Nützliche Links

(last update: April 2006 - CAPL)

There are many good sites offering links for German teachers and learners. We will list only a very few for reasons of space. We are not responsible for external links. The linked pages will open in a new window.

Goethe-Institut London, Deutsch lehren - From here you can access many useful areas of the GI site, the German-British youth portal "the voyage", their pages for Advanced and AS students, the GI's institute-wide portal for German teachers and much more. In this World Cup year, GI are offering motivating special features relating to Football. Follow the link to find out more.

Österreich Institut - The Institut publishes a magazine (and CD) for learners of German which has themed extracts from the Austrian press with complementary clips from Austrian Radio. The Österreich Portal is another good source of materials for DaF ("Landeskundepakete"). At present there are very good materials (online and downloadable) for the Mozart Year 2006, as well as football and many more topics - some free, some for subscribers only. There are also quizzes (Austria, Mozart) and web link collections.

CILT Promoting Languages - Though not exclusively for German teachers, there is a lot of useful stuff here, including a link to the new promotional resources Languages Work.

Paperball - Always the latest news reports from German-speaking media organised into various rubrics. If you register, you can personalise your choice of sources from their list and put together your own electronic newspaper, which you then bookmark for regular use or have sent by e-mail.

Leeds University German Department - "Sprungbrett ins Internet".

DACHL - international Landeskunde Project part-based at University of Innsbruck (hence clever name?) with access to comprehensive collections of Landeskunde links for D, A, CH - and Liechtenstein.

AATG - See what our U.S. colleagues are up to on the web site of the American Association of Teachers of German.

Link Theme for the Summer: Nature and Environment

Every so often we will have a different theme of possible interest or use to Germanists, fun or serious, highlighting a small selection of web links.

SWR - Oli's Wilde Welt - Tierlexikon - Part of the very attractive site of a children's nature/science TV programme. There are detailed and informative "Steckbriefe" of many mammals, birds and other creatures. Another attraction of the site may be video clips of the "Klugscheißer", a programme "expert" who is the only animated pile of ... which I am aware. Not directly useful in language teaching, but a lovely site.

BMU-Kids - Children's web site of the Bundesumweltministerium. The "Wissen" section is based on a printed brochure "Durchblick - Was hat unser Alltag mit der Umwelt zu tun?". Some of this material may be useful, covering as it does a wide range of topics from energy conservation to healthy eating.

Rudi Rotbein Club - Web site of NAJU, an organisation for children, associated with NABU. The reference area has six sections (such as "Stadt" and "Lebensraum Wasser") each with several sub-sections on creatures belonging to that environment. (For real storks, see below...)

Umweltkids - another prize-winning children's site with lots of "Umwelt" news and information, started by a teenager Christoph Schneider.

Emil Grünbär (RIP) - this was my favourite "Umwelt" site for classroom use, created by Janosch, with its "Umweltlexikon" explaining all the key aspects, concepts and issues, so useful for Sixth Form and in part for KS4, but it now seems to be inaccessible. It's too good to leave out, and thanks to the Wayback Machine archive of old internet sites, you can access most of it here.

Bionet - an EU-sponsored multi-lingual site for the general public devoted to informing and stimulating discussion about developments and concerns in Life Sciences, such as stem cell research, age research, HIV, GM foods and more. Good for those unfortunate Advanced students (and teachers!) who have to grapple with such topics. It's well done: as well as concise answers to common questions, there are games, video clips and opinion surveys (interesting ability to compare your opinions with those of German site visitors on any given topic). The weakest section is News Items, which are too eclectic and seemingly all in English.

bio Sicherheit - German Government-sponsored attempt to do something similar about public concerns over food and agriculture. Good for specific information on genetically-modified crops but very technical.

WWF.de - World Wide Fund for Nature site. "Young Panda " section with information about various endangered species and environments.

Greenpeace.de

Storchennest.de - a web cam and video cam allow you to view a nest at the Storchenzentrum in Vetschau in the Spreewald. Normally these give a marvellous view of a stork pair and their young. This year (2005) three of the young have died, probably killed by poisoned food - but there is still one more egg in the nest.

www.storch-odertal-naturfotos.de - Günter Blutke's excellent photographs of storks and other wildlife. My favourite is the stork's nest on top of a Trabi on top of an old power pylon.

Freely-usable Images, Clip Art and Photographs

for non-commercial use in worksheets or other educational materials such as PowerPoint slides.

We will only list sources which we believe permit this use - but it is your responsibility to check and adhere to the terms of use on each site, which may include a source acknowledgement.

UVic's Language Teaching Clipart Library - From the home of Hot Potatoes (if you don't know this excellent free authoring package for web-based activities, check it out!) 1500 images, each in two versions.

Classroomclipart.com

Stock.XCHNG - Free Photo Stock. Well over 100,000 categorised photographs free to use. Some must be useful. You can join and contribute your photos too.

Kölnbild-Archiv - Press service of the City of Cologne. See conditions of use.

AEIOU - this collection of online materials in text, audio, visual and video forms relating to Austria has amongst others an album of over 1500 photographs and 60 360° panoramas of places in Austria. And the rest of the collections are worth exploring too.

CAPL - a very good collection of 2000 high-resolution images for German teachers, which has been built up since 2003 by Michael Shaughnessy & Jason Parkhill at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA. CAPL stands for "Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon". The categorised and searchable image bank allows you also to look the word up in the LEO dictionary or look for an entry in the German Wikipedia.