Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

This is a little different from my usual “The Best…” lists.

Inspired by the twentieth anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall this week, I’ve begun to think about developing some lessons related to walls — physical, mental, and emotional — and how they’re used by us and others to stay separate. I’m thinking it’s also an opportunity to help students learn about metaphors and similes.

This list is different, though, because usually I don’t post a list like this until I have some specific ideas on how to use the resources in a lesson.

I’m not there year, and, instead, am sharing these resources and asking for ideas on how best to use them. Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Absent a lesson plan, here are my choices for the The Best Sites To Learn About Walls That Separate Us (and are accessible to English Language Learners):

Raising Walls is an intriguing feature from The Wall Street Journal highlighting famous….walls in history and around the world.  The interactive graphic is supplemented by a slideshow, video, and article focused on walls being built around slums in Rio de Janeiro.

Great Walls In History is a slideshow from Newsweek magazine.

Here are two sites on the Great Wall of China:   One is a site from the University of Washington called the Great Wall that has text accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners and some nice photos.   I really like this other site.  It’s from an organization called The China Guide, and it’s a cool Virtual Tour of The Great Wall.  It gives a 360 degree tour and you can click on “hot spots” to move throughout the wall.

Two nice sites on the Berlin Wall are a series of photos from The Denver Post and an interactive from The Guardian.

Of course, the United States is building a huge border fence between the U.S. and Mexico. The New York Times has a map showing it. Here’s an interactive interviewing people who live near it. Earlier this year, the U.S. built a fence in the middle of ‘Friendship Park,” which is near San Diego and a place where friends and relatives from both countries would gather. You can watch a slideshow about what happened and also hear and read an NPR report on the event.

The Washington Post has an interactive about Israel’s plan to build a fence on the West Bank to separate Israel from the Palestinians.

Here are a series of images of Hadrian’s Wall, which was built in Great Britain long ago by the Roman Empire.

Walls of Incompetence is a series of photos of modern-day walls.

Baghdad: City of Walls, Pt.1: Scars of war is from the British newspaper The Guardian and highlights giant walls that have been built to separate Shia and Sunni neighborhoods.

Again, lesson ideas are welcome, along with suggestions of additional resources.

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Max’s Math Adventures is from Scholastic, and offers a variety of relatively simple math games.

The key feature, though, that makes it so useful to English Language Learners is that audio support is provided for much of the text.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Math.

In response to my request for help in figuring out what President Obama was referring to in his speech this week when he spoke about a national competition to identify better assessments different from having students “fill out a bubble” (An Interesting Thing In Obama’s Speech This Week), “chalkdusty” shared an article that appeared in Education Week two weeks ago titled Experts, Public to Weigh In on Common Tests.

Unfortunately, the article certainly doesn’t leave the impression (at least, in my reading of it) that they are going to seriously consider new types of assessments.

The comments on the article are also worth reading. Here’s one left by renowned ELL researcher Stephen Krashen:

At a time when children are overwhelmed with tests, when schools are being turned into test-prep academies, and when worth-while programs are being eliminated because of severe budget cuts, we are planning even more tests, tests that will match grade-by-grade standards, and carry a “hefty price tag.”

Judging by some of the other posts, I am clearly not the only person who thinks this is nuts. And I am not the only one who thinks it makes more sense to invest in maintaining and improving our educational system rather than developing more and more precise tests, tests that will add little or nothing to what we already know.

(I found out what Obama was talking about. See So This Is What Obama Was Talking About….)

Unfortunately, this week President Obama echoed the typical stuff that has been coming out of his administration about schools in his speech at a Wisconsin school.

However, there was one part that I found intriguing. Maybe others know what he’s referring to in the last line of this excerpt. If you do, please leave a comment.

But what we want to do — what we want to do is finally get testing right. So it’s not about more tests, it’s about being smarter about our assessments. It’s about measuring not only whether our kids can master the basics, but whether they can solve challenging tasks, do they have the skills like critical thinking and teamwork and entrepreneurship; assessments that don’t just give us a snapshot of how a student is doing in a particular subject, but a big picture look at how they’re learning overall; and assessments that will help tell us if our kids have the knowledge and the skills to thrive when they graduate.

