http://www.americanrhetoric.com/
This particular site is definitely a great source of highly effective speakers with highly effective skills while addressing an audience. It is, indeed, a very nice way to have students sample different talks and different speaking/delivering styles. The one thing I recommend for the audios available in this site is that this webpage should be used with high intermediate students (or higher levels) due to the level of vocabulary used in the talks.
I felt really glad to have found a great source of samples for effective speeches. With that enthusiasm, I went into searching for the other part of my particular teaching in this class: pronunciation exercises to work on student accent reduction. And guess what? I visited the following portals in noodletools.com and found nothing.
http://infomine.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/canned_search
http://www.virtuallrc.com/
I felt disappointed! Or my search was too specific, or I was knocking on the wrong portal till I clicked this other link.
http://www.tulane.edu/~lmiller/ArchivesResources.html
This particular site led me into http://www.alltheweb.com/, which gave me all the magic I needed to find information and exercises for a pronunciation class. For instances, I looked for information about the "disappearing T" in some American accents and dialects, and bingo!: The information was just a click away. Then I tried something a bit harder such as "English front vowels" (including the quotion marks) plus L and R, to explore the intermediary schwa contexts, and was directioned to some interesting websites as well.
The one thing I didn´t like about www.alltheweb.com is that at times it gives useless links with lots of advertising and the like. I would like to suggest my teaching colleagues and blog visitors to try the following web search engine:
www.metacrawler.com
This particular search engine allows you to filter and narrow information and gives you the most important sites found in google.com, yahoo search, bing.com, Ask.com, and About.com; all in one single browser.
In my query for pronunciation exercises or information about the intermediary schwa, it guided me directly to what I was looking for. Besides, this browser keeps a record of your recent searches to easily go back to where you were before and not to lose a nice link you just found. And by paraphrasing your search words or giving you synonyms, it does provide you with a number of related topics or suggestions to further explore.
Let's see if this information would lead you to what you are looking for for your classes or your personal research.
Jonathan,
Thank you for all those great sites you gave us. I will recommend them to other teachers that teach pronunciation.
I think you did a great job with the search engines.
Cristian Meléndez