Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

I had to make a lot of difficult choices to come up with this latest “The Best…” list.

One decision I made was to focus this list more on Beginning and Early Intermediate English Language Learners, or for more advanced ELL’s who primarily would use these sites more to “brush-up” or review some basic pronunciation skills. I am developing another list that I’ll call The Best Sites For Developing English Conversational Skills. That one will probably be geared more towards Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners, and will include more of the sites I received from readers in my call for recommendations.

Several readers recommended sites using the phonetic alphabet. I’ve included them in the second part of this post, but didn’t include any in my Top Ten list. I know some very gifted teachers have been able to help students learn through using this alphabet. I, however, have generally thought it was too confusing for my students, so I don’t feel comfortable including them as one of “The Best…” sites.

In addition, I had a very difficult time ranking this particular list. All ten seemed pretty good to me and, unlike on my other lists, I just couldn’t pick one over the other. So these ten are not listed in order of preference, though I’d be interested in hearing from readers which ones they particularly like.

As with all my “The Best…” lists, links to these sites can also be found on my website.

This list is also linked to the The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English. Those sites could certainly be used in conjunction with using the ones on this list.

Here are my picks — not in any order of preference — for The Best Websites For Learning English Pronunciation:

Susana Canelo and Crystal both recommended Ship or Sheep, and I agree with them. The site offers excellent practice using minimal pairs.

English Online has a good pronunciation course that’s worth having your students try.

I recently blogged about Spoken Skills. If I have a favorite out of any of the sites on this list, it’s this one. Spoken Skills provides good, clear, listening practice, and also provides users the ability to easily record what they hear and play it back for comparison.

Minimal Pair Practice and Quizzes from Charles I. Kelly is one of the many extraordinary activities he has created over the years. This is also one of the sites I might slightly favor in this list.

Simple English News has short and current news stories spoken very clearly and very slowly. It’s great for pronunciation practice, and it has engaging content.

Voice of America Special English News, also recommended by Crystal, is probably for students who are closer to being Intermediate English Language Learners than Beginners, but it is an excellent resource because of its interesting content.

I like WordBuilder because it has a zillion exercises and helps students learns both spelling and pronunciation simply in context.

Kids R Cool teachings pronunciation of words through the form of a game my students like.

Spoken English has a lot of examples. The lay-out can be a little confusing, though, and sometimes the words are spoken too quickly.

Lastly, I think WordBuilder from I Know That is the best site out there for phonics practice. And, yes, it has the same name as another “WordBuilder” site on this list. Like with all I Know That activities, when you click on it, an annoying pop-up asking you to register shows-up. Just click on “Maybe Later” and you’ll automatically proceed to the exercise.

That’s my list. As I mentioned earlier, though, some readers had other recommendations. I’m going to list some of them here, though not all. A few will be included in The Best Sites For Developing English Conversational Skills that I’m working on.

Susana Canelo has an extensive list of good sites for English speaking practice.

Laura suggests Pronunciation Tips From The BBC and Cambridge English Online to gain familiarity with the phonetic alphabet.

Ronaldo Lima recommends a Guide To English Phonetic Symbols and New English File Pronunciation Practice.

In addition, both Ronaldo and David Smailes thought Howjsay was a good one. David also suggested Free Resources For Learning English.

And EFL Geek likes the Sounds of American English.

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It’s time for the fourth edition of the ELL/ESL/EFL Carnival, bringing together posts from throughout the blogosphere about English language learning and teaching. The deadline for the next Carnival will be in about two months — on May 31st. You can contribute submissions using this easy form.

TECHNOLOGY

Ronaldo Lima from Brazil gives an excellent comparison of online presentation tools and then shares how his students used them in an international ESL/EFL Sister Classes project where he and seven other teachers from around the world (including me) are collaborating.

David Deubelbeiss, the brains and primary energy behind EFL Classroom 2.0, writes about “bots” (those animated thingamajigs that try talking to you on the computer) and language learning.

Alice Mercer, who I can’t say enough good things about, writes about she uses computers to help develop her students’ verbal skills.

Carla Arena has a not-to-be-missed post on blogging in the classroom. It’s one of the best, if not the best, piece I’ve seen written on the subject. She follows that one up with a post about incorporating technology in the classroom.

Mathew Needleman, who hosts his own excellent Digital Storytelling Carnival, writes about using iPods as a teaching and learning tool. Mathew, by the way, was just named a Top Online Educator.

Cora Chen from San Francisco has some beautiful videos and follow-up exercises for ESL students on her blog. She’s also contributed some excellent examples of student work.