So we’re not just interested in can they fill out a bubble. What we want to do is to take a look generally — are kids learning and gaining the critical thinking skills that they need to succeed. Now, these are the kinds of assessments that our states should be putting in place, and we’re setting up a separate competition where they can win grants, extra grants to help them do just that.

I had not heard anything about this effort to have states compete to develop better assessments.  Is he serious?  Or is it just window-dressing to make all the bad stuff seem more palatable?

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:

CREATE A GAME OF HANGMAN: With the Flash Hangman Challenge, you can easily write a phrase, email it to a friend, and it will automatically be turned into a Hangman game that can also be posted on a teacher/student website or blog. No registration is required. I’m also adding it to The Best Sites For Making Crossword Puzzles & Hangman Games.

TALK LIKE AN ELF: K-Mart has just created a “Talk Like An Elf” application. Go to the site, click on Elfspeak, and then record your message or use the text-to-speech option. Your message, which has a pitch that they must figure an elf might sound like, can then be emailed to a friend and the url can be posted on a student/teacher website or blog. You can also embed it, or send it directly to Facebook. It’s a brand new app, and, when I used it a few times, it was a bit temperamental. But I’m sure they’re working the bugs out as I write this.

DESIGN A WEIRD FLOWER: The musical group Black Eyed Peas has created a site called Planting My Ideas. You can use music, images, and words to create your own flower, which would then be posted in the site’s gallery. You can also post the link on a student or teacher’s website/blog, and have students write about it as a language development activity. It’s supposed to inspire creativity.  It’s interesting, fun, and a bit weird.

MAKE A BOOK: With Picture Book Maker, you can easily create a…picture book (including text). It can be saved online or printed out. It’s super-easy to use, plus no registration is required. The url of your creation can be posted on a student/teacher blog or website.

It’s a short list this time, but the next one I’m sure will be filled with a ton of Christmas-related activities.

The National Parks Service has put together a really exceptional interactive on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources About President’s Day.

Project Third Edition is another new excellent site from Oxford University Press supporting one of their textbooks.

There’s a ton of different and engaging online activities there for Beginning through Intermediate English Language Learner students.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Vocabulary on my website, even though it also includes reading and listening exercises..

Screencasts are audio-narrated “tours” of what you see on your computer screen (they don’t have to narrated, but it works much better if they are). Screencasts that I have seen are primarily used to show how to use various computer applications. They are wonderful teaching tools, especially for technological dummies like myself.

They can also be used as good speaking opportunities for English Language Learners.

I’ve written a lot about how I use online video games with ELL’s. One thing I’d like to do is have students play video games using “walkthroughs” (instructions and hints about how best to “win”) and create instructional screencast ”walkthroughs” that would teach other students how to play the game.

Of course, students could also just leave a stationary picture on the screen and talk about it.

In order to make it on this list, the application needed to be accessible to ELL’s and not require any downloading of software, since downloads are problematic for many schools.

Here are my picks for The Best Tools For Making Screencasts:

As regular readers know, my favorite is Screentoaster. It couldn’t be more simple to use, and they’ve recently 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. I’ve also placed it on The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.

DemoGirl also has a screencast on how to use that application, but it might not include its newest features.

Screencast-O-Matic is also nice, but a bit more complicated than Screentoaster.

Two newer apps that look good are Screenr and Screenjelly.

The great site Teacher Training videos has a screencast on how to use Screenjelly.

And, though I’m limiting this list to apps that require no software download, I do feel I have to at least mention Jing, which is a very popular free tool available by download. Teacher Training Videos also has a screencast explaining how to use Jing.

If you think I’m missing any tools, or if you have other ideas on how they can be used effectively with students, feel free to leave a comment.

You might also be interested in the other nearly 350 “The Best…” lists.

And you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free, too.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and Washington, D.C. Schools Chancellor are apparently getting married, according to Education Week.

Ordinarily, I certainly wouldn’t be using space on this blog to talk about somebody getting married (well, I have to admit I might write a word or two if it’s one of my kids). However, when our mayor, who turned a public high school into a private charter; who is the midst of a campaign to change the city’s charter so that the mayor gains huge control over the city; and who I would bet is planning on trying for mayoral control of the schools at some point, is getting married to one of the most outspoken advocates of many initiatives that I think are not helpful to public schools and the teachers and students in them, I’ll make an exception.

