Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Every year lots of organizations, ranging from the United Nations to the Gallup Organization, put out various types of “Best” lists using different criteria to rank cities, states, and countries on their quality of life.

Each year I do a unit with my students where they evaluate different neighborhoods using their own criteria. This year, I thought it might also be useful for them to see the criteria that others use to evaluate communities.

So, here are my choices for The Best Lists Of “Best Places To Live”:

World’s Happiest Places

Interactive Map On The Happiest Places In The U.S.

Best Places To Live

Another Best Places To Live

Best Counties To Live In

Countries With The Best Quality Of Life

The Ten Happiest Countries In The World

America’s Best Places To Live

World’s 20 Best Places To Live

World’s Friendliest Countries

As always, feedback is welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to explore the other 350 “The Best…” lists and consider subscribing to this blog for free.

As readers know, I’ve been updating all of “The Best…” lists regularly.

However, even though I’ve added to each of the lists, and tried to remove sites that no longer exist, I haven’t adjusted any of the rankings on many of them since they were first posted — I’ve just added new ones to the bottom of each post.

So, in 2010, I’ll be revisiting many of them and revising the rankings. Stay tuned for many new and improved “The Best…” lists!

I recently began began a thread on the Edutopia Classroom Management Group (Alice Mercer and I facilitate it) asking people to share the best classroom management advice they’ve ever been given.

I’ve posted about my own choice earlier, but since I’ve been thinking more about it over the past few weeks because of some classroom issues that have come-up, I thought people might find it helpful to share again.

It comes from Marvin Marshall, one of my favorite writers on positive methods of classroom management.

He wrote:

Will what I am about to do or say bring me closer or will it push me away farther from the person with whom I am communicating?

Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — I can lose my temper a bit with a student. Each time that has happened since I read that line, I have been able to remember that wise piece of advice and shift gears. Obviously, it would have been better for me not to get upset in the first place but, of course, I am only human…

It’s similar to the old community organizing adage I often used during my nineteen year community organizing career — after you polarize, always depolarize.

When I first posted about this piece of advice, I included a useful link to a New York Times article titled When The Heart Pays The Price of Anger. The last line of that article is “Life is very lonely when you are always right.”

Feel free to share the best piece of classroom management advice you’ve ever read or heard — either in the comments here or in the Edutopia Classroom Management Discussion Group.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Here’s a quote from TIME Magazine about it:

The convention ensures children of the right to a name, a nationality, an education, the highest possible standards of health and protection from abuse and exploitation. UNICEF said these rights are based on four core principles — non-discrimination, the child’s best interests, the right to life, survival and development, and respect for the views of children.

The convention has the widest support of any human rights treaty, with ratifications legally binding 193 countries to its provisions. Only two countries — the United States and Somalia — have not ratified the convention, though have said they intend to.

I thought I’d quickly put together some resources about it that might be accessible to English Language Learners:

A Generation Later, Still Struggling is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal.

The World’s Children is a series of images from The Sacramento Bee.

UNICEF has a number of good multimedia resources on the anniversary, including this slideshow.

TIME Magazine has a good article that is probably accessible to Intermediate ELL’s.

ABC News has a longer piece. You could probably take excerpts from it.

Human Rights Watch has a good series of questions and answers about the Convention.

Feel free to offer additional suggestions.

Learning to Teach to Bridge the Achievement Gap is a nice article about strategies that a California school is using to assist its students learn.  It appeared today’s New York Times.

But, as I note in a post I have at my other blog, Engaging Parents In Schools, I have a “bone to pick” with the headline wording. I believe it helps perpetuate a myth that most schools can indeed “bridge” the achievement gap. You might want to check out the post.

The Mugurdy Search Engine is a simple visual search engine that is very accessible to English Language Learners.

Once you type in a query, search results are show with good size images of the actual websites. It reminds me of the old Page Bull visual search engine, which I rated highly two years ago but then went out of business.

It doesn’t have any of the “bells and whistles” of my other highly-rated search engines, but I’m still adding it to The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners — 2009.

Let’s Celebrate Thanksgiving is a brand-new online activity by Renee Manfroid, whose main site is on The Best Websites For English Language Learner Students — 2009 list.

I’ll be adding this new exercise to The Best Sites To Learn & Teach About Thanksgiving.

