Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

I’ve posted before about a couple of free web applications that allow teachers to create online classrooms where students can work on specific lessons.  In that previous post, I wondered if they would really be useful.

I also just learned about a new similar tool called Ecto Learning.

I still think I feel the same.  However, as I begin to plan my experiment next year of teaching one class like I usually do, and the other with student laptops, I’m beginning to wonder if these types of applications could come in handy…

I’ve placed the links to these sites on my Teacher’s Page under Online Classrooms.

Holiday Rock Star is one more bizarre (but useful to English Language Learners) example of viral marketing.  You can choose an image, or upload your own; decide on a holiday song; sing it karaoke style; and then email it to a teacher or friend.  The url can be posted on a teacher’s website or online journal/blog.

For newer readers of this blog, you might want to see an article I wrote for TechLearning last year describing how I use viral marketing as a language-development tool in the classroom.

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

I’ve been posting quite a bit lately about slideshows and other online resources available at the websites of traditional news organizations.  Many of these resources are accessible to English Language Learners. 

I have just three more to share (for now, at least!).

One is USA Today’s Destinations Photo Gallery.  It has a bunch of slideshows that are great for a Geography class.

The other is the International Herald Tribune.   They, too, have a lot of slideshows, but they don’t have a main page devoted to them.  All you have to do, though, is type “slideshows” in the Search box and you’ll get a listing of them.

By the way, the Tribune also has a great service of providing audio support to all of its articles.

National Public Radio also has quite a few excellent slideshows.  However, they, like the Herald Tribune, don’t have a special page for them.  There, too, you have to search for “Slideshows.”

All these online news resource can be found on my Teacher’s Page.

The British Council has done it again and come up with several good activities to help English Language Learners learn about sports.

Sports Maze is a fun listening game; the Busy Buzz Song will have students singing along about different sports; and Buzz and Bob’s Big Adventure is a talking story about time at a summer camp.

I’ve placed these links on my English Themes For Beginners page under Sports and Other Fun Activities.

America’s Favorite Architecture  features the 150 “best” buildings in the United States.  It’s sponsored by the American Institute of Architects.

It shows a photo and basic information on each of the top 150, as chosen through a survey.  You can click on each image to get more info.  This additional data is probably only accessible to Advanced English Language Learners, but the image and the description you see initially is certainly accessible by anyone.

You can also vote on which you think are the best five, and then compare your opinions with others who have viewed the site.

I’ve placed the link on my Geography page under The United States and Canada.

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution has several online games designed to teach about water safety.  Two of them — Build a Lifeboat and the Boating Game – are particularly good activities to help English Language Learners build their vocabulary.

In “Build a Lifeboat,” players choose various building materials they want to use to build different parts of a boat.  Then the boat is placed in the water, and an analysis is shown about how seaworthy it would be.  Students can learn the names of building materials and parts of a boat playing this game.

In the “Boating Game,” players have to go through “their” house finding things they would bring with them on a boat excursion.  Here, students can learn the names for rooms of a house and a large number of other items.

I’ve placed both activities on my English For Beginners page at the bottom of the Vocabulary section.

I’ve recently added two very neat sites to the Students Songs section of my Examples of Student Work page.  They were both created by a creative designer named Luke Whittaker.

His latest creation is an amazing online video game called Sound Factory.  It’s very hard for me to explain.  Basically,  you role-play a man in a factory who get to create music.  That description, however, does not in any way do the game justice.  There are a lot of instructions given in simple English, and students can email their final musical creation after they’ve finished the game.  I also have listed the “Walkthrough” (answers) to the game on my website so students can doubly use it as a language development exercise.

In Sound Factory, and the next game I’ll describe, in addition to posting their musical creation students can write a description of it.

In A Break In The Road students can again create their own musical composition.  It’s not quite a game, but I won’t even attempt to describe it.  Check it out for yourself.

The November 30th deadline to submit blog entries for the next ESL/EFL Carnival is approaching fast.

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.

Colgate has just begun offering the opportunity to create a Smile Slideshow that is a great activity for Beginning English Language Learners.

In it, users easily choose a variety of photographs.  Then, you drag-and-drop words to make a sentence or to describe the photos.   Next, you pick a word to describe the “mood” of the show, followed by choosing musical accompaniment.  Finally, you can email the link to the show for posting to an online journal or blog.

It’s a neat way to build some vocabulary.

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

I learned about Walk Score from Tim Lauer.  You type in an address and it then gives a “walkability” score to it.  In other words, how close is it to schools, stores, etc. so you don’t have to use an automobile.

It also lists the different services, stores, etc. in the immediate vicinity.

This will be a great tool for my students to use in their annual project of comparing their neighborhoods with others. 

I’ve placed the link along with the other online tools my students use to evaluate neighborhoods.  It’s on my Examples of Student Work page under Student Neighborhood Maps.

People sometimes ask me where I find all the useful sites I write about and link to my website.   I’ve shared a lot of my “sources” in various articles I’ve written, which you can find on the right of the screen if you’re reading this post at my blog, or you can go to the Published Articles page on my website. 

Today, though, I thought I’d share my three favorite places to find online video games that my students play as language development exercises.  You can get a preview of an upcoming article in TechLearning about how I use these games in the classroom.

The three are Jay Is Games ,  Escape The Room, and Channel 4 Adventure Games.  Jay Is Games offers new links,  game reviews and thoughtful commentary.  Escape The Room doesn’t provide much information, but does deliver on quantity — it highlights several new games each day. My favorite site, though, is Channel 4 Adventure Games.  I find a high percentage of the games I use for language development activites there.

For new readers of this blog, I’d like to point out that you can find links to scores of the free games I use on my Intermediate English page under Word and Video Games.  You can also find ones I’ve reviewed here by typing “video games” in this blog’s search engine.  And you can even see photos of my students playing this games on a slideshow on my English For Beginners page.