Eric Koshinsky shares about a free online PowerPoint-like program he likes. He’s also submitted an excellent post reviewing a variety of pronunciation software.

IN THE CLASSROOM

EFL Geek from Korea, who might be the “dean” of ESL/EFL bloggers, shares some ideas on how to use a TV comedy show as a language-development exercise.

Heidi Hyte discusses reading strategies in ESL/EFL instruction. She differentiates between ones that are bottom-up and those that are top-down.

Sabrina De Vita from Argentina contributes a lesson plan on racial discrimination.

I hope you enjoyed the posts as much as I did!

Spoken Skills is an online English teaching program that has a lot of parts, many which you have to register (and I think pay) for. I have to admit I haven’t taken much time to look around the site.

I did, however, find a nice page that has a number of listening activities that students can follow-up with by using a mike and speak what they’ve heard. They can then play it back and compare it to the original. It’s simple and effective.

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

I really like this site a lot, and will be placing it on my upcoming “The Best Sites For Learning English Pronunciation.”  I’ve picked the top ten sites for that list, and just have to get around to ranking them and writing the post.

Here are several more sites to add to my lengthy list of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. These all meet the usual criteria, which you can read about in previous parts of this series.

Here they are:

DESIGN A (I DON’T REALLY KNOW HOW TO DESCRIBE IT): LiteBrite is its name, and students can create a multi-colored design, describe it, and then get its url address for posting on an online journal or blog.

CREATE AN HONEST JOHNNY: In another example of viral marketing, users can create and accessorize a virtual person called Honest Johnny, make him/her speak using the text-to-speech feature, and then email their creation for posting.

SEND A VIRTUAL BIRTHDAY CAKE: I just posted yesterday about virtually baking and sending a birthday cake along with burning candles.

CREATE YOUR OWN BABY QEE: Design and send your own virtual doll called a Baby Qee. Thanks to Linda DeVore for suggesting this site.

MAKE AN ONLINE POLL: Micropoll is a new web application that allows for quick and simple poll creation.

DRESS-UP A BEACON STREET GIRL: Beacon Street Girls appear to be some sort of popular series for tween girls (mine are older so I don’t keep track of these things). In this game you can dress one of them up, describe their outfit, and email your creation and description for posting on a blog or online journal. There are several other similar games linked to the same page, but I didn’t have much luck getting those email functions to work.

When I get around to it, I’ll be placing all these links on my website with other Examples of Student Work.

You might want to look at all of the other “The Best….” lists, too.

If you found this post useful, and would like to receive updates, you can subscribe for free here.

English Quest is an online ESL teaching system out of Taiwan.   You have to pay to subscribe to the program, but they do have two good sample lessons that I’ve posted on my website.

One is a phonics lesson on the “ck” sound. I’ve placed that link on my English For Beginners page under Phonics.

The other is a geography lesson that I’ve placed on my Geography page under Introduction to Geography.

Both lessons are accessible to beginning English Language Learners.

The fine blog The Tech Savvy Educator recently posted about an excellent online game on environmental issues called Planet Green Game. He describes it quite well in his post, so I won’t go into many details here. It’s basically a role-playing game where players have to minimize their carbon emissions. And it’s combined with learning environmental facts.

I didn’t spend a whole lot of time playing it, but I was especially impressed that there’s audio support for a fair amount of the text. Of course, that makes it particularly accessible to English Language Learners, though I’d say it’s complicated enough so that just Intermediates or Advanced students should play it.

I’ve placed the links in a few areas of my website, including under Toward The Twenty-First Century.

As regular readers know, I highlight my picks for the “Top Ten” (more or less) sites I’ve posted about each month. You might want to check-out previous Websites of the Month.

Here are my choices for March:

I’ve written several new “The Best….” lists. I won’t list all the new ones here, but you can find all of them at Websites Of The Year. By the way, I just discovered that the link to my recent The Best Websites For Learning and Teaching Geography was incorrect on that page listing all of the lists. It’s fixed now.

Here are my other favorite posts for this month:

ESL/EFL Sister Classes Project

Hospital Connection

Visual Geography

Article About Our School Getting Out of School Improvement

New “Best Search Engine” For English Language Learners

Home Computer Project Update

The “Digital Vaults” Are An Incredible Find!

The Goals Of Education

The Key is a  monthly online newspaper that covers current events, and is written specifically for English Language Learners.

It’s probably most appropriate for Intermediate-level students.

I’ve placed the link on my Intermediate English page under Reading.