Our school places a heavy emphasis on working with our ninth-graders. As regular readers know, I teach a lot of students in that grade.

Stuck in 9th Grade: The Bulge in the Education Pipeline is a report from Education Week which shares recent research showing why that kind of focus is just so important.

Just a reminder to readers that I’ve been continuing to update The Best Sites For Learning About Pearl Harbor
that I published last year.

You might find that list useful.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has some exceptional resources providing a Native American perspective on Thanksgiving.

I’m not sure how accessible they’d be to English Language Learners, but the lesson ideas can certainly be modified by teachers.

I’m certainly adding the link to The Best Sites To Learn & Teach About Thanksgiving.

Thanks to The School Library Journal for the tip.

Our very talented and innovative principal Ted Appel (you’ll be able to read an interview with him in Public School Insights that Claus von Zastrow will post there in a couple of weeks) recently came up with another excellent idea — this one related to students getting tutors.

Our school is a recipient of a multi-year federal grant to support Small Learning Communities (we have seven SLC’s which are made up of roughly 300 students and twenty teachers each — those students pretty much stay in those groupings for their high school career). Part of that grant provides substantial funding for “tutoring.”

Ted thought, “Why not use the money to have students hire teachers of their choice as tutors and they can arrange the time (before –school, lunchtime, after-school, weekends) and location?”

As Ted explained it to me, many schools might use these kinds of funds for “tutoring centers” that don’t easily offer the flexibility that might be needed to make tutoring an attractive idea to students.

Of course, the National No Child Left Behind Act also requires all schools in Program Improvement to offer the students the option of receiving tutoring paid by NCLB funds (known as supplemental educational services, SES). There has been a fair amount of criticism of the unevenness of those providers (see Research shows key NCLB provision not helping students and Evidence Thin on Student Gains From NCLB Tutoring ), and often it’s difficult for those tutors to really communicate well with students’ teachers to coordinate on curriculum and student strengths and challenges.

The way that our school has set it up has teachers identifying students who appear that they might need tutoring and initiating a discussion about how the program works. It’s quite simple — we have a list of teachers at the school who have said they’d be open to being a tutor; the student can review the list (with help from a teacher who knows him/her and who can provide suggestions on who might be a good fit); the student arranges to “interview” potential tutors; and then they develop a contract that is agreed to by all parties (including parents). There can be one or twenty sessions, and the teacher is paid the regular hourly rate paid by the District for extra activities.

I love the way it has transformed some conversations I’ve had with students. Several of my students are having major challenges in their math classes. I’ve been able to approach them to share my concern about what I hear from their math teacher, and explain to them that they could get their own individual tutor; they could hire a teacher of their choice; they can interview several if they want; and then they help determine when and where the tutoring takes place.  If they try it out, and don’t like it, then they can fire their tutor and find someone else.  We review the names of available teachers, and I can help them narrow down who might be a good fit — temperamentally and language and content-wise.  It sends a message, I believe, that we really are going the extra mile, and that they have power in their hands.   It maximizes the benefit for students as well, since it’s very easy for teachers to communicate with each other about the individual student, and since we have common curriculum in many of our classes,  students won’t using content that is “parachuted” in by an outside provider.

As Ted puts it,  “It reflects our school’s thinking.  We don’t just want to put on a tutoring center after school,  say we provided it,  and then blame the kids for not coming. ”

Even if some students don’t follow-through, it removes an excuse that they can give themselves (and others) for why they aren’t doing well.

Are any of your schools doing anything like this?

ESL Bee is a teacher-designed site to assist Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners in writing academic essays.

There’s a lot of material there. For me, though, the gold mine is in the examples of student essays (for example, these persuasive essays). It’s not easy to find good, short, accessible, and well-written examples of different types of academic essays that can be used with English Language Learners as models, but you’ll find a wealth of them here.

The same site also has a number of good English practice quizzes.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Practice Writing.  I’ve also added it to The Best Websites For K-12 Writing Instruction/Reinforcement.

I felt honored yesterday when Alice Mercer, my exceptional colleague who also teaches in the Sacramento School District (she’s at an elementary school), came by to observe one of my classes. I felt doubly honored that she wrote a post about it. You can read it at her blog. It’s titled Dear Theory of Knowledge Students.