I’ve posted twice recently about excellent online resources that “traditional” media offers that are accessible to English Language Learners.  These include multimedia presentations like narrated slideshows and interactive graphics.

I’ve periodically put links to specific presentations on my website, but again thought I’d list some more primary sites that I draw from.

Here are some new ones on top of those I’ve already posted about.  The links will take you directly to their multimedia pages.

The new ones include the Associated Press, CBS News, the Reuters Audio Slideshow Gallery, the BBC In Pictures, The Times of London, The Washington Times, San Jose Mercury News, New Orleans Times-Picayne, and The Guardian.

I’ve created a section on my Teacher’s Page listing all of these multimedia news sources.  It’s called Multimedia Resources From News Outlets.

I wanted to make a few more comments following-up on my post from yesterday.  In that post, I highlighted how excited I was that this blog and In Practice were both nominated for this year’s Edublogs Awards,  and how you could vote for this blog here and In Practice here.

One thing I forgot to mention was that, even though In Practice is indeed a group blog written by a collective of teachers, it was initiated by my Sacramento teacher colleague Alice Mercer.  Alice continues to provide essential leadership to all of us.

I also forgot to highlight two other great groups that hundreds and thousands of teachers participate in (including me) – EFL Classroom 2.0 and Classroom 2.o — were both nominated in the “Best Educational Use of a Social Networking Service” category.

Dave Deubel has done an extraordinary job beginning and continuing to provide leadership to EFL Classroom 2.0.  He contributes enormously to the resources available to ESL/EFL teachers and students.

Steve Hargadon has played, and continues to play, a similar role in Classroom 2.0.  It’s a great place for teachers to connect, experiment, and learn with each other.

Congratulations to both!

The New York Daily News has a good editorial on the absurd backlog of U.S. Citizenship applications.  I’m looking forward to getting student reactions to it.

I’ve recently placed two new links related to dinosaurs on the Science page I have for English Language Learners.

One is from the Discovery Channel, and their DinoViewer allows you to see 3D models of different dinosaurs actually moving.

The other link is from Enchanted Learning — Zoom Dinosaurs.  Its materials are very accessible to English Language Learners.

In addition, students can send an E-Card about dinosaurs from the Field Museum.  Teachers can post the email’s url on a webpage.  I’ve placed that link on my Examples of Student Work page under Student E-Cards.  It’s the last one.

I’ve added three games to the Economics section of my English Themes For Beginners page.  I don’t think they’re half-bad as business simulations, and they’re accessible to English Language Learners. 

One is a classic that’s been around for a long-time called Lemonade Stand.  Another just came out, and it’s called Coffee Shop.  I learned about Coffee Shop from Jay Is Games.  I also just learned about a different lemonade game called Moneyville Lemonade Stand that looks pretty good. Primary Resources Links posted about that one.

In the three games you operate either a….lemonade stand and a coffee shop.

The title of this post is the topic of a post I’ve just written for In Practice, the blog written by a group of us who teach in lower-income schools.

It elaborates on an issue I brought up yesterday in my post here on Boom Shuffle.

As always, any feedback is welcome.

The 2007 Edublogs Awards Finalists have been announced.  This blog has been nominated for the Best Resource Sharing Blog, and you can vote for this blog here.  You can also vote by clicking on the awards “badge” at the top of the sidebar.

It’s an honor to be nominated, and to be named a Finalist.  The Edublogs Awards are a respected award in the education community.

All the blogs nominated in the Best Resource Sharing category and, in fact, in all the other categories, too, are award-worthy.  I know that if I haven’t been reading some of them regularly I’ll start doing so now.

I’d also like to point out that In Practice, the blog written collectively by a group of teachers (including me) working in schools located in lower-income communities, was also named an Edublogs Award finalist in Best Group Blog category.  You can vote for that blog here.

Voting is open until December 6th.

Do take the time to visit all the nominated blogs.

Boom Shuffle allows users to create their own “mix tapes” of music (in English) they like,  choose a visual “cover,” describe the whole tape, explain why they chose each song they included, and then share its url to be posted on an online journal or blog.

The site explains this can all be done free because of regulations around Internet radio.

There are actually more and more of these sites that allow users to create their own mixes and share them.  However, all the others I’ve seen are questionable for use in schools because of inappropriate content – either because of some of the available “visual covers” that users can choose or because of the available songs. 

I am definitely in the camp of having fewer restrictions on Internet content and more of an emphasis on helping students develop their own capacity for good judgment.  I’m still, though, trying to figure out how to balance that with the language comprehension challenges facing my students, along with wanting to maintain the confidence school district staff have in my judgment.

I’ve been hopeful of finding a music mix site that would work since I know my English Language Learner students would find it a helpful language-development activity and enjoy it a lot.

I haven’t had a chance to look carefully over Boom Shuffle, but at least the “visual covers” look okay.   I quickly browsed through some of the mixes that had already been made by users.  By clicking an icon next to each song you can be taken to where the music is being sold on Amazon, and I didn’t find any that were labeled “explicit” there.

However, I’m going to hold off putting a link to Boom Shuffle on my website until I, or one of this blog’s readers, have a chance to look it over a little more.

I learned about the Water Alert game from EFL Classroom 2.0.  It’s sponsored by UNICEF, and in it the player has to respond to various water crises that residents of the Third World have to face.

Text and audio support is provided, and the language used is fairly simple.  It certainly would be accessible to Intermediate  English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my World History page under Toward The Twenty-First Century.

As I’ve mentioned before, section titles on that page are the same as the ones in the book we use.  And, yes, it’s obviously a little old if the last chapter is called “Toward The Twenty-First Century.”  But it’s a good book accessible to English Language Learners.