Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Here are some additions to The Best Sites To Learn About The Vancouver Winter Olympics:

Vancouver’s Olympic Venues is a neat interactive from The New York Times.

Passing the Torch: An Evolution of Form is an update of another great interactive from The New York Times.

The Torch’s Path is a slideshow from the Times.

Valentine’s Day: send a miniature card via the World’s Smallest Postal Service is a neat slideshow from The Telegraph.

I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Learn About Valentine’s Day.

The Starbucks Love Project lets you watch some great performances of “All You Need Is Love” from around the world, and offers you the opportunity to contribute your own. In addition, you can make a “love drawing,” too, which is a lot easier and more accessible to our students.

This is somehow connected to a campaign to fight AIDS in Africa, though I’m a little unclear how.

In addition to drawing something and writing/talking about it, it’s a great opportunity to learn the words to the song.

Thanks to the Innovative Interactivity blog for the tip.

Gimundo, which has the sub-heading “Good News…Served Daily,” provides only positive and upbeat news stories and videos. I wouldn’t make it the primary source of news for either my students or me, and, I have to admit, the idea of just sharing positive stories doesn’t feel right to me — I guess I prefer the real world.

However, I have to admit many of the stories are engaging, and are accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my website in the News section.

Mardi Gras and Carnivals are held around the world just prior to the fasting season of Lent, which is coming right-up!

I’ve just updated The Best Sites To Learn About Mardi Gras & Carnivals.

If you’ve ever wanted to be a dragon, Choice of the Dragon is the game for you. You get to be one — as nice or as mean as you want!

It’s accessible to Intermediate ELL’s.

I’m adding it to The Best Places To Read & Write “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories.

“Searching With Success” is an engaging tutorial on searching the web. It’s from Acadia University, and is accessible to high Intermediate English Language Learners.

Acadia also has a tutorial called Credible Sources Count. It’s probably only accessible to advanced ELL’s.

I’m adding both to The Best Resources For Learning Research & Citation Skills.

Here are the latest additions to The Best Sites To Learn About Valentine’s Day:

When Love Is In The Year is a neat little interactive from the Tampa Bay newspaper.

Love and Romance Through The Ages is from the Virtual Museum of Canada.

How Valentine’s Day Helps the Economy shares some interesting information.

Merriam-Webster Word Games is an impressive collection of about twenty different games accessible to various levels of English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games.

State Of The Unions is a very accessible infographic showing a lot of information about labor unions in the United States today.

It’s also a bit sad to see.

It would be very useful for students, particularly in Social Studies classes.

Karenne Sylvester has come-up with a great and creative idea for the next ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival on April 1st. It’s going to have a theme focused on teachers sharing lesson ideas.

You can read all about it at her post, The Carnival of English Language Lessons.

She’s encouraging bloggers and non-bloggers alike to participate, and has created a special submission form to use, which you can access at her post. So please don’t use the regular system at the blogcarnival site. Submissions are due by March 21st.

It should be a fun and useful Carnival.

In case you missed it, Shelly Terrell posted the most recent Carnival last week. You can see all previous editions here.

Check out the new post in my other blog, Engaging Parents In School, to learn about this strange but apparently true story…

I’m a big fan of students annotating what they’re reading — either on the paper, or on post-its, and I feel the same about the web. That’s why I compiled the Best Applications For Annotating Websites list.

Layerpad is the newest addition to that list. After registration, you can make comments on the site, and see comments others have made. In that way, it’s similar to Blerp. However, Layerpad doesn’t let you position the comments in different places around the page, which limits its effectiveness as a way for students to show that they’re using reading strategies. Even though I’m adding it to the “The Best…” list, I won’t be able to highly recommend it until it adds that feature.

Dispostable is the latest addition to The Best Temporary Email Address Sites For Students (Or Anyone).

You can read more about it at the Make Use of blog.

The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…

Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:

* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.

* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.

* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.

* provide some language-learning opportunity (for example, students can write about their creations).

* not require any registration.

