)
Hehehehehe
Brent Warner (16:53.307)
Yeah
Yeah, as we do.
Ixchell Reyes (16:59.052)
It’s rewiring our brains and my little nephews, the number one question I heard over the break was, is that real or is that AI? No, that’s AI. That’s fake. That’s AI. I just, again, they’re four years old and nine years old, which means they are very much aware of AI. That’s like a, that’s second nature to them. So again, remembering that we need to see how the brain is changing. How is it being rewired?
Brent Warner (17:08.038)
Hmm.
Brent Warner (17:27.962)
I’m glad to hear they’re questioning it even at that age though, that’s really wonderful. tell your sister good job on raising them.
Ixchell Reyes (17:29.42)
me too me too absolutely kudos to my sister and to their teachers because I’m pretty sure that they have really good teachers as well so
Brent Warner (17:41.008)
Nice, good. All right, so mine next is my first physical recommendation, and I haven’t quite found the exact one I’m looking for, but I’m telling you all out there, this is something that I am looking for, which is a big, you know, digital wall clock. You know, some people have them, you know, whatever, they have a good clock, but like, I want one that can kind of do countdown timers for things like presentations in the class. Yeah, and so what I’m really looking for is a
Ixchell Reyes (17:50.892)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (18:05.332)
that’s cool.
Brent Warner (18:10.64)
Big one, a big digital countdown timer that ideally is battery powered. Because I’ve seen a lot of good ones that are exactly what I’m looking for, but they require a plug. And I’m like, no, want it to, because we’ve got those whiteboards in our class. I want to be able to have it on a magnet and just stick it on the back wall of the whiteboard for the students who doing presentations to see.
Ixchell Reyes (18:17.108)
Hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (18:23.115)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (18:30.332)
That’s cool.
Brent Warner (18:32.454)
And so I’m still kind of searching for things if anybody out there has a good digital wall clock that does that runs on batteries Let me know I would be I would be stoked to To take your recommendations otherwise. I’m kind of looking through some possible options, but but particularly I want like they’re called the gym clocks because they have like countdown and count up timers and different things like that Yeah, so I am on the hunt, but I know there’s something out there. That’s gonna work
Ixchell Reyes (18:40.371)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (18:54.079)
Hmm, that’s cool. I never even thought of that.
Ixchell Reyes (19:03.381)
Very, very, very cool. All right, so the next tool I have is Reverso. I had not heard about this before, but it gives you translations of real text, but it’ll give you the, like, let’s say you’re looking for an idiom, not an idiom, you paste a piece of text and it’ll actually translate it, with the, not directly translate it, but it’ll give you the correct idiomatic expression in that language.
so that you can better understand.
Brent Warner (19:33.386)
so like context appropriate. because sometimes, when you see. Right, right, right. OK, that’s pretty interesting.
Ixchell Reyes (19:36.939)
Yes. Culturally, yep.
And of course you can use AI, can use chat GPT for those things, I usually have to teach my students. You can go into your AI and tell it, give me the context, give me the idiomatic expression in the language of whatever you’re searching for. But this just has everything set already. It just does the one thing and I like that.
Brent Warner (20:05.254)
Hmm nice, okay Yeah, I think at first glance. I’m just like well Why not why not use Google Translate or something, but I think a little bit more looking into this can show some Some uses for it so reverse. very cool All right, so my next one again. This is just an online resource if you do a bunch of jigsaw stuff This is it’s called ESL jigsaws calm I think they mostly kind of sell like
Ixchell Reyes (20:11.979)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (20:35.204)
workbooks and downloadable lessons and things like that but but if you’re doing a bunch of different jigsaw activities and you get it so for those who don’t you haven’t done a jigsaw or maybe you aren’t aware of what a jigsaw is this is where you have let’s say you have four different groups of four people and they’re kind of all given one set of assignments each and then you split them out so that it was all
AAAA BBBB CCCC on you know on the four groups, and then it becomes ABCD on each group so you every person spreads out and then mix out perfectly to match up So that’s your kind of basic idea of a jigsaw and then this website Provides a few and I think they rotate them out like some different jigsaw Activities that you can use with your class like some of them are cool They’re like puzzles right like like kind of breakout escape rooms style things
different things like that. anyways, take a look. Even if it’s just inspiration for like how to start building some different types of jigsaw activities, I think you could find some real fun ways for students to use them. So esljigsaws.com. You don’t necessarily need to pay for things. If you find it useful, for sure do support. It looks like a small independent, you know, team or individual going for it. But yeah, there’s some really nice resources inside of it.
