Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

I regularly highlight my picks for the nine or ten (or several more) most useful posts for each month — not including “The Best…” lists. I also use these in a more extensive monthly newsletter I send-out. You can see back issues of those newsletters here and my previous “Top Ten” picks at Websites Of The Month.

These posts are different from the ones I list under the monthly “Most Popular Blog Posts.” Those are the posts the largest numbers of readers “clicked-on” to read.

Here are the posts I personally think are the best, and most helpful, ones I’ve written during this past month (not in any order of preference):

The Best Piece Of Classroom Management Advice I’ve Ever Read

Mugurdy Search Engine

“Be A Martian”

What Alice Mercer Saw When She Observed My Class

Do Teachers REALLY Come From The Bottom Third Of Colleges? Or Is That Statistic A Bunch Of Baloney?

The Difference Between Praise & Acknowledgment

“A Parent Engagement Model That Works”

Meeting Testing Goals By Lowering Standards

“Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education”

A Few Simple Ways To Introduce Reluctant Colleagues To Technology

“I just thought it would end differently this time”

“I Notice”

Neat Lincoln Memorial Interactive

When You Have A Sub…

Compasses Or Road Maps

I write about using Problem-Based Learning in my book that’s coming out next year, Teaching English Language Learners: Strategies That Work.

There are surprisingly few useful resources on it available on the Web. Jose Luis Cabello, though, has found some good materials and posted them. They’re worth a look.

Here’s my monthly round-up of “The Best…” lists I’ve posted in November (of course, you can find all 340 or so of them here):

The Best Sites For Teachers Of English Language Learners — 2009

The Best Sites To Learn And Teach About The Hajj — November, 2009

The “Best” Articles (And Blog Posts) About Education Policy — 2009

The Best Tools For Making Screencasts — November, 2009

The Best Reflective Posts I’ve Written About My Teaching Practice — 2009

Part Forty-One Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — November, 2009

The Best Sites To Learn About Walls That Separate Us — November, 2009

The Best Ways ESL/EFL/ELL Teachers Can Develop Personal Learning Networks — November, 2009

The Best Tools For Keeping Your Own Website Or Blog “Healthy” — November, 2009

The Best Online Resources For Teaching & Learning About World War II (Part One) — November, 2009

The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners — 2009

The Best Online Resources For Helping Students Learn To Write Persuasive Essays — November, 2009

The Best Websites For English Language Learner Students — 2009

The Best Resources To Learn About The Convention On The Rights Of The Child — November, 2009

The Best Lists Of “Best Places To Live” — November, 2009

The Best Resources For Learning About World Toilet Day & The Issue Of Public Sanitation In The Third World — November, 2009

The Best Sites For Learning & Teaching About The Day Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe — November, 2009

The Best Places To Find Lyrics On The Web — November, 2009

The Best Online Resources To Learn About Charles Darwin — November, 2009

The Best Sites For Teaching About Latitude & Longitude — November, 2009

The Best Sites For Learning Spanish Online — November, 2009

The Best Places To Find Quotations On The Web — November, 2009

Part Forty-Two Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — November, 2009

The Best Online Resources For Learning About Eid al-Adha

This is another short post that I periodically write specifically for teachers of the International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge (TOK) class. I know more and more of them are subscribing to this blog. As regular readers know, in addition to my Intermediate English class and my mainstream ninth-graders, this year I’m teaching a TOK class.

I just added quite a few resources to the sidebar of my Theory of Knowledge class blog, so you might want to check them out.

Just a reminder to readers that I’ve been continuing to update The Best Places To Learn About Christmas, Hanukkah, & Kwanzaa that I published last year.

You might find that list useful.

Today, Muslims around the world begin celebrating Eid al-Adha, or “Festival of Sacrifice.”

I’ve put together a short “The Best…” list sharing resources about the holiday.

You might also be interested in The Best Sites To Learn And Teach About The Hajj and other related lists I’ve posted.

Here are my choices for The Best Online Resources For Learning About Eid al-Adha (that are also accessible to English Language Learners):

Festival of Sacrifice is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal.

Muslims worldwide celebrate Eid al-Adha is a slideshow from The Guardian.

The Eid Al-Adha 2009 is a photo gallery from the Charlotte Observer.

Worldwide Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha is a slideshow from China View.

The CBBC Newsround has a feature on Eid-ul-Adha around the world.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

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:

MAKE CHOCOLATES DANCE: You can choreograph a dance for a piece of chocolate, choose the accompanying music, and write a message using this piece of viral marketing. The link can be posted a student/teacher blog or website.

SAY THANKS TO SOMEONE: Thanks For Being There is a simple and accessible web application from State Farm that lets you thank someone for “being there” for you. It’s easy to use, and students can post the url of their creation on a student blog or website.

MAKE DOGS SING: With the holiday season coming-up, you can send a Critter Carol — dogs singing a Christmas song, with a message you write included. Students can create on, and then post the url of their card on a website or blog.

