Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Bookr is a nifty application that allows you to search Flickr for pictures of a particular subject; write text to go along with them; and then put it all together to make a little online book.  You can then email the url and it can be posted on a website.  It can all be done by students quickly and easily.

You can see examples that some of my students made to create a book on “Family.”  I’ve had this site on my webpage for several months.  However, there are so many links there that it’s easy to miss.  I decided to highlight it here because I think it’s such a good activity.

The link to Bookr can be found on my Examples of Student Work page described as Student Photo Books.

There are two ways you can subscribe to this blog for free so you automatically receive new posts.  This way you don’t have to keep on coming back here to check for new content.

One way is by receiving each new post by email.   You can see a “Subscribe to this blog by email” notice towards the lower right of this post and screen.  Right below that is an orange-and-white icon saying “Feedz By Email.”  Click on that icon and fill-out the form that pops-up, which should take about thirty seconds to complete.  You’ll then immediately receive an email asking you to confirm the subscription.  Click on the link in that email and you are then subscribed.

The other way you can subscribe is by using an RSS feed.  This is easy to do.  This is a link that will take you to a short Tutorial On How To Use Bloglines  article from TechLearning and subscribe to as many blogs as you want via an RSS feed.  Here’s a link to another Bloglines Tutorial.  This one is a video.

Trig’s Listening Zone is another  excellent online exercise developed by Oxford Press.   Students first learn, though audio and animation, a series of words connected to a theme.  They are then tested on what they have learned.

There are three separate levels of Trig’s Listening Zone, and they each have separate links under the Favorite Sites section of my English Themes For Beginners and Early Intermediate page. Once you click on one of the Trig links, you’ve got to take two more steps to get to the Listening Zone (the instructions are also listed next the links on my site).   You next click on a chapter and then click on the “Listening Zone” for that chapter. 

I’ve created a new category called Encyclopedias on my English Themes for Beginners and Early Intermediate page.  Links to several online encyclopedias appropriate for English Language Learners can now be found there, though I’d like to highlight the one listed first — the Simple English Wikipedia.

I know there are strong opinions about the use of Wikipedia on both sides of the issue.  I’ve found it helpful and accurate.  My students have had the same experience with this simple English version, which is geared towards English Language Learners.

Sorry if this announcement sounds too much like I’m blowing my own horn, but I have just been named the grand prize winner of the 2007 International Reading Association Presidential Award for Reading and Technology. 

It’s recognition for the ESL Computer Lab and Family Literacy Project we started at my school, Luther Burbank High School.  You can read more about the program at the link above, and in an article I wrote for TechLearning a few months ago.

An updated and more extensive article about the project should be appearing in the May issue of Language Magazine.

One of my favorite links is called Phrase Builder from Oxford Press.  You first pick a level, then see and listen to a phrase.  Then the words are scrambled, and finally you have to place the words in the correct order as you listen to it again. 

The link is located near the top of Favorite Sites on the English Themes for Beginners and Early Intermediate.  It’s been on my site for quite awhile.  However, I recently added several similar links connected to other Oxford titles.  Those links are immediately under “Phrase Builder” and called “Phrase Bank.”

CNN developed a series called Millenium in 1999 which reviewed the last thousand years of world history.   A website went along with the series, and it seems to be a pretty good multi-media presentation, though it’s more appropriate for upper-intermediate to advanced English Language Learners.  Teachers could also find some good materials on the site.

I’ve place the link on the relatively new World History page on my site.  It’s the last link under the category Sites That Cover Many Periods of World History.  I’ve titled it “The Last Thousand Years.”

Animal Sounds is a fun quiz that Kerttuli School has developed.  There’s a list of English names of animals, and you have to match them up with the animal sounds that you hear on the site.  There are twenty-one questions.

I’ve placed the link to this quiz near the bottom of the Animals category on my English Themes For Beginner and Early Intermediate page.  It’s called “Animal Sound Quiz.”

Travelago is designed to sell vacations, but also has a lot of good videos that tell you about different countries in the world.  Granted, the videos are designed to “sell” those locations, and the audio is spoken pretty quickly, but the visuals alone are good to help English Language Learners gain a little understanding of geography.  Last week I had my students describe verbally and in writing what they saw.

There are several other travel video sites on the web, but the others seem to have inappropriate content as well.  They all seemed to only have user-generated content that was not moderated, so you didn’t really know what you’d find.  It doesn’t look like this would be a problem with Travelago.

If your school has a subscription to United Streaming, though, you can probably find even better geography videos.

I have a link to Travelago entitled “Travel Videos” near the bottom of the Sites That Cover Many Areas section of my Geography page.

I’ve just added a new link to the Favorite Sites section of my English Themes For Beginners and Early Intermediate page called English 180.  It’s a neat site with well-produced text, audio and animated lessons for both Beginner and Intermediate students.

The lessons are graduated — beginning with vocabulary and building to sentences using the learned vocabulary.

People who have received my Email Newsletter in the past know about Spelling Time, which is clearly the best site I’ve seen to help beginning English Language Learners develop their spelling skills.  You can find that link under the Favorite Sites section of my English Themes for Beginners and Early Intermediate.  You have to register at Spelling Time, but it’s quick and free, and after that all your students can use the same user name and password or you can set-up a class list.