She happened to come by to see my International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge class (I have a wide-ranging class schedule including IB, mainstream ninth-grade English, and Intermediate English).

Alice framed her post as a letter to my students and included several thoughtful questions (she also included photos). Tomorrow, my students will be responding to them. I’ll be very interested in seeing the comments they leave at her blog.

Thanks, Alice!

Twick it is designed to be sort of a version of Wikipedia. The difference is that every entry has to be 140 characters or less.

In the future, once there are many entries, it might be a great source of information for English Language Learners. Now, however, it’s an excellent opportunity for students to identify topics, develop their own 140 character answer or description about the topic, and then post it to the site.

I’m adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience.”

NASA just opened a website yesterday called Be A Martian. Here’s how the BBC describes it in an article titled How to explore Mars and have fun:

A Nasa website called “Be A Martian” allows users to play games while at the same time sorting through hundreds of thousands of images of the Red Planet.

The site includes some neat-sound games that look like they might be accessible to English Language Learners.  Unfortunately, though, it looks like the site is being overwhelmed with visitors and I couldn’t get past the home page before I got a page load error.

I assume they’ll get that issue cleared up later today, and I’ll be looking forward to exploring it further.

It’s time for another year-end “The Best…” list. This one will be sharing my choices for the best eighteen sites to use with English Language Learner students.

Some of these sites may have been around prior to this year, but since I didn’t discover them until now, I’m including them on the list.

Please vote in the poll at the bottom of this post and pick your top five. I’m having my students participate in the voting too, so you might want to consider using it as a lesson with your own students.

Here are my choices for The Best Websites For English Language Learner Students – 2009:

Number eighteen: Town Me is a brand-new “Yelp”-like site where users can write reviews of restaurants, stores, tourist attractions, etc.  I’m adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”.  You can read more about the site at TechCrunch.

Number seventeen:  Bluewalks lets you easily create a “walking tour” with text you write and images you can grab off the web.  It’s another addition to the “authentic audience” list.

Number sixteen:  BBC Memoryshare is a “place to share and explore memories.” The site has a cool-looking timeline where you can access memories that people have written — on just about anything. In addition, and most importantly for this post, you can contribute a memory (after quickly registering at the BBC). Each memory is accessible through the timeline, through a keyword, or through an individual url address.

Number fifteen:  Google expanded their Google Translator Toolkit. It builds on their great Google Translate tool, which is on The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners — 2008 list.  I’d encourage you to read the post at The English Blog, which gives an excellent explanation of the new application.

Number fourteen: Grapevine is an audio “chatboard” that I’m adding to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English. It’s super-simple to set-up a private forum where students can listen and respond to others and don’t have to be online at the same time.  English Language Learners can communicate with other classes around the world, like in our International Sister Classes Project or just be given a simple speaking assignment to complete.  I love its simplicity and ease of use.

Number thirteen: I’ve posted in the past about how the ability to make easy screencasts — with audio– could be an excellent learning opportunity for English Language Learners (you might want to take a look at that post).  There’s now a great tool called Screentoaster that couldn’t be more simple to use, and they’ve just added both the ability to record audio and add subtitles. All you do after you log-in is click on a button, open up the window on your screen that you want to record, and it starts recording your screen.  After that’s been recorded, you can provide audio or subtitles.  And it’s free.

Number twelve:  Users can create online animations at DoInk. I especially like what sounds like a strict and pro-active policy at ensure classroom appropriate content on the site.

Number eleven: Google also expanded its Google Books service. You can read about all the new additions at TechCrunch. The one that I really like is the feature that lets you embed previews of books into your own blog or website. I’m hoping to use this with students this year. We’re going to be doing some work with other classes, and I can see them writing about their books, embedding the preview, and then having other students respond not only to their writing, but to the preview of the book that they will be able to read.

Number ten:  English teacher Renee Manfroid has created many excellent activities for Beginning English Language Learners, including Colors In English. You can see all of her interactives on her main site.

Number nine: English Raven, a site begun by Jason Renshaw, has just gotten even better with a new feature called World News For Kids. Several stories with images and accessible audio are shown each week, and students can participate in an audio forum, too. All that is free. If you are an English Raven member (and it’s one of only a very few sites on The Best Educational Web Resources Worth Paying For… list — it only costs $20 per year, but also has a ton of materials that are available without paying), additional great materials are provided.