Ixchell Reyes (21:58.316)
All right, and we are pausing for a moment. Are we taking a break? We’re pausing for a moment. To remind you that if you’re listening, we are trying. Okay, sorry. I didn’t know you were still recording. We’re gonna cut this out, right? Okay. We’re pausing for a moment to remind you if you are listening on whatever platform you’re using that we are trying out video.
Brent Warner (22:02.704)
Hey! Yeah, we’ll pass!
Yeah. Yeah, we are. We’re recording. Sure.
Ixchell Reyes (22:25.673)
So check us out on YouTube if you’d like to have us along with whatever chore you’re doing and leave us a comment.
Brent Warner (22:32.87)
Yeah, you can just have us on your big screen TV in the background while you’re vacuuming. YouTube, just slash DIESOL think that’s what it is, right? D I E S O L as you know. Oh, DIESOL pod. Hey, yes, of course. Very good. All right. So, Michelle, we’re going back to you.
Ixchell Reyes (22:35.888)
Hehehehehe
Ixchell Reyes (22:45.835)
DIESOL pod DIESOL DIESOL pod
Ixchell Reyes (22:57.361)
Yes. So I learned about this tool from one of our colleagues and friends of the pod, Michelle Quiter So Michelle, if you’re listening, thank you. This is called Versatext and it is a web-based language learning tool that helps you explore the text within a window. So basically you paste or upload the text you want to study. Then you can look at a word cloud. It looks very basic if you’re looking at it on video.
but the words will come up in different colors based on parts of speech. You can click on a word to see all the sentences in which it appears in the concordance, and you can see how the word is actually used. It’ll also give you text stats like frequency lists and other vocabulary information. So it’s actually kind of cool. Again, it’s one of those single use, I would say single use tools.
which of course you can probably do this on AI, why not also have one of these?
Brent Warner (23:58.554)
I mean, this is my favorite, it’s just those single use, focused… The word clouds, I actually have not totally understood like the big… People love word clouds and I’m not trashing it, I just have never really understood.
Ixchell Reyes (24:00.661)
The word clouds. yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (24:10.622)
Maybe for people who like maybe people who take information visually and remember it that way. think that helps for some of my students that maybe struggle with maybe they have ADHD or ADD and they’re able to remember a little bit easier, especially with colors.
Brent Warner (24:26.064)
Yeah, okay. So for sure, there are like the word cloud, like I said, for me, I’m not a huge word cloud fan, but the concordance in there and the leveled readers and all these different things are really cool. So I am definitely going to be adding this versatile T-I-L-E to some things to explore for me as well. Cool.
Ixchell Reyes (24:33.288)
Yeah, you don’t need to use the word cloud. Yeah, absolutely.
Brent Warner (24:50.79)
All right, so my next one is Helperbird, which is kind of makes PDFs and web pages more accessible. I think there’s a lot of really interesting ways to play around with this. like it can do. We’ve talked about these kind of things way long time ago, you show like these distraction free reading. Like we’ve talked about what’s what was that beeline reader and like like making things easier to read, more accessible, et cetera.
Ixchell Reyes (25:11.124)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (25:19.91)
They have all sorts of ways to interact with the documents and so you can see, you know, there’s some reading features, writing features, so it can do like text to speech, voice typing type of things, grammar support, etc. So it’s just like if you need some accessibility things going on, there are a number of great tools that do things, which I really encourage people to explore and see what’s out there. You know, we’ve talked in the past about Read &Write, which is a great accessibility choice.