CREATE A WEBSITE: Just Paste It and Axess are very, very simple ways to create websites. They’re ideal for teachers or students who are not very tech savvy, and just want a place to add links or, for example, if students have an assignment where they might need to collect images and then describe them. Axess has an advantage over Just Paste It because it appears that you can return to edit Axess but can’t do that for Just Paste It. No registration is required for either one.

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

This post contains a listing of the most popular posts in this blog during the months of October and November (usually I do them for each individual month, but didn’t get around to writing one in October). These are the ones that have been most “clicked-on,” and are different from my Websites Of The Month. Those are the posts that I personally think are the best and most helpful.

Because of the popularity of my “The Best…” lists, it should be pointed out that often the most clicked-on posts are not necessarily ones that I wrote that month. Instead, they might have been written earlier, but then one of these older ones has just been highlighted elsewhere and all of a sudden become popular.

You can see previous reports on my Most Popular Posts here.

THE TOP EIGHT “THE BEST…” LISTS:

1. The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2009

2. The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween

3. The Best Sites To Learn & Teach About Thanksgiving

4. The Best Online Resources About Christopher Columbus

5. The Best Teacher Resources For “Foldables”

6. The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers

7. The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2008

8. The Best Sites That Students Can Use Independently And Let Teachers Check On Progress

THE TOP EIGHT POSTS THAT WERE NOT “THE BEST…” LISTS:

1. A Few Simple Ways To Introduce Reluctant Colleagues To Technology

2. How To Get A Discount When Ordering My Book

3. When A “Good” Class Goes “Bad” (And Back To “Good” Again!)

4. Great Picture Book Maker

5. “I Like This Lesson Because It Make Me Have a Longer Temper” (Part One)

6. Do Teachers REALLY Come From The Bottom Third Of Colleges? Or Is That Statistic A Bunch Of Baloney?

7. “Funniest videos about teaching / learning English”

8. Reading Logs — Part Two (or “How Students Can Grow Their Brains”)

I periodically look for quotations — for articles, posters, etc.  I get pretty frustrated by most of the online quotation sites because they often don’t provide the source for the quotes, nor any information about the person who supposedly said the quote.

I’ve searched and searched, and I still I’ve only found four sites that consistently provide sources for quotes and have a decent searchable database. I do have to say, though, that one way I’ve recently discovered to get around this problem is by pasting the quote in the query box at Google Book Search. Often, that will bring me to the primary source.

This is an extremely short “The Best…” list.

My choices for The Best Places To Find Quotations On The Web are:

Quotations Book

Wikiquote

Lit Quotes

Quote Snack (This is a blog. It doesn’t seem to have a complete “search” system in place, but it does have a “tag cloud” you can use).

Another site that deserves an “honorable mention” is called Quotes.net. It doesn’t provide the sources for their quotes, but it does have two other neat capabilities that could be helpful to English Language Learners — it provides audio support for the text, so that users can hear the words; and it provides the option of translating the quotes into many different languages.

iWise is another site that doesn’t meet my criteria, but the fact it offers audio support for the text is a real plus.

Finally, even though the listed sites don’t meet my criteria, you might want to look at the exhaustive list of quote resources that Presentation Zen has at Where to get quotations for presentations? (the post is about three years old, though, so there might be a fair amount of dead links).

Tara Benwell lets me know that The English Club has a quotes section designed for English Language Learners. It’s in its beginning stages now, but will be expanding.

Any additional suggestions are welcome!

I’m often asked for suggestions of good places online where people can learn and practice Spanish for free. In fact, I’ve been asked enough times to make me develop this short “The Best…” list of my recommendations.

Many of these sites also offer lessons in other languages, including English.

Feel free to offer additional suggestions.

I personally have found that going to a language school in a Spanish-speaking country (I went to ones in Mexico and Guatemala) and living with a family to be by far the best way to learn Spanish, but these sites can provide good initial exposure and be helpful for later development and practice.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Learning Spanish Online (not in order of preference):

BBC Languages Mi Vida Loca

The BBC also has several other sites for learning Spanish.

Online Spanish Help

Visual Link Spanish

Live Mocha

Busuu

Vocabulix

Lingus TV

Panfu (a virtual world for kids where they can learn Spanish)

Study Spanish

Hello World Spanish

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

“Does ‘Counting Our Blessings’ Really Help?” is a report from Cognitive Daily sharing research that shows having students regularly list what they are grateful for helps them develop a more positive outlook.

Doing it daily generated the greatest benefit, but it appears that doing it weekly helped, too.

I don’t plan on trying this with my students anywhere that number of times, but it sounds like a good reflective question to ask now and then.

“Frenchfrog’s Little English Pond” is the name of a blog written by Laurence Haquet. She creates great interactive books that are exceptional learning tools.