I wonder what this news might mean for schools in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C.? Especially with Rhee’s recent troubles.

I thought readers might find it useful for me to list in one post some useful (at least in mind ) pieces I’ve written about my own teaching practice over the past year. It was certainly a helpful exercise for me to review them.

There are some posts that could have been included here, but, instead, I’ve decided to add them to a future post titled “The Best Articles (And Blog Posts) Offering Practical Advice To Teachers — 2009.”

I have not included any additional description where the titles are self-explanatory.

Here are my choices for The Best Reflective Posts I’ve Written About My Teaching Practice — 2009:

“Data-Driven” Versus “Data-Informed” talks about my principal’s perspective on the use of data and my own response to lower standardized test scores in one of my classes.

What Do Pit Bulls & Cockroaches Have To Do With Learning & Teaching? shares my thoughts on what I view as my “teaching metaphor.”

Why I Support The Cellphone Ban At Our School

Results From Student Evaluation Of My Class And Me

Results From Student Evaluation Of My Class And Me (Part Two)

Have You Ever Taught A Class That Got “Out Of Control”?

“I’ll Work If You Give Me Candy” shares my response to a student who said that to me.

Writing Letters To Students

Results From My Year-Long U.S. History Tech Experiment is where I shared the assessment results and my reflections from teaching two U.S. History classes — one entirely in the computer lab and one in my classroom with my typical curriculum.

The Best Part Of The President’s Speech & How I’ll Use It shares how I use a different type of goal-setting lesson regularly with students  in class.

In “Seeing The Forest Through The Trees” I write about my amazing ability to not see things that are so obvious.

I wonder about the Hopes and Dreams that my students share in a beginning-of-the-year exercise in The Hopes And Dreams Of My Students.

Reading Logs — Part Two (or “How Students Can Grow Their Brains”) shares some lessons I was planning to use with students to help them see that they could literally make their brains “stronger.” “Now I Know My Brain Is Growing When I Read Every Night” describes what happened when I tried them in the classroom. “This Is Your Brain On Learning” shares a follow-up lesson I did. “I Know My Brain Is Growing…” Slideshow Of Student Work displays work that came out of the lesson.

Helping Students Develop Self-Control shares another lesson in the same vein as the one on the brain.

“I Like This Lesson Because It Make Me Have a Longer Temper” (Part One) shares the actual lesson on I did on self-control.

“I Was Disappointed With What Happened Yesterday…” talks about some class management issues.

“I Made My Agreement With Mr. Ferlazzo And Kept It…” talks about about the importance of making individual “deals” with students.

Getting Our Students & Their Families Thinking About College

“Lean-In” is about a short lesson to help students become more attentive.

Feedback , as always, is 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.

Flowing Data has some maps that very visually show where unemployment has increased over the past few years.

I’m adding them to The Best Sites To Learn About The Recession.

Student Day Protests In Iran is a slideshow from TIME Magazine.

I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About The Protests In Iran.

Google announced today a new feature in their popular Google News page — you can now create your own customized news sections, and publish them so they’re accessible to anyone (if you want to). For example, I just created one on Hmong news, which is obvious interest to many of my students.

Of course, in a lot of ways you do something like this with an application like Daymix and, unlike with the new Google news feature, you don’t have to sign-in at Daymix to create your custom page.

But I could see Google’s page just being one more way for students to create their own high-interest content to read.

Thanks to Mashable for the tip, which also has more info on it.

As I did in last year’sThe “Best” Articles About Education — 2008 and in the previous year’s The “Best” Articles About Education — 2007, I’ve put quotes around the word “Best” in the title of this list since I’m sure there are many, many articles about education I have not read and posted about this year. I’m particularly interested in hearing people’s suggestions for additions to this list.   This list, as the title says,  focuses on education policy issues.  I’ll have another one coming-up titled “The Best Articles (And Blog Posts) Offering Practical Advice To Teachers — 2009.”  I’ll also be writing “The Best Reflective Posts I’ve Written About My Teaching Practice — 2009.”

Unlike in previous year’s, though, I could not bring myself to rank them in order of preference — they all were just too good.

Where the titles of the articles or blog posts are self-explanatory, I haven’t included any additional description.