Moat is building in a lot of cool stuff into into their features But helper bird is another cool option that might be really valuable for a lot of people so helper bird comm
Ixchell Reyes (25:58.955)
Yeah, it’s the first time I heard of it, so very cool. Alrighty, so I work with teacher trainees and they have to take phonology and it’s not very fun for them to go back and teach to their students. Oftentimes they worry about their pronunciation, but this website has a ton, sorry, the name of the website is phonics and stuff.com.
And it’s got a lot of games to help students understand phonemes, morphemes. There’s interactive phonics games where you’re matching sounds to letters. There’s blending. That helps a lot of our Asian background students. There’s the quotable readers and read along stories where you can practice the pronunciation. Most of it is free. And then there is an optional, of course, membership.
but it’s got a lot of sentence generators. Also, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the speech therapy. They’re like grids with pictures, and then they’re supposed to target, like for example, consonant blends or consonant vowel, consonant patterns. And so you’ve got that already in there. So you could create it, but it’s tricky and it’s time consuming, and it’s already in one place that targets those things. So I’m just…
Happy it’s free because it will help students.
Brent Warner (27:26.918)
Very cool. Yeah, I like the look of this and I think there’s some… I have to be careful when we look at these because I’m like, just want to start jumping right into all the links. But yeah, we’ll do that later. Yeah, okay. All right, cool. So my next one is another physical thing, which is… I’m kind of playing around with how to do this, but basically those foam ball blasters, like those Nerf gun type of things.
Ixchell Reyes (27:37.027)
Yeah, nope, nope, nope, you explore later.
Ixchell Reyes (27:50.666)
man.
Brent Warner (27:55.384)
And so what I’m thinking about is like ways to make kind of like fun games with these things where you could like, for example, maybe you put numbers on the foam balls and then you kind of like, wouldn’t like, obviously don’t point the gun at your students, know, but like I’m thinking like popping. Yeah, well, like popping, popping these little foam balls into the air and then like if a student catches it and they get the number and then that’s the challenge for them to do or yes, yes, yes, because that’s actually what I was. was.
Ixchell Reyes (28:00.17)
Hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (28:10.229)
You’re going to have rules.
Ixchell Reyes (28:20.467)
like one of those t-shirt blasters.
Brent Warner (28:24.666)
The reason I thought of this was first because I was looking for a t-shirt cannon. But they’re out of my price range. But then I’m like, okay, well, this might be a kind of a cool way to do some things for students. And then if you just sharpie some numbers onto these, you could go endlessly. Whatever it is the number is, then you have some sort of different game, some different bingo, some different points, whatever.
Ixchell Reyes (28:25.034)
Mm.
Ixchell Reyes (28:28.57)
Why?
Ixchell Reyes (28:48.074)
points, a number of questions.
Brent Warner (28:50.66)
Yeah, like all sorts of endless things and it’s a kind of a way to make it more interactive and maybe you could like If you trust your students, you could have like one student be the like popper, you know and so i’m just trying to think of like ways to make guns like fun interactive physical a little bit more, you know, some some real movement around the classroom things like that, so And these things are like 20 bucks
Ixchell Reyes (29:01.674)
If you trust your sister.
Ixchell Reyes (29:09.544)
Yeah, of course. Yeah, absolutely. You can always point it at a target so it can bounce right back and then catch it.
Brent Warner (29:15.942)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly like you could also say like hey shoot it in the trash can if you make it in the trash can you get some point you know like Endless kinds of things for like a simple gun toy that might be fun to play with so So yeah
Ixchell Reyes (29:20.584)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Very cool. Okay, so the next tool I have, some people may have heard about it. Maybe we’ve mentioned it before, but it’s Ideogram and it’s in AI that focuses on images. And the reason why this comes up more often than other AIs, at least for now until AIs get a little bit better, is that if you ask for particular text, the text tends to come out accurate, more accurate than others.