You can find previous installments of this series with the rest of my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year. Several hundred sites have been highlighted in these past lists. You might also want to take a look at the first list I posted in this series — The Best Ways For Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly, and Painlessly.

You might also want to look at The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009.

Here are the newest additions:

DESIGN A DONUT: Dunkin Donuts lets you create your very own virtual donut and share it with others. Students can describe what they made and explain why they made it that way.

COMPOSE LYRICS FOR A BEAVER ON A FIDDLE: You can compose lyrics to a song being played by a beaver that fiddles, and see them displayed as captions while the music plays. You can then post your creation on a student/teacher website or blog for all the world to see — lucky them….

MAKE A BABY TALK: etrade’s “Talking Baby” commercials during the Super Bowl are famous annual events. Now you and your students can create their own talking babies by either using the text-to-speech feature or recording their own voices. Their creations can be posted on a student/teacher website.

CREATE MORE MUSIC: The American Heart Association has unveiled a web application that lets you create a “hand symphony” and send the link of your creation to a friend or yourself. It can then be posted on a teacher website or blog. It’s designed to promote the Association’s new hands-only CPR, and the site also has a one minute video demonstrating it.

Feedback is always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

The United States Census Bureau does its every-ten-year census in 2010, and much of the allocation of public funds and resources is based on the results. Lower-income communities are often “short-changed” because many people don’t respond to Census questions for a variety of reasons.

The Sacramento Bee ran an excellent article today titled Capital-area activists seek full census count of Franklin Boulevard’s Latinos. The graphics that accompany the article are even better, especially one highlighting Sacramento’s Hard-To-Count Census Tracts.

It got me thinking…

The Census Bureau itself has a lot educational materials for us in schools, but I have to admit that I’m less than impressed with most of them. It does, however, have a simple and accessible Census Fact Sheet that I like.

We’re in the middle of a neighborhood research unit (I explain it in detail in my upcoming book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work, and I’ll post about it here one of these days). It culminates with their writing a persuasive essay explaining why they like living in their neighborhood.

I’m thinking that an interesting follow-up to that would be for students to do a little more analysis into why their neighborhood is considered “hard-to-count,” read a little more about the Census and what benefits could come in to make their neighborhood even better if more people responded, and develop their own version of a persuasive essay/poster to share in the community.

If you’re interesting in trying to do something similar, you can find which neighborhoods in your area are considered “hard to count” here.

I’m adding this section to The Best Websites For Teaching & Learning About New Orleans:

The city of New Orleans went wild after their football team, the New Orleans Saints, won the 2010 Super Bowl. Here are some links to see the celebration:

Improbable Win Sends New Orleans Into a Frenzy is a Wall Street Journal video.

Bourbon Street Celebrates is from CNN.
New Orleans Celebrates The Saints is also from CNN.

New Orleans Backing Its Saints

Here are some new additions to The Best Sites Where ELL’s Can Learn About The Super Bowl:

You can find the best commercials from the 2010 Super Bowl here.

TIME Magazine picks The Best and Worst Super Bowl Commercials 2010.

TIME also picks Top 10 Superbowl Ads of the Decade.

The Wall Street Journal also has a collection of Super Bowl Ads 2010.

Proofreading: Spelling and Writing is a really nice series of many, many exercises where students have to correct paragraphs. It’s divided by levels of difficulty.

I’m adding it to The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis (It’s a long story about why that list has that title — you can read the explanation in the post).

Thanks to the Langwitches blog for the tip.

Readers know that I’ve been doing a series of experimental lessons in my mainstream ninth-grade class (and modifying them for my Intermediate English class) on helping them find ways to motivate themselves to want to work harder at learning. These lessons have included ones on the brain being a muscle that grows with exercise; the long-term importance of developing more self-control; goal-setting skills; and the discipline of visualizing success.

I talk about the importance of helping students find their own motivations in my forthcoming book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work, and will be expanding on that idea in my third book, which will be published by Eye On Education in 2011.

