General Help & Advice

Dictionaries & Aids:

English-English:

Oxford

Cambridge

Merriam-Webster

English/German:

Linguee

dict.cc

English/Italian:

Linguee

WordReference

Grammar and language usage tips:

grammargirl

stackexchange

Creating projects:

Visual (posters, slideshows etc.):

• Adobe Spark (good for making single, powerful graphics)
• Canva (attractive, simple tools for most visual needs)
• Sway (the "new", more stylish PowerPoint - you'll probably need a Microsoft/Outlook account to use it)
• Prezi (the basic version is still free [let me know if it's not!])
• Pixlr (photo/image editing)

Video (documentaries, montages etc.)

• Adobe Spark (takes you through a nice video editing process)
• Clipchamp (a popular online video editor)
• MovieMakerOnline (another popular online video editor)
• Lightworks (industry-standard film editing) [more serious & download required]
• Shotcut (a popular Lightworks alternative) [more serious & download required]

Audio (interviews, podcasts etc.)

• Audacity (the most popular free audio editor) [download required]
• Ocenaudio (an Audacity alternatice) [download required]
• TwistedWave (a very basic online audio editor)
• Audiotool (an online audio/music editor) [note: only available when using Chrome]

Websites/Blogs (for presenting entire project processes and results):

• Wix
• Weebly
• Wordpress

Finding Material:

• To avoid copyright issues, I HIGHLY recommend using CC Search to find all the music, sounds, images and videos you need in a legal, professional and easy manner!

Guides (there are lots of others, so have a look around!):

• How to Start your own Podcast
• Step-By-Step How to Make a Documentary

Pronunciation help:

• General Advice: "How to Greatly Improve Your English Pronunciation in 8 Steps"
• Video guides for specific problems: "BBC: Tim's Pronunciation Workshop"
• English Teacher Melanie's Podcasts are easy to understand and focus on pronunciation tips. (Her site also features good grammar explanations.)
• Mr Smith's tip: Watch and listen to as much English as possible and try to copy the funny/interesting phrases in your head (or out loud if you're feeling brave!).

Reading and Writing:

• This is a comprehensive course you can sign up for that will train you up to an excellent level of understanding and creating texts.

Improve your English... While helping people:

• Maybe a bit complicated for some, but you can translate (e.g. from Italian or German into English), change, add to and create articles by contributing to Wikipedia.
• If you prefer translating into your own language, you can also translate entire articles from English into German or Italian.

General learning:

• You can learn English at your own speed following the innovative BBC structures which are recommended for Intermediate (roughly 2nd Year and below), Upper Intermediate (2nd Year to 3rd Year) and Towards Advanced (3rd to 4th Year and beyond).
• How to take notes: here's a good video which compares different methods. (This guy also has a new Crash Course series over here.)
• This is a visual example of a painfully simple, but likely very effective, vocabulary notebook.
• Mr Smith's tip: Google everything. Sounds easy, does it? Well, typing in the right question and identifying a trustworthy answer are often very difficult tasks indeed!