Brent Warner (29:36.592)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (29:54.469)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (29:57.99)
I would just like to throw that one out there. If you’re not using ideogram, ideogram is actually pretty cool. actually, I usually go through three different AIs to see which one has the better images. And ideogram has always been fun. So another tool to explore.
Brent Warner (30:09.894)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah it the text one the text thing I mean that has is still an issue with some of the AIs where they don’t quite put the text you’re looking for this one has always been for whatever reason very very strong with like getting the words that you want in there so cool all right I am going to share a book I don’t remember if we talked about this in the past
Ixchell Reyes (30:17.981)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (30:24.583)
More accurate, yeah.
Hmm.
Brent Warner (30:38.5)
But we’ve definitely talked about Ilka Koska and she did her book with Rachel Toncelli and Josh Pais. It’s called Artificial Intelligence, Real Teaching, A Guide to AI in ELT. I read this book when it came out. I think it’s good, big picture, so you don’t have to worry about being perfectly timely. It’s about kind of understanding bigger choices.
ethical integration, all of those kinds of things. And it’s not very big, you I mean, it’s not super long. It’s definitely, you know, you could kind of sit down and get through it. So check it out. Artificial intelligence, real teaching, a guide to AI in ELT.
Ixchell Reyes (31:21.905)
Excellent. All right, the next tool I have is sadly now called FameLac. It used to be TV Garden, it is now called FameLac and I hope that’s not like a predictor for where it’s going. But it is a website where you can click on any part. So it’ll come up with a globe, the in a world map and you can click on any country and it’ll give you
Brent Warner (31:32.165)
TV Garden.
Brent Warner (31:39.269)
Mmm.
Ixchell Reyes (31:51.946)
TV from around the world and I like this tool because my students can go in there and look at different types of English and I like it because I go in there and look at all the different countries that have different acts or different Maybe versions of Arabic for example, and it’s pretty cool You can you know watch and see how other cultures what other cultures are showing on TV and I think that that is pretty cool and so fame lack
Brent Warner (31:53.989)
Mm.
Brent Warner (32:19.224)
the
Ixchell Reyes (32:19.941)
is something worth exploring.
Brent Warner (32:22.757)
Very cool. I like it. mean, yeah, I’m with you. I hate the name, but TV TV garden. What a great name fame lack terrible name Can I just say to all of you out there who are out there changing your names? Stop it. Just stop changing your names Okay Great next up
Ixchell Reyes (32:27.273)
TV garden was amazing.
Ixchell Reyes (32:38.633)
Ha
Brent Warner (32:45.549)
So if you use DraftBack in the past, DraftBack was a great way if you’re using Google Docs with your students and kind of having a way to heat map and track their writing process and show them what’s going on and be aware if they’re doing things like massive cut and paste from other sources, et cetera. But a lot of people were bummed out that DraftBack converted to a subscription model.
Ixchell Reyes (32:48.093)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (33:03.411)
Dun dun dun.
Brent Warner (33:13.733)
a know $40 a year. I don’t have a problem with subscriptions with information that is updated. I do have a problem with subscriptions for services that really don’t take any extra work from time to time. so draft back was kind of that. Like they never really updated anything. You know a few times when they had to like align with new Chrome requirements but like not actually changing the.
the content or the product at all and that doesn’t cost them anything for me to run it on my computer. So to me, I’m like, not really into that. I would have happily paid for a endless user license, right? Like a one-time purchase, but anyways, they decided to go a different way. So process feedback. Yeah, process feedback is the new one. I love it. It’s very deep. It’s way deeper than I’m ready for and it’s a little bit
Ixchell Reyes (33:58.409)
Too bad. Process feedback.
