Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

I just discovered an unbelievable resource from the National Archives called “The Digital Vaults.” I know the year is young, but, so far at least, this is the Find Of The Year!

It’s an entry into the vast resources of the National Archives, and allows you to use those resources to create your own movies, posters, and what it calls “Pathway Challenges” to… challenge others to find connections between a series of images, documents, and other resources you put together.

It’s such a huge resource I haven’t quite yet figured out where I’ll put it on my website — probably in multiple pages and sections. You just have to check it out!

Healthy Roads Media has great health information available online — in multiple languages.

I’ve had a link to their online videos on my English for Beginners page under Health for quite awhile. They’re well-designed, and closed-captioned. Their English versions are great for English Language Learners.

They’ve recently added quite a few new resources, so it’s worth visiting if you haven’t done so already.

It’s time for another one of my “The Best….” lists.

I think the best way for people to learn English is to find a topic that they are interested in learning about, and then create a situation where they need to use English to learn it. And certainly figuring out a future career is a pretty darn high-interest subject for most students.

And even though one of the key criteria I used to place a site on this list was if it was accessible to English Language Learners, the vast majority of these sites have also garnered high marks from my mainstream native-English speaker students as well. In fact, I think you’ll agree that all of the sites except for number ten are definitely engaging for young and adult students of all ages.

Here are my choices for “The Best Websites For Students Exploring Jobs and Careers”:

Number ten actually consists of two links connected to the same organization — the English School Club in Greece. The first is a Words Revision for basic words identifying individual occupations, and second is a series of games reinforcing different Occupations.

Kids Work is number nine on my list, and is from South Carolina Public Television. It has a number of engaging and accessible activities about careers in health, television, and the theater.

GCF Learn Free is the eighth-ranked site, specifically for their Job Application exercise. There are numerous high-quality and accessible activities on the site designed to teach life-skills. You have to register to use them, but it’s free and easy to use.

Amiko and Emurse are tied for seventh place. They are both free and access online tools to create resumes. They walk you through the process of making one. They basically have a series of text-boxes to fill-in, and have instructions written in simple English. You then end-up with a professional-looking resume.

California Career Zone (which, despite its name, is useful for students everywhere) is number six on the list and has three separate sections — Assess Yourself, Explore Industry Sectors, and Reality Check. They are all well-designed and accessible.

Fifth place is held by BioWorksU, a very accessible series of activities focusing on health occupations.

You’ll find two links from Cisco in fourth place. One is Career Capture and the other is Penny’s Search. Both target girls interested in technology careers.

Hot Shot Business from Disney is number three. It’s a great interactive site where students have to start virtual businesses.

Number two is Career Voyages. The primary reason I’m rating this site so high is because of its numerous closed-captioned videos about every occupation imaginable.

And now, for the number one-ranked website for helping students explore jobs and careers…..The Learning Edge. You’ll find eight issues of animated newsletters with text and audio support, and most of it is about jobs and careers.

I’d also like to share two good sites that were submitted by readers but didn’t make my list. One is Workforce Development, suggested by Sonja. The other is Visualcv, which comes recommended by Nik Peachey, whose blog should definitely be on your RSS Reader.

All these links can also be found on my website, along with 8,000 others.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

All the great new Edublogs upgrades, combined with a big influx of new users, resulted in a little “hiccup” over at Edublogs earlier today.  But everything’s working fine now. 

Yaplet could be a helpful tool for online “chat.” There are several web applications that allow you to easily create online chat rooms that work great for real-time collaboration. You can find links to them on my Teacher’s Page at Collaboration Sites- Real Time.

What’s unique about Yaplet, though, is that it allows you to convert any website on the Net into a chatroom. All you do is type in the web address and then on your screen you see the website and on its right a chatroom.

A tool like this might be ideal, for example, to use in the Sister Classes project I’m working on with teachers from around the world. Let’s say students in my class have created a slideshow presentation (using an application that doesn’t have the ability to “chat” built into it) sharing examples of how people make social change in the United States. They and students from our other sister classes can synchronize it so they’re watching the slideshow at the same time and asking and answering questions back and forth.

Susan Gaer has a nice collection of ESL games.  I particularly like one called Consonant Match.  There is audio of a child saying a consonant letter, and then the player has to correctly choose the letter that is being said.

I’ve placed that game on my English For Beginners page under Alphabet.

There sure are a lot of creative people out there! When I think of learning games related to geography, I figure there are only a limited number of things you can do with a map. However, I’m continually amazed at what people come up with….In fact, I think my next “The Best…” list, after the one on sites for exploring jobs and careers that I’m publishing next week, will be on Geography.

The most recent addition to creative geography games is called Place Spotting. You’re shown a satellite image of a location, and then have to read a variety of clues to try to determine the location. All the different “riddles” are user-generated.

I think most of the ones on the site now might be too hard for English Language Learners. However, students can create their own, including their own clues, post the link to their creations, and everyone in the class can try to solve the problems their peers have created. It could be a great activity! And it doesn’t appear that you even have to register on the site to be able to make your own riddle.

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

The deadline to submit blog posts for the fourth ELL/ESL/EFL Carnival is March 31st. You can use this submission form to contribute posts from your blog (including student work) that you think offer helpful advice or insight about teaching English as a second language.

Some people have already sent-in great contributions.  Keep them coming!

Here are some more collections of recent excellent posts from multiple blogs:

The latest Week/Day In A Sentence, which this time was Week/Day In A Simile. You can submit your contribution for this coming week here.