Here are my choices for The “Best” Articles (And Blog Posts) About Education — 2009:

Diane Ravitch wrote an excellent post titled What’s Wrong With Merit Pay.

Crazy Talk is the title of a great piece Doug Noon wrote for Change.Org a few months ago. It offers an excellent critique of Secretary Duncan’s plans.

Slate Magazine published what I think is an exceptionally insightful critique of KIPP Schools written by Sara Mosle.  It’s called The Educational Experiment We Really Need: What the Knowledge Is Power Program has yet to prove.

Claus von Zastrow has wrote great blog post titled Taking the Easy Way Out. He talks about the recent tendency of journalists (who really should know better) to claim there are easy answers to some of the challenges facing our schools.

The Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning’s blog shared the results of two pretty interesting surveys. In one, 500 recent drop outs were asked about the reasons they decided to drop out of school. The other survey collected data from over 23,000 3-5 minute visits around the country.

How can we close the achievement gap? You can read the answer to that question from my favorite writer on education reform issues, Richard Rothstein.

Does Slow and Steady Win the Race? A Conversation with Top Researcher Russ Whitehurst offers an exceptionally well-balanced perspective on school reform — one that’s well-worth reading.

Anthony Cody wrote an excellent post titled National Standards A Wild Goose Chase.

Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success is a study released by The Great Lakes Center For Education Research and Practice. It details “out-of-school” factors that affect learning success.

A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education is an excellent article by a former textbook editor. It tells, in horrifying detail, how publishers develop the textbooks our school districts buy.

Alice Mercer wrote an absolutely great post at our group blog, In Practice. It’s titled “Why Not Cure Poverty Instead?” and is outgrowth of a conversation about Ruby Payne.

The National Journal ran a piece  on paying students for increased test scores.  I was pleased to see a number of thoughtful responses criticizing the idea, and disappointed to see what people said in support.  I was particularly pleased with the response by Bob Peterson (from one of my favorite magazines, Rethinking Schools).

Extreme School Makeover: Creating the Conditions for Success is a blog post by Claus von Zastrow that is one of the best, and most reasonable, descriptions of what it might take to “turnaround” a troubled school.  He highlights the key elements of a successful strategy and makes it clear that there is no one single answer that will provide a solution — no matter what some “expert” school reformers might think.

David Cohen, a teacher from Palo Alto whom I know through the Teacher Leaders Network, co-wrote a great op ed piece in the  Sacramento Bee. It’s called “Test scores poor tool for teacher evaluation.”

Earlier in the year, there was quite a bit of commentary in the educational blogosphere about a not particularly helpful or insightful op-ed piece in the New York TImes by Nicholas Kristof.  In it, he touts the mythical figure that:

A Los Angeles study suggested that four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of the pool would erase the black-white testing gap.

There are three posts about Kristof’s column that I think are particularly thoughtful that I want to include here:

In Search Of The Top 25 Percent Teacher from Public School Insights

The Miracle Teacher, Revisited by Diane Ravitch at Bridging The Differences

We Need Schools That ‘Train’ Our Judgment by Deborah Meier, also at Bridging The Differences.

Larry Cuban wrote Fixing Urban Schools: Sprinters or Marathoners?. It’s about superintendents, and I shared it with our new one here.

State’s exit exams deserve a failing grade is an op ed piece by the late education researcher/author Gerald Bracey that appeared in the Sacramento Bee.

Education researcher David Berliner wrote an excellent guest post in The Answer Sheet, a Washington Post education blog. It’s called Why Rising Test Scores May Not Mean Increased Learning.

Blinded by Reform is an exceptionally well-balanced and reasonable critique of some of the questionable strategies Education Secretary Duncan and the Obama administration is pushing on schools. It’s written by Mike Rose, who is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and the author of “Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us.”

Do You Want To “Build Influence”? is not specifically about education policy, but does provide some ideas for those who want to change it.

And, lastly, I’m going to include the piece I wrote at Public School Insights titled Parent Involvement or Parent Engagement? It’s an excerpt from my recent book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools.”

Suggestions and feedback, as always, 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.

Millions of Muslims make the annual pilgrimage, called the Hajj,  to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.  Because the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar based on the motion of the moon, the time of the Hajj is different time each year in terms of the Gregorian calendar.