Brent Warner (34:08.837)
kind of, you know, engineer looking when you get into it. It’s like, my God, there’s so many different things going on. It would be nice if there was like a little easier to understand and a little bit kind of less, less granular feedback. I mean, it’s nice to have the granular, but like, it’s still just like a lot to look at. But at the same time,
Ixchell Reyes (34:14.023)
haha
Ixchell Reyes (34:25.181)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (34:31.173)
It goes through, helps students see like, how long have you been spending actually working on this? And it’s really designed in a different way, which is to say like, it can help students understand their writing process more. And it’s meant to help them through that process, not just to be like a, caught you cheating kind of thing. Yeah. And so that’s why it’s called process feedback, right? And so it’s like, well, what’s going on with your writing? What’s happening inside of here?
Ixchell Reyes (34:48.297)
Play drives, yeah.
Ixchell Reyes (34:54.173)
Hmm?
Brent Warner (34:58.009)
How are you taking the time to think through these ideas, et cetera? So processfeedback.org created by educators. It’s all over the place and really worth looking at, especially if you’re worried about, hey, are my students doing too much with AI in their writing? they thinking through their work themselves, et cetera?
Ixchell Reyes (35:18.023)
Very cool. All right. We’re on 23 tools. 23. Okay. So my next tool is esl-bits.org. And I learned from Michelle Quiter again about this tool. I’m constantly looking for resources for my students, for them to read along with the audio. And though YouTube does have a lot of stuff, sometimes it’s messy for them.
because they have to sift through playlists and some of it is not interesting. It’s not stuff that I would read, but this place has a lot of graded readers with audio and they’re by levels and a lot of the stories are maybe more current. They’re not just the classics. So.
Brent Warner (36:01.605)
Hmm Yeah, love it. It is a little old-fashioned looking like old web You know like web 1.0 kind of look going. Yeah But you know Wonderful like this is this is the type of stuff I I get so bummed because it’s like it’s so easy to dismiss things because it’s like old frames and doesn’t look modern and new But like there’s so much good stuff out there that people have made that just doesn’t necessarily
Ixchell Reyes (36:08.017)
Yeah, like HTML-y type.
Ixchell Reyes (36:29.597)
Yeah, and if you’re out there and you’re the creator, you please update it? At least the font color.
Brent Warner (36:37.261)
Can I suggest some vibe coding to make this look modern and new you don’t have to change any of the content All right, cool, so my next one is grouper I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at this but But so there’s been a couple of these types of things in the past There’s been like shake school and a few things. This is basically like you
Ixchell Reyes (36:41.226)
Vibe coding. Vibe coding would do it.
Ixchell Reyes (36:53.074)
Never heard of it.
Brent Warner (37:01.375)
you put your students names in there and then you can put in some different, you know, basically like defining aspects of like, you know, things that you want the thing to know about them, like their gender, how profession they are, what their background language is, whatever else it is. And then you can click a button and it’ll rotate and it’ll make groups for you, like the best distribution of possible groups for you. Yeah. So like, so then, you know, and you can create your own
Ixchell Reyes (37:21.865)
Ooh, this is cool.
Brent Warner (37:28.841)
you know, ideas so it doesn’t just have to be the ones that they have. Like you can be like, you know, I want to do, you know, colors of shoes that students wear and you could do that, right? So like whatever you wanted to do. But like it comes up with some some pretty good common ones that you might break things down about. Like you can categorize your students by, know, like you get this basically a spreadsheet and you just put the different ones inside of there for each of them.
Ixchell Reyes (37:32.008)
Right.
Ixchell Reyes (37:37.801)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (37:54.053)
It’s fast, it’s easy, and then all you have to do is click a button and it’ll make a group for you. And a really cool feature inside of it is say, you can also go in and say, do not ever put these two students together. So yeah, like, I mean, it’s like, you’re like, I hate to say that I have to do that, but yeah, of course. Yeah, we need a little classroom management sometimes. And so you know, these two students don’t work well together or perhaps work too well together. And so you end up
Ixchell Reyes (37:58.461)
Very cool.
