Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Just another reminder that November 30th will be the deadline for the next ESL/EFL Carnival.

Use this submission form or send a post directly to me at MrFerlazzo@aol.com.

Any post that you think is particularly helpful or insightful to teaching/learning English is welcome, including examples of student work.

Here’s a link to the first ESL/EFL Carnival in case you missed it.

The Effective Detective is an online game from PBS.  The player picks one of a variety of characters, then selects three adjectives that describe their choice.  A dog “detective” then uses the adjectives to deduce the correct character.  Then the roles are reversed.

It’s a good game for higher beginning English Language Learners.  Unfortunately, there’s no audio.

I’ve placed it on my English Themes For Beginners page at the bottom of the Descriptions section.

Nominations for the 2007 Edublog Awards are now open.   There are twenty different categories, and a ton of blogs out there worth nominating….

The Reading Today Daily reports today about a new joint project the International Reading Association, TESOL, and a gaggle of other organizations are doing, including bringing together research results on what works with English Language Learners.

One project is called The Tapestry For Teachers of English Language Learners.

The Calgary Public Library has a series of online Tutorials teaching basic computer skills.  The tutorials are animated with audio and text support.

I’ve placed the link on my English Themes For Beginners page under Computers.

Due to “popular demand” I’ve finally gotten around to getting a much shorter url for my English website.

The homepage is now:

http://larryferlazzo.com/

The main English page is:

http://larryferlazzo.com/english.html

You’ll be automatically forwarded to the new address for at least the next three months if you first go to the old address.  However, after that time you’ll have to use the new one.

Global Citizenship in a Virtual World is just published another Educational Technology Carnival.  This one has a theme of “Access” and is worth reading.

The British Council has developed yet another good site for English Language Learners.  They call it Identipet, but I’ve listed it on my website as Describe Animals.

In it, the student hears a description of a pet, and then has to choose the correct one.

I’ve placed the link on my English Themes For Beginners page under two categories — Animals and Descriptions.

Elizabeth Hanson-Smith wrote about Tribbit in her blog this week.  You should read her post, but it’s basically a new web application tool.

It’s very easy to use and certainly accessible to English Language Learners.  Photos can included in student presentations by just writing in their url.

I’ve placed the link on my Examples of Student Work page under Student Presentations.

Here’s another winner that I learned about from Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day.  It’s called Spoken Text, and it could be a very helpful tool  for English Language Learners.

Spoken Text (which is free) allows you to upload any Word, PDF, or PowerPoint documents, and quickly convert it into spoken text.  Your recordings are listed in your account and you can also be given its own url for you to share.  In addition (and I really like this feature),  it will do the same for any webpages.

In many ways this service is similar to Scribd. There are some key differences, though.  There are advantages and disadvantages to each service. 

Scribd automatically allows you to see the text at the same time you’re hearing the audio.  Spoken Text just lets you hear the text, so if you want to read the text you have to actually open two “windows” on your computer.   Also, Scribd provides one unique url for each uploaded text, which makes it easy for posting student work on a website or blog.  Spoken Text will give you one url that gives a list of all of your recordings.  Scribd will maintain the text and recording indefinitely, while Spoken Text just does it for seven days (though you can request a longer time).

On the Spoken Text “side,” their upload process is a lot easier for English Language Learners.  And Spoken Text allows you to easily and quickly provide audio for any webpage, a service that Scribd does not provide.

The site is definitely worth exploring.  And, since it appears to be brand-new, I’m sure it will be evolving.  I’ve sent them an email asking if it would be possible for ESL teachers to maintain student recordings on the site for much longer than seven days.

I’ve placed the link on my Examples of Student Work page under Talking Stories.  You can find the Scribd link there, too.

Graphita lets you either upload a picture or use one in their collection, and then create text bubbles, add objects, etc. to it.  You can then email the url of your creation and post it on a website or blog.

It joins a bunch of other sites on my Examples of Student Work page under Student Cartoons.  I posted about them a few months ago.

Though not specifically related to English Language Learners, I thought people might find this Op-Ed piece that was in the New York Times last week interesting.

It’s called Bonus Babies and critiques bonuses that are being offered to New York teachers if their students perform well on standardized tests.

Yesterday I wrote a post about a bunch of recent research papers that have come out about teaching English Language Learners.

What might be the most important one, at least for those of us in California, was omitted from that post.

The California Legislature and Governor are supposedly making 2008 the Year of Education.  A group of foundations, at the state’s request,  financed studies that are designed to get the ball rolling.

One of them specifically relates to English Language Learners.

Resources For English Learner Education was released last week.  I haven’t had a chance to go through it that carefully, but, at first glance, the recommendations don’t look half bad.  I’ll have to study it more carefully, though.

The Northern California conference for CATESOL (California Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) is coming up next Saturday.  I’m looking forward to participating in a number of the sessions, and will be leading a short workshop on “Using Computers to Learn English and Build Relationships.”

It’ll be my first CATESOL conference, so it will be fun to meet people. 

My workshop will be in their new super-duper computer lab, which may be a little strange since I generally prefer to do these kinds of sessions in classrooms where people can sit together and I use my old-fashioned overhead projector.  I’ll still bring it, just in case (see my post in In Practice).

I’ve got two more strange marketing gimmicks used by companies to advertise their sites or products.  In both of them, English Language Learners and others can write a message and then, using a text-to-speech feature, have a bizarre creature speak it.  It can be emailed, and then the url posted to a blog or online journal.

You can send a Halloween eCard and have a scary-looking guy from the “Carnival of Carnage” speak what you write.

You can also send a speaking message from something called Dude Mail.

I’ve placed links to both sites on my Examples of Student Work page under eCards.

You can read more about how I use viral marketing devices with English Language Learners here.

Edublogs, the host of this blog is great and will get even better.  Over the past week, though, they seem to be having some technical problems.  Periodically this site has been “down” and it appears that the feeds to at least one RSS reader (Bloglines) don’t seem to be updating (which may not be Edublogs’ fault).

The Feedblitz email option, though, continues to work without any problems.  So, for now, you might want to consider subscribing to daily email updates.  You can do so by clicking on the Feedblitz button on the sidebar of this blog.

I’m sure Edublogs will resolve its technical “glitches” soon.

I’ve posted before about sites that compile lists of the countless new Web 2.0 applications that are created each day.  Many of these offer great learning opportunities for English Language Learners.  You can review the posts that I’ve tagged with Web 2.0 on this blog, or go to my Examples of Student Work page just to see a few of them.

Today, I’d like to share another listing that I periodically “mine” to find new applications I can use with my students.  It’s called GoToWeb20.

If you have never gone to the site, it’s worth checking-out.

In Town is a series of free sample activities from Linguascope, a British site focused on teaching languages.

The exercises in the sample teach the names of important places…in town.  There’s audio support, and the activities are quite good.

I’ve placed the link on my English Themes For Beginners page under Community and Neighborhood.

I learned about this link from the French site Resources for the College.

I recently learned about Podcast People.  It’s a new site that can be used for podcasting and doesn’t require any software downloads.

There are free accounts, and you can also get more services by paying a monthly charge.

I really haven’t tried podcasting with my English Language Learner students yet, though anything that can provide speaking practice is useful. 

I’d be interested in hearing from others who are more familar with podcasting.  What do you think of Podcast People?

I’ve placed the link on my Teacher’s Page under Podcasting.

The Learning the Language blog shares about several new publications that have just come out about teaching English Language Learners.

I won’t re-list them all here,  but there are names, authors, and links to them if you go to Learning The Language.