This year it begins on November 25th.  You can see future dates here.

I thought it would helpful to create a “The Best…” list about the Hajj.

As usual, I’m only listing sites that are accessible to English Language Learners.

You might also find The Best Websites To Learn About Various Religions & English helpful.

Here are my picks for The Best Sites To Learn And Teach About The Hajj ( not in order of preference):

The UK newspaper The Guardian has an excellent interactive about the Hajj.

Channel 4 in the UK also has a good site on the Hajj, including a “virtual Hajj.”

The Hajj and Eid al-Adha is a series of excellent photos and accessible captions from The Boston Globe’s Big Picture.

The Hajj Goes High-Tech is a slideshow from TIME Magazine.

CBBC Newsround has a simple explanation.

The Washington Post has a short article and slideshow.

Breaking News English has an online lesson on the Hajj for English Language Learners.

As always, feedback is 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.

Middlespot was the number two application in The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners — 2008, but since the number-one ranked site went out of business, I can safely say it’s my choice as the best search engine for ESL/EFL learners. It was also included in The Best Social Bookmarking Applications For English Language Learners & Other Students.

They just announced improvements in their site (you can see a video about them here), and I’ve got to say I’m quite impressed.

It’s so easy to save the pages, images, etc. that you’re looking for; you can easily write tags for each of them, and the best feature is that you can email or embed your work — all without registration. I’ve written in those “The Best…” lists, particularly the one on social bookmarking, on how useful an application like this can be in generating higher-order thinking among students. You might want to check out those ideas, and check out Middlespot.

As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

Today, I’d like to share about two new applications that I’m adding to my post on how to find The Most Popular Links Being “Retweeted” On Twitter.

The first is Topsy, which lets you identify the top 100, top 1000 and the top 5000 links to sites that are being retweeted. Thanks to TechCrunch for the tip.

The other is more expansive than just Twitter but, for lack of a better place to put it, in adding it to the “retweets” list. It’s called Splurb, and it ranks links based on their popularity among several social networks — including Twitter. Thanks to Mashable for the tip.

Alice Mercer, my co-facilitator of the Classroom Management discussion group at Edutopia, is sick at home and has begun a thread on subs and classroom management.

I thought it might be a good opportunity to share my Attitude and Behavior With A Substitute Teacher grading rubric.

I only use it with classes that I’m concerned about. In those classes, a few minutes before the ending bell rings, the sub passes out the rubric. Students grade themselves, and then the sub grades them. It works quite well — subs can grade by “faces” instead of having to try to remember names (you’ll notice on the rubric there’s a caution and way to spot if students don’t put their real name on it), and pushes students to reflect on how they’ve handled themselves.

Yes, yes, I know — I’m a big believer in developing intrinsic motivation, too. I just figure that I miss class so seldom, subs have such a challenging situation anyway, and remembering how I behaved with a sub when I was a student, that using something like this is best for everybody involved.

Join in the discussion at Edutopia and share how you handle sub and classroom management issues….

I just wanted to remind readers that comments are always welcome.

The vast majority of time I’ll respond quickly with a direct email. If it looks like it’ll create a public conversation helpful to other readers, I’ll also include a response in the comments section of the post, too.

Though I’ll often publish comments from people publicizing their productions, I typically don’t respond to them.

People can also contact me directly through several other ways, all laid-out in the Contact Me section at the top of this blog.

My Testbook looks like a great addition to The Best Sites That Students Can Use Independently And Let Teachers Check On Progress. It lets students study math, science and English. Thanks to Steven Roberge for the tip.

19 Weirdest Houses Around the World has been added to The Best Images Of Weird, Cool & Neat-Looking Buildings (& Ways To Design Your Own).

How To Use Twitter Lists has been added to The Best Resources For Beginning To Learn What Twitter Is All About.

Academic Vocabulary Games has been added to The Best Websites For Developing Academic English Skills & Vocabulary. Thanks to Diana Dell for the tip.

Learning About Learning has been added to The Best Resource Sites For ESL/EFL Teachers. It’s not specifically for ESL/EFL teachers, but it has an enormous amount of resources about teaching in general. Eventually, I’ll put together a “The Best…” list of broader resources for teachers. Thanks, again, to Diana Dell for the tip.