The Tangled Bank Science Blog Carnival.

Support Blogging has a huge and growing list of education bloggers.  I browse through it periodically to check-out new blogs.

It’s a wiki, so you can add your own to it.

I have the link on my Teacher’s Page.

As if there weren’t already enough reasons to use Edublogs to host one’s blog, James Farmer has just added the ability for blogs to easily create their own forums. This is really going to come in handy with the ESL/EFL Sister Classes project, where we already have secondary Intermediate English classes participating from Brazil, Argentina, Hungary, Kuwait, Romania, Portugal, and the United States.

(Editor’s Note: It’s still a great addition, but I just learned from James that, at least for now, the forums don’t include a “moderation” feature.  All forum users have to be registered with Edublogs, but their comments will be published without review.  So it probably isn’t workable for classroom use until that moderation feature is added.)

I thought I’d let people know that the next “The Best…” list I’ll be publishing will be called “The Best Websites For Students To Explore Jobs & Careers.”  I have twelve sites in mind, and am open to hearing recommendations from readers.   In order to make the list, a site has to be especially…

…. accessible to English Language Learners.

…. engaging to middle, secondary, and adult school students.

Please send me suggestions this week, since I plan on publishing the list during the first week of March.

I’ve added a new category on my Teacher’s Page called Grants. Money for special projects that can’t or won’t be funded by your school is always a good thing to have, and there are quite a few funding opportunities out there. And there are always new ones!

Grant Wrangler, for example, is a good source of grant info for education.

Every month I pick the Top Ten posts for the month. You can see previous picks at Websites of the Month. I also use this selection for a more extensive monthly newsletter I send-out. You can see previous issues of the newsletter here.

This month includes several of the newest “Best of…” lists I’ve compiled. I won’t bother listing them here, but you can check them all out on my Websites of the Year.

The others include:

What Are You Doing In That Computer Lab?

Pixton Comic Strips

Plagiarism

Teacher Book Wizard

Breathing Earth

Create An Online Scavenger Hunt With Zunal

Tim Lauer pointed me in the direction of this column by one of my favorite writers, Paul Krugman, called Poverty Is Poison.  In it he highlights, among many things, a new study that shows poverty’s negative effect on the brain development of children.   It particularly impairs language development and memory.

I’ve posted (E-Cards) before about the links to thousands of E-Cards that are on my Examples of Student Work page.

I’ve recently added even more sites to that list. They include E-Card sites with dinosaurs, where you can draw your own, send a smoke signal from any location on earth, and a new one with a ton of different kids of messages.

These are great for English Language Learners, who can write an E-Card and then post the link to it on an online journal or blog. As I’ve mentioned previously, I only list links to E-Cards that appear to maintain the cards online for at least a year or longer.

I learned about My Global Life from an excellent blog called Educational Origami. My Global Life has a ton of resources about educational games. It’s going to take me awhile to get through the site — it’s pretty big.

Just in a minute of browsing through it I was able to find a nice set of games called The Problem Site that would be accessible to English Language Learners.

When I have some time I’ll go through it more extensively and put links in appropriates sections of my website.

Instructables is a site filled with “how-to” slideshows and videos. There are tons of new sites that have these kinds of instructional videos, but Instructables is the first one I’ve found that actually focuses more on step-by-step instructions using still images with captions. All of the “instructables” (which is what they call them) are user-generated.

I definitely would not use the Instructables site to have my English Language Learner students create “how-to” slideshows. The creation process does not appear to me to be particularly user-friendly and is overly-complicated. I’ve reviewed many other slide-show web applications that are easier to use, like One True Media. You can find many more on my Examples of Student Work page under Student Slideshows.

However, Instructables is a great place for students to see examples of what a good instructional slideshow would look like.  They can look through a variety of them, and then just go to another site to create their own slideshow.

There have been some new Web 2.0 applications that have recently been unveiled, and I thought I’d share a few of them in one post. They all seem decent, but ultimately I think there are better programs for English Language Learners doing similar things.

I learned about GabSight from Teaching Learners With Multiple Special Needs. It’s a very easy way to send a video email. For me, though, since we don’t have webcams (and are unlikely to get them) I was impressed that you could also use it to send an audio email if you didn’t have a camera. Daft Doggy Voice Recording is a little easier to use since it has an email feature built into it (with GabSight you have to copy and paste), but I have to say the GabSight audio seems a little clearer.

Webware reports that Photobucket has revamped their ability to let you create slideshows. It is a lot better than it was, and allows you to grab images off the Web. However, the creation process appears more complicated than a number of other online slideshow tools, including One True Media.

Finally, Confabio is a new easy way for video conferencing. It seems okay, but doesn’t allow only voice conferencing. MeBeam and TokBox are two other easy online video conferencing applications, but they also allow you to just use voice if you don’t have a webcam.

Links to these applications can be found on my Examples of Student Work and my Teacher’s pages.

The Sacramento Bee recently began an online web application called CrimeMapper.  You write in the address of a home, residence, school, etc.; click, and you are then shown a map of the area with markers explaining what crime was committed where and when over the past year.

A program like this has tons of possibilities for English Language Learners and others.  Students could analyze their neighborhood  crime’s statistics and compare it with others, then discuss the reasons for differences.

They could look at the stats and organize a meeting with police to discuss any concerns they and their families might have.

And these are just two of many ideas.

I’m assuming that other newspapers around the United States and world will have similar applications if they don’t already.

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