Number eight: Shahi is a dictionary that combines simple definitions with quite a few Flickr photos. The combination of the two makes it pretty accessible to English Language Learners.

Number seven: Nearly two years ago I posted about an excellent site for Beginning English Language Learners called Kindersay. Then it went off-line. It recently came back online again, so I’m including it in this year’s list.

Number six:  Many English Language Learner teachers and students are familiar with Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab. It’s provided high-quality listening exercises on the web for a longtime. It’s now gotten even better with the addition of videos. Video Snapshots for ESL/EFL Students show short video clips along with comprehension quizzes for students to take.

Number five: Pinky Dinky Doo is a new site with a bunch of resources.  I’d encourage you to read a post by Kevin Jarrett that gives a good overview of what it offers.  I’d like to highlight one area of the site that I’m adding to The Best Websites For K-12 Writing Instruction/Reinforcement. It’s called Your Story Box, and is basically a simple cloze (gap-fill) activity where users fill-in the blanks with images that are converted into words. Audio support is also provided to the text.

Number four: Speakaboos provides excellent quality “talking stories” on video with closed-captioning — often read by “celebrities.”   They say they are also going to add the ability to record stories, as well as offering other online activities.  You can watch the stories without registering, though it appears like you will have to sign-up (for free) in order to record stories.

Number three: Welcome To The Web is really quite an exceptional site that acts as a guide for students to learn how to use the Internet. Audio support is provided for the text and users can save their progress in the tutorial. It’s super-accessible.

Number two: BITS Interactive Resources is another one of those sites that was around, then disappeared, and then returned.  It has nineteen “sets” of five different excellent reading activities focusing on “signs, details, matching, gist, and gap.”  It’s also on The Best Websites For Intermediate Readers.

And now, the number one website for ELL’s this year is…a tie between two new applications.

One is Vocabsushi. It’s s a neat new — and free — vocabulary learning site. It includes assessments, audio, learning words in context, and games. The only thing it’s missing are photos and/or videos, but I guess you can’t always have everything. Joyce Valenza has written a post that describes the site in much greater detail. I’d encourage you to read that, and then try out Vocabsushi…

The other number one site is called English Central. David Deubelbeiss has posted a very thorough post about the site titled English Central – Bringing “voice” and output to learning English. I’d strongly encourage you to read it — I don’t feel any need to “reinvent the wheel.” A quick description is that it’s a free video site for English Language Learners, lets users listen to parts of the video, then lets them repeat what the characters says and compares it to the original. You get graded on how well you do. It has even more features, but you can read David’s post or check out the site directly. The other great thing about it is that the videos are all appropriate for the classroom, unlike several other ESL video sites that have come online recently.

Below you’ll see the poll. Remember, people can only vote once, and I’m asking that you vote for no more than five of them. English Central is a late-comer to the list, so even though it’s tied for first, you’ll find it last on the actual poll.

Feel free to leave a comment about other sites you think should have been included on this list.

You might also want to look at the other three hundred plus “The Best…” lists.

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

Agence France Presse has an Interactive graphic on hunger in the world. 60 heads of state are attending the United Nations World Summit on Food Security in Rome.

I’ve added the resource to The Best Sites To Learn About World Food Day.

The Future Is Ours is the title of a very eloquent editorial that appeared in the New York Times today. It reviewed many of the challenges facing immigrants to the United States today. One line said:

“They” are “us,” a cohort of newcomers who will be filling the demographic void left as the baby boomers start fading away.

Unfortunately, it really didn’t offer any specific ideas of what should be done to respond to those challenges.  That was disappointing, but I also have to wonder — even if it had — would it really have any impact nowadays?

Harcourt has an excellent Multimedia Art Glossary that provides audio support for the text in addition to visual images.

I’m adding it to The Best Art Websites For Learning English, as well as placing the link on my website under Music and Art.

Runpolls is a new site for making online…polls, and it looks extremely simple to use. And it’s free.

One feature I particularly like is the ability to easily add url address to polls. Teachers or students can quickly make polls where people can vote on their favorite online games, for example. Many survey sites don’t have this option.

I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Creating Online Polls & Surveys.