Gordon Wells has just returned from Belgium where he and Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle were attending a workshop with other European partners for the new TOOLS project. The project has only just started, but the aim is to develop a tool that will help teachers and learners when they need to find a word in an online dictionary. Users will be able to put recordings (for example from YouTube) on a new page with an accompanying transcript. You will then be able to check any word you don’t know in an online dictionary. This should be helpful for learners, though clearly you can’t learn any language just from a dictionary alone! The team has started a blog where they will be putting up examples of their work as they progress. Here is an English example, using an Island Voices film. 
As can be seen, you can also put links on the page for following to other webpages. That allows you to build “learning units” including Hot Potatoes pages or other appropriate sites or blogs. It will be interesting to see how easy this tool will be to use in a community like Uist and how useful it will be for local ESOL learners.