Today I’d like to highlight a new (at least to me) spelling site from the Interlink Language Center.  The link on my site will take you to fifty different spelling exercises, many which have both audio and text.  It’s located in the Spelling section of the English for Beginners page on my site.  You can find it at the bottom of that category, and the link is called “Spelling Exercises.”

The BBC has many great online activities.   Today I’d like to focus on their Talking Stories activity.  Here, students can pick characters and themes for a story; choose the words that they want to go along with them; and then have the story read aloud.

I’ve recently put the link to this activity at the bottom of the Writing category on my English For Beginners page. It’s called “Create a Talking Story.”

National Public Radio recently revived This I Believe, a program that invites people to write and, if selected, read a one minute essay. The link on my website will lead you to the selected essays where students can read and hear the essays that have been selected for broadcast.

They are more appropriate for Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners.  You can find it near the bottom of the Reading section on my Intermediate page.

Having students write their own “This I Believe” essay after reading the ones on NPR makes for a great exercise, too.

Literacy Works has a new version of a site combining video from television news stories with their scripts, along with comprehension and vocabulary questions.  Learning Resources has some very recent and well-done stories and exercises.

It’s located at the bottom of the Non-Fiction section of my English For Beginners page.  You can access their older site (Literacy Net) in one of two ways — either through the new site’s Story Archive or through a link on my page immediately above Learner Resources.

Angles Online is a very graphic and audio rich site that has many activities, including ones for music, movies, and ads.  It’s designed like an online school, with various “floors.”  You can find it under a category called Favorite Sites, but these Favorite Sites are different from the category I’ve talked about in previous posts.  The category where you’ll find this particular link is on my English Themes For Intermediate and Advanced Students page.  The other, and more heavily-used section, is on my English Themes for Beginner and Early Intermediate page.

Sorry if that’s a bit confusing.  One of these days I’ll get around to “cleaning-up” some things on my site, but I don’t know when.

There are a few other excellent sites appropriate for Intermediate and Advanced students under that same category.  The Angles Online link is called “English Isn’t Boring” (that’s the theme of the site).  It’s been on my website for quite sometime, but appears to have recently undergone an upgrade.

Dy-Tech is a site that I used to link to when it was in a previous incarnation, but then it disappeared from the web.  It recently reappeared, and has many well-done language learning exercises.  My students and I especially like the Movies section.  In these activities, a short clip from a popular movie is shown and students have to type, in the appropriate places,  some of the words they hear.

Even though it has many different kinds of activities, I’ve placed it in the Videos category on my English for Beginners and Early Intermediate page.  You can find it near the bottom of that list, and it’s simply entitled “Movies.”

Though I believe Pumarosa is the best bilingual Spanish/English site to use for Spanish-speakers to learn English, there are quite a few others.  I’ve recently put several new links in the Spanish section of my Bilingual Exercises page (by the way, Pumarosa is the first link listed there).

These new links include Vocabulix and a site called Learn English (created by the same person who has another great site called Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun, which can be found in the Vocabulary section of my English for Beginners page).

Learning English through a direct translation system can be problematic and, over the long term, potentially detrimental to the language learner if that is the main method of teaching and learning.  In fact, even without my saying anything, my students quickly figure that out for themselves.  However, now and then they like to visit these bilingual sites and it’s fine with me when they do.

News Flash Five is produced by PBS, and is an online news program targeting young people.  It has animated characters, with audio, reporting on current events.  It’s a great site, and it’s made even better by having a “Read Transcript” button which allows you to read what the characters are saying.

I’ve place the link to this news program near the bottom of the News section of my English Themes for Beginners and Early Intermediate page.  You’ll also find quite a few other links there to news sites appropriate for English Language Learners.

There are a zillion search engines out there, but a few stand-out for their unique qualities. I mentioned one in a previous post — Ask Vox, which allows you to ask a question and then actually hear an avatar speak the answer as well as seeing its text.

I recently discovered another search engine with special qualities — Sidekiq.  When you do a search, it doesn’t just show a list of sites.  It immediately shows good-sized pictures of the actual webpages where your search item appears.

The link to Sidekiq is under Search Engines on my English Themes for Beginners and Early Intermediate page.  There are several other interesting search engines listed in the same category, all having some unique qualities that I think would be helpful to students in general and English Language Learners in particular.

There is a new, at least to me, site called Scribd that I have just discovered, and I’m very excited about it.   This site allows you to type a document on your computer, easily upload it to Scribd in seconds, and then the site immediately posts your document on the Internet with audio speaking the text.

Here’s an example of a Hmong folktale I adapted a couple of days ago:

A Father and His Sons

Just click on the “play” button to the right of the story to hear the text.

This, I believe, is an extraordinary site for English Language Learners.  They can easily post what they write and listen to how it sounds.  They can use pictures and text or just plain text.   Other students and family members can access them (if they have computers and Internet, of course, like the students in our Family Literacy Project).

I’ve posted this link on my Examples of Student Work page.  It’s near the bottom of the page and is called Student Talking Stories.  You’ll also be able to see a number of examples of student “talking stories” there.