A post by Susan Ohanian today prompted me to create another lesson in this series, and I’ll be trying it out sometime this week. Susan’s post reminded me about a chapter in the excellent book, Nurture Shock, that shares the results of studies that document how teen sleep habits affect them.

Fortunately, the co-author of the book, Po Bronson, published a version of that particular chapter in New York Magazine as the article Snooze Or Lose, and it’s available online for free.

I’m going to start out in both of my classes asking students to complete Part One of a short survey, which can be downloaded here (Part Two of the survey, which I talk about later in this post, is part of the same download). They’ll then tell a partner what they feel comfortable sharing from it.

After that, my mainstream English class will read a page-and-a-half excerpt I’ve modified from the Bronson article. I don’t think I can legally post how I modified it, but I can share the Read Aloud I’ve developed for my Intermediate English class that highlights the most important points (teachers can easily create their own page-and-a-half version of the article). That Read Aloud will substitute for the excerpt, since the article is too advanced for my ELL’s — even with the modifications I’ve made. Here’s the Read Aloud:

WHY TEENAGERS NEED MORE SLEEP

Studies show that people under twenty-one get an hour less of sleep each night than they did 30 years ago. Scientists have found that this loss of an hour hurts people because brains are still developing and growing until the age of twenty-one. A lot of this developing and growing happens while teenagers are asleep.

Every study done shows a connection between sleep and school grades.

Teenagers who get A’s average fifteen more minutes than B students.

B students get eleven minutes more sleep than C students.

C students get ten minutes more sleep than D students.

Less sleep hurts the brain’s ability to remember new information. It especially hurts the ability to learn a second language. Less sleep also tends to make you feel more depressed.

Sleeping less also makes your body want to create more fat. Children who get less than eight hours of sleep are three times more likely to get fat.

After students read the excerpt in my mainstream class, and after sharing the Read Aloud in my Intermediate English class, I’ll then do a Read Aloud sharing some ideas on how to sleep better. It’s adapted from a piece written by Ashley Merryman (Nurture Shock’s co-author) that’s titled How to Get Kids to Sleep More:

WAYS TO SLEEP BETTER

• It’s important to go to bed at a consistent time. If you stay up late some nights, it will make it more difficult for you to get to sleep on nights you go to bed earlier.

I’ll ask students to take a minute to think of other things that might help (reading before they go to sleep, etc.), and then have them share.

I’ll then give students Part Two of the survey. It basically asks students to summarize what they learned; asks if they feel like they want to sleep more and, if so, for how long; and what are they going to do to make it happen. They’ll then tell a partner what they feel comfortable sharing.

I’ll have students staple the two surveys together and turn them in to me. I’ll make copies, return them, and they’ll add it to the goal sheets they’ve prepared for the new semester.

Here’s my specific plan for the mainstream class:

1) Take survey, share
2) Read first four paragraphs (introduction & lack of sleep’s effect on grades) on their own & write a one sentence summary.
3) Share with partner. I’ll ask a couple of students to share what they wrote with the class.
4) With a partner, take turns reading the next five paragraphs on how lack of sleep can lead to inattentiveness & depression. Write a one sentence summary & make a connection. Again, I’ll ask a couple of students to share with the class.
5) Still be with the same partner, either read aloud or silently the section on how lack of sleep tens to increase weight gain. Write a summary sentence. I’ll ask a couple of students to share with the class.
6) I’ll share a Read Aloud listing three actions students can take to sleep better and ask for more ideas.
6) On their own, complete Part Two of the survey and share.

Teens are physically “wired” to go to sleep later and wake up later (you can watch a short video about that here). As both the book’s authors,and Susan Ohanian, suggest, because of that fact the best solution would be for schools to start later in the morning. Until that happens, though, I think a lesson like this can’t hurt.

I’ll post how the lesson goes. Fell free to leave comments with suggestions on how I can make it better.

I’ve posted about E-Learning For Kids in the past, but I recently learned they changed the url address that will give English Language Learners free access to math, science, health, and language games and activities.

I’ve placed the new link on my website under Other Mixed Activities.