I’ve added her book on Thanksgiving to The Best Sites To Learn & Teach About Thanksgiving.

And I’ve added her book on Halloween to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween.

She’s created quite a few other similar interactives,too.

I learned about her from Michelle Henry’s site, which is on The Best Sites For Teachers Of English Language Learners — 2009 list.

The World’s Coolest Buildings is the name of a slideshow from “Travel & Leisure.”

I’m adding it to The Best Images Of Weird, Cool & Neat-Looking Buildings (& Ways To Design Your Own).

Each month, I publish a feature where I “look back” at posts I’ve made one and two years ago (at about this time). I share ones that I think people might still find useful.

Here are some from one year ago:

Voice Of America Special English — From China

A Good Question For Classroom Management

Incredible Website Launches Today!

The Best Tools To Make Simple Graphs Online

The Best Science & Math Sites — 2008

The Best Social Studies WebSites — 2008

“The Best…” Lists Reorganized

And here are some interesting ones from two years ago:

Browser Books Again

Maps Of The World

America’s Favorite Architecture

Neat Music Sites

The Object Of History

Last week I posted about an experiment I was doing with my mainstream and English Language Learner students using visual imagery.

In that post, I included links to research done by Zoltán Dörnyei on using visual imagery specifically with English Language Learners.

Today, I learned about another article by him that’s available for PDF download. It’s called New Ways Of Motivating Foreign Language Learners: Generating Vision.

Thanks to Barbara Sakamoto and Dayle Major for the tip.

I regularly share my picks for the most useful posts of each month. I also publish a list of the month’s most popular posts, based on the number of times they are “clicked-on.”

I also share a list of Post Rank’s analysis of each month’s top posts. Post Rank uses a variety of ways to measure level of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts. I have a constantly updated “widget” on my blog’s sidebar that lists these posts, but I thought a monthly post would be helpful/interesting to subscribers who don’t regularly visit the blog itself.

Here are their rankings for the month of November:

The Best Reflective Posts I’ve Written About My Teaching Practice — 2009

The Best Sites For Teachers Of English Language Learners — 2009

The Best Piece Of Classroom Management Advice I’ve Ever Read

An Interesting Thing In Obama’s Speech This Week

The Best Websites For English Language Learner Students — 2009

Do Teachers REALLY Come From The Bottom Third Of Colleges? Or Is That Statistic A Bunch Of Baloney?

So This Is What Obama Was Talking About…

Another Oxford University Press Site

More Sites For Copyright or Royalty-Free Photos

The Best Online Resources For Helping Students Learn To Write Persuasive Essays

Now This Sounds Like An Essential Quality A Teacher Should Have…

A Few Simple Ways To Introduce Reluctant Colleagues To Technology

The Difference Between Praise & Acknowledgment

The Best Ways ESL/EFL/ELL Teachers Can Develop Personal Learning Networks

The Best Sites To Learn About Walls That Separate Us

The Best Online Resources For Teaching & Learning About World War II (Part One)

Neat Lincoln Memorial Interactive

The Best Resources To Learn About The Convention On The Rights Of The Child

Submit A Post To The Next ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India.

I’ve added resources that were published this week to The Best Resources To Teach & Learn About The Terrorist Attacks In India, including:

Remembering Mumbai’s Victims is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal published a year after the attacks.

Mumbai Still Vulnerable on Anniversary of Attacks is a New York Times slideshow also published a year after the attacks.

I clicked the wrong button and inadvertently posted The Best Sites For Teaching About Latitude & Longitude a bit too soon.

Here’s an excellent online interactive that I’ve added to the list:

The Saskatoon Public Schools Online Learning Center has a nice interactive on latitude and longitude.

Thumboo! seems like a very quick and easy way to take a screenshot (a picture of a webpage) and add it to your blog or website. An embed code is provided. One negative, though, is it doesn’t appear that you can adjust its size.

I’m adding it to The Best Ways To Create Simple Screenshots.

One of the trickiest things for me to teach (and to learn!) about Geography is keeping things straight between latitude and longitude. Because of that difficulty, I’ve decided to create another “The Best…” list. You might also be interested in The Best Websites For Learning & Teaching Geography.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Teaching About Latitude & Longitude (that are, of course, accessible to English Language Learners).  These are not listed in any order of preference:

The Saskatoon Public Schools Online Learning Center has a nice interactive on latitude and longitude.

The Calgary Academy has a great online interactive on the topic that provides audio support for the text. You first have to register for the site, though.  Just click “Start Activity.”

Here’s a free Brainpop movie on the topic.

Kids Geo has a fun latitude and longitude reinforcing game.

Try-out this Pearson “drag-and-drop” activity.

Here’s a game to test and practice understanding of the concept.

And here’s another simple game.

You can also find these links, and links to other map-reading activities, on my website under Introduction to Maps.

As always, feedback and additional suggestions are welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.