Chris Spackman

ESOL Resources, Classroom Tools, and More

Resources for English to Speakers of Other Languages teachers and students, and sometimes others

Much of the content here is for ESOL and other teachers and their students: classroom and reading tools, readings, diagnostics, and professional development. The rest is for anyone curious: interactive cryptography and math pages, point-and-click builders for command-line tools, browser games, software, and some writing. Everything is free to use, and the tools run locally, entirely in your browser. Aside from the actual software, nothing to install.

News and Updates

2026-10-30: New releases of the fluxDockApps: Visit the index page, or get them all in one suite tarball.

2026-10-25: New in Educator Resources: Read-Along Stories, story pages with a recording where each word lights up as it is read, karaoke style. First up, Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.

2026-10-25: A review of the whole Cryptography section before go-live. The Zimmermann Telegram page now decodes the real telegram group by group and shows how the code was broken; the CODEX Decryptor gets a real Vigenère stripper, a crib attack that solves names as a system, and a worked example; the Vigenère and transposition breakers, the Kasiski demo and a dozen history details are corrected.

2026-10-23: On the software page: fimgdupes 0.2.0 (two-stage matching, checksums, exact and query modes), dvd2mkv 0.4.0 (chapter-split mode) and a new polaroid-montage.py.

2026-10-22: The software page gains NeoFlux, a Fluxbox-style window manager, plus fimgdupes, dvdmap and dvd2mkv, and two scripts. The fluxDockApps are at their October releases: a new fluxVolume and new versions of every other app.

2026-10-21: Everything from my NeoCities site now lives here, because school districts block the NeoCities domain. The teacher tools are under Classroom & Reading Tools in Educator Resources, and there are new Cryptography, Technology, and Games sections. The NeoCities pages stay up for a while, then redirect here.

Older items are on the News and Updates page.

Resources for Educators

Everything for teachers is collected under Educator Resources. I have used versions of most of it in real USA K–12 or adult ESOL classes. The main parts:

Accessibility Posters on how to design for students with various challenges, and a contrast checker with accessible slide templates. Classroom & Reading Tools Browser tools for phonics and reading practice, lesson planning, word games, readability checking, classroom display, and more. Formerly on my NeoCities site. Diagnostics A few diagnostics I’ve developed for incoming students. “Enhanced” Readings Readings to help students build background knowledge before (or in some cases, in place of) grade-level readings. Every Sentient Being’s Guides Every Teacher’s Guide to Technology, about using technology more effectively in an educator’s job, and Every Sentient Being’s Guide to Password Security, for anyone who wants to stay secure. Free books. Know Your Rights What schools are required to do to support students, for teachers and families. Mostly about English learners at the moment. Professional Development Slides, resources, and session pages from PD I’ve led. Study and Review Vocabulary quizzes, spaced-repetition flash cards, and a simple quiz maker.

Resources for Students

Interactive pages written for high school students, including English learners, so the explanations aim to be clear without being dumbed down.

CSCC LI Strategies for Learning Vocabulary Notes, slides, and vocabulary cards for the Columbus State Language Institute micro-class. Cryptography & Code-Breaking Interactive demos of classical ciphers, codebooks, cryptanalysis, and the math behind modern keys. Glossary of Terms Plain-English definitions of the math, cryptography, and probability terms used across the site.

Archived and no longer online: the CSCC LI 2020 Au-B Vocab class pages and the TGFS class pages.

Technology

Technology Point-and-click builders for command-line tools (curl, ffmpeg, find, GPG, nftables, rsync, tar, regular expressions, and more), plus the guides above. Software The fluxDockApps suite for Fluxbox and Window Maker style docks, the NeoFlux window manager, fimgdupes, dvdmap, and a few scripts.

Games

Games 2076: Sengoku America, Solar Expats, neojongg, fortune, and an age-verification quiz. Browser games, nothing to install.

Writings

High-Low Books Novels for adult English learners: high interest, low reading difficulty. The first is La Cocina. A Young Lady’s LLM Primer A brief opinion article (2023) about large language models as tutors for K–12 students.

Send comments, bug reports, and requests for other teacher-tool pages to chris@chrisspackman.com, or find me on Mastodon.

Last updated: 2026-10-23

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