Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Now that I’ve finished two of “The Best…” lists, I’m ready for a third one.  This post will share my picks for the best twelve online learning games of the year.

All the games on this  list should be accessible, challenging, and fun for English Language Learners and native-English speakers alike (of all ages), except for two or three that are obviously for Beginning English Language Learners.  I’ve particularly tried to include sites where students can create great games, too.

Number twelve on my list is Line Rider 2.  This is “hot off the presses” and is the sequel to the popular Line Rider game.  I’m certainly not a science teacher, but I’m told by those who are that it can be used very effectively to teach physics and other topics.  Students can also have a lot of fun creating and saving their creations.  It’s worth reading my post about it for more details.

Number eleven is Class Tools.  Teachers and students can create lots of learning activities using formats from popular 1980’s arcade games.

Philologus is the tenth site on my list.  It’s very similar to Class Tools.  However, it uses more recent television games shows as templates for teacher and student created exercises.

The Senses Challenge is ranked number nine.  It’s a series of timed puzzles from the BBC, and they’re a lot harder than you think.

Bite Size Literacy and Math is the eighth site on the list.  It’s a new BBC portal filled with fun activities for Beginning English Language Learners and native-English speakers to develop literacy and math skills.

Number seven is the famous Free Rice game.  It’s great that they donate rice to the United Nations food program for every correct answer, but that’s not why it made my list.  It’s here because it’s a neat vocabulary-building exercise for anyone.  It stands-out becauses it only increases its difficulty level based on how well you’re doing in the game.

The Twenty Questions Game is number six. You think of something, and the computer asks you questions in an attempt to guess what you’re thinking of.  You  might want to read my post to learn about how I’ve used it in class.

Qtoro is number five.  It’s a fun game covering countless subjects.  Students can also create their own games and compete against each other.  Here again it’s probably worth reading two separate posts I wrote about it.

The fourth site on my list is Launchball from the British Science Musuem.  Students can create a sort of video game (and learn scientific concepts in the process), title it, and post the url.

Number three is another site primarily for Beginning English Language Learners.  It’s the new English Learning site from Yahoo Korea, and has a gazillion fun activities.  Even though all the titles of the activities are in Korean, once you click on them all the words and audio will be in English.

Number two on my list really consists of two music games by the same creator — Luke Whittaker.  One is called Sound Factory  and the other is A Break In The Road. I’m not going to even going to try to describe these wonderful games here.  You can read my post and try them yourself.

And, finally, the number one online learning game for 2007 is… Wordmaster, another site from the BBC. In it, you’re shown a sentence with a word missing (indicated by a blank).  Then you have to click on an on-screen keyboard to type the correct word “hangman” style.  You can ask for clues, and you’re competing against the clock.  You can also choose various levels of difficulty, and the game has thousands of words.  And after you’ve either guessed the correct word or the timer is up, you can have the sentence read to you.

Again, as in my other lists, I’m looking forward to feedback.

Links to all these games, along to thousands of others, can also be found on my website.  You can also find all the other Websites of the Year here.

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