Ixchell Reyes (38:05.979)
that’s good. Yeah. We don’t want mutiny. No, you have to.
Brent Warner (38:23.885)
you can do things like that kind of distinctions as well. it’s called grouper, g-r-o-u-p-e-r dot school.
Ixchell Reyes (38:33.16)
Okay, so my last one for 2026 is, I guess they’re toys to keep our students more calm and redirect their energy. So many of you know them as fidget toys or toys for the brain, but my students love Rubik’s cubes and I have all different types. I’ve also tried to find different ones for the ones that get frustrated by the Rubik’s cubes.
So I recently found magnetic cubes. They’re like little just cubes that you can form things with and there’s puzzles you can do. And also there’s fidget links. So a lot of these are made for students who have a lot of energy and maybe need to manage that energy while they’re sitting in a long class. Again, I’m very big on letting them channel that so that they are not bothering someone or channeling it elsewhere.
Brent Warner (39:19.321)
Mmm.
Brent Warner (39:27.193)
Yeah. Do you find that it’s useful in the class? Like that it actually makes a difference for them? Huh.
Ixchell Reyes (39:29.84)
Again, absolutely. For me, yeah, absolutely. I’ve had students who tell me, can I borrow this and take it home? And then they’ll come back and they’ll continue fidgeting with it. But I’ve had students also who told me they had ADHD or dyslexia and they couldn’t focus. But when they had that thing, that manipulative in their hand, and it could be something like squishy. So it doesn’t have to something noisy. I also like the little keyboard clickers. You can just type in
Brent Warner (39:53.221)
Right, right, right.
Ixchell Reyes (39:58.493)
keyboard clickers or just a lot of brain puzzles. Students will sit there and they’ll do a little longer without disrupting or without losing their focus if they have something in their hand. And again, I’m talking about adults. I recently got myself a fidget spinner for my phone. It looks like it’s a like the little phone stand, but it’s actually a very silent fidget spinner. so sometimes you’re waiting or you’re nervous and you’re just fidgeting with it. It helps to channel that energy.
Brent Warner (40:01.701)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (40:26.957)
Nice, very cool. Okay, so mine last one will also be a physical one, is basically it’s a Dopp kit, which is a canvas satchel essentially. Their travel kits are different. Yeah, so.
Ixchell Reyes (40:40.58)
a canvas settle.
Brent Warner (40:43.897)
So I bought one of these, the one I’ll have the link to is from Herschel Supply Company, if you guys know Herschel. I actually got mine from Vans several years ago, but just some sort of like bag, and basically what I use is it’s to hold, it’s like a giant pen case, right? But I put a ton of expo markers and I put like some regular pens inside of there, and just a few little things that either I want.
Ixchell Reyes (40:50.041)
Mm. Mm.
Brent Warner (41:09.059)
to distribute to my class or if my students say, hey, I don’t have a pen or pencil or whatever, I always have something available for them. It’s the only thing I actually carry with me to school or to my classroom every day is like this is the one thing that I always have with me. And so it’s like, and I’ve used it every day for years and I don’t think about sharing it very often. And so it’s like, but it is very, very useful to have. just a, you know, it’s probably a…
Seven inch long bag by you know two or three inches wide and just stuff in as many pins as you can And whatever else you need that that you would carry normally really like it find it very useful So you can look it up as a dop kit I would recommend just getting a little better quality one of the last you a bunch of years and And I like I said, I use it every single day
Ixchell Reyes (42:06.107)
All right, it is time for our fun finds. After all those 26 tools, if you’re still not satisfied, this time I have a Whitney Hansen poetry journal. If you don’t know who Whitney Hansen is, she’s on Instagram. I think she started off on Instagram, but she’s got some amazing, I would say modern poetry, very short, but inspirational.
Brent Warner (42:10.309)
Alright.
Ixchell Reyes (42:32.808)
And she came out with a poetry journal in the style of you’ve probably seen the reels where people say in my language we say or in English we say this but in my language we say that and she has a journal that is in English we say that in poetry we say and I think that is such a great writing prompt. So I’m actually going to incorporate it into my writing classes so go out there find it to journal.
Brent Warner (42:44.026)
Mm-hmm.
Brent Warner (42:54.201)
nice.
Brent Warner (42:57.871)
Very cool, very cool. Nice. So mine is, so right now it’s been really rainy in California and you’ve maybe even seen this on the news, but one of the things that happens is a dumb little problem, which is your reverse camera on your car might often get kind of clouded with little dots or foggy or whatever else it is. And so I saw this.
Ixchell Reyes (43:07.496)
Mm-hmm.
Ixchell Reyes (43:20.754)
Hmm.
Brent Warner (43:23.599)
video on YouTube and this guy is basically showing like a couple of different techniques for dealing with that and the one that I liked the best was just so simple was just take a tiny little slice of potato and rub that potato on the you know on the little reverse camera and then you got like several weeks of just it’ll droop like the the water drips will just slide right off and it won’t fog up and everything like that so if you just if you’re cooking potatoes
If you’re throwing away a couple of slices of peels and things, just grab one of those little peels, dry off your camera lens on the back of your car and rub that potato on it and you’ll be much better. Rub that potato. That’s your goal. That’s your New Year’s resolution for 2026 is to rub that potato. So cool. That is it. 2026, we made it. Unbelievably, somehow.
Ixchell Reyes (44:01.25)
Rub that potato.
You
Ixchell Reyes (44:20.964)
And if you made it through the end of this show, thank you.
Brent Warner (44:24.281)
Yeah, give us a like. If you’re following the YouTube thing, then give us a thumbs up on the video or subscribe to the channel or anything like that, right? There’s all sorts of little ways that you can support us if you like, including the show notes. show where can they find the show notes.
Ixchell Reyes (44:43.784)
You can find the show notes and other episodes at DIESOL.org/131 for episode 131. You can also find us on most socials at DIESOL pod.
Brent Warner (44:56.963)
right? You can find me out there at @BrentGWarner.
Ixchell Reyes (45:01.414)
And you can find me at @ixy_pixy_ that’s two underscores.
Brent Warner (45:07.633)
All right everybody, thanks so much. We’re looking forward to exploring more with you in the new year and supporting our students and making sure everything is good. So happy new year once again. See you guys.
Ixchell Reyes (45:09.402)
You
Ixchell Reyes (45:18.984)
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year! In this episode, we’re poking around the newest tools and resources of 2026. We haven’t tried them all—but they’re too intriguing to miss. We’re also trying out video episodes, something many listeners have been asking for. Come see what’s shaking things up!
Watch the Video
We’re experimenting with recording the episodes on video. If you prefer a video format, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel:
Tools and Resources
- TESOL AI Position Statement
- Adobe Podcasts
- Vibe Coding (Canva AI)
- Gemini Canvas for app making
- Spotify for Creators & Brisk for audio creation (see LindyHoc)
- Color Vowel –
- Presidential AI Challenge for Educators & Guide
- https://americanenglish.state.gov/
- ELT Toolkit
- Classpoint.io
- GenAI and brain rewiring (Article by PsychToday / Article by Fortune)
- Gym Wall Clock
- Reverso
- https://esljigsaws.com/
- Versatext
- Helperbird
- Phonicsandstuff.com
- Foam gun popper
- Ideogram
- Artificial Intelligence, Real Teaching – Ilka Kostka, Rachel Toncelli, Joshua Paiz
- Famelack
- Process Feedback
- ESL-bits.org
- Grouper.school
- 3X3 Rubiks Cube / Magnetic Cube / Fidget Links
- Dopp Kit
Fun Finds
- Ixchell – Whitney Hanson Poetry Journal
- Brent – Wipe a potato on your reverse camera