I’m still trying to catch-up after being gone for a week. Because of that, instead of posting the next edition of the ELL/ESL/EFL Carnival on April 1st, it might be delayed for as long as a week.

There are many excellent contributions so far, and this will definitely be the biggest edition to date.

Even though my posting might be delayed for a few days, I’m still sticking to the March 31st deadline for submissions. There’s still a little time left to send yours in. You can use this simple form.

Webware had a post today about a web application called Simple Bucket. It’s a neat tool that lets you upload a photo from your computer, email the link for posting on an online journal or blog, and then lets others leave comments wherever they want to on the picture. Viewers can then turn the comments on or off.

It seems like it might be a good learning tool for English Language Learners. Beginners could use it just to label items for basic vocabulary-building. I use the Picture Word Inductive Model as an important strategy in my teaching Beginners, and I’m wondering if I could use something like Simple Bucket as an “add-on” to it.

Intermediate English Language Learners could use it to reinforce more complicated vocabulary, too.

The Webware post also mentioned there’s a similar feature available on Flickr, which is news to me. So I’m going to have to check that out.

If you’re interested, I have several sites listed under Student Photos on my website where students can use online images as part of a language-development activity.

Omnisio is an intriguing site that allows you very easily edit videos that are on YouTube, Google Video or Blip TV and create your own version of them. What’s more interesting to me, though, is its comment system. Once you create your video, people can write comments directly on the video itself and at whatever point the writers want it seen.

Graspr is another video site I’ve posted about that has a vaguely similar commenting system, but Omnisio’s appears far more advanced.

For classes with English Language Learners in schools that don’t block those three video sites (and I suspect they are few and far between) it might be worth experimenting with Omnisio. Students could create their own videos and, more importantly, comment on the others created by their peers.

I learned about Omnisio from TechCrunch.

What The World Eats is an online slideshow from Time magazine that shows families from fifteen different countries, along with what they eat during one week and its cost.

This site can be used with English Language Learners to initiate a discussion on economic inequities; use in compare/contrast activities; and take advantage of it to develop new vocabulary.

I’ve placed the link on my Geography page under Sites That Cover Many Areas.

I learned about this resource through TechLearning.

I periodically write very short articles for TechLearning on Web 2.0 applications. You can see one here about easy ways students can display their work online. I highlight Jottit, Tumblr, and Edublogs.

I’ve been trying to dig-out from under an enormous amount of work (including a backlogged Google Reader). Being gone for a week without much access to a computer does complicate matters, as Sue Waters also writes about today.

As regular readers of this blog know, I like to use certain online video games as an English language development exercise.

Here are a few recent games that I’ve posted on my website under Word and Video Games that would be accessible to English Language Learners. You’ll find these links and the Walkthroughs (instructions on how to win the games — an essential tool in maximizing them to help learn English) at the bottom of that category. I only posted links to the games themselves here — you’ll have to go to my website for the walkthroughs. I’m just a little too tired to post them here, too, today.

They are:

A game about wizards called The Final Spell.

E-Scape, what’s called an “Escape The Room” game.

Tipping Point, a pretty ambitious “Point-and-Click” adventure.

The annual state-wide CATESOL (California Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) will be taking place here in Sacramento in a couple of weeks.

I’m looking forward to meeting people and learning a lot. On the Friday of the conference I’ll be on a panel organized by Marian Thacher on “Using Technology To Grow Democracy.” I’ll be talking about our Family Literacy Project and our international Sister Classes collaboration. Several other talented teachers, including Barry Bakin, will also be on the panel.

On that Saturday morning, I’ll be leading a presentation/demonstration on “Using Computers To Learn English and Build Relationships.” I’ll be covering how we use technology to develop and strengthen face-to-face relationships at our school, and why that is one of the many reasons we just became one of the very few high schools who have exited fourth-year Program Improvement Status.

By the way, Ted Appel, our principal, and I are co-authoring an article highlighting how working with a student body that’s over half English Language Learners helped our school get out of Program Improvement. Of course, that’s contrary to the conventional wisdom. We’ll be sharing how we look at our ELL students through an asset, instead of a deficit, lens.

I’ll look forward to seeing some of you at the conference!

Pod’s Mission is another great interactive from the BBC.  This site has several online science experiments that are accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

These include ones on bones, electricity, and solids and liquids.

I’ve placed the link on my Science page.

There are many easy, and free, browser-based applications to resize and add effects to photographs. Adobe Photoshop Express just become the newest one (thanks to Webware). And another one, FotoFlexor, just revamped their site.

I’ve certainly found sites (and you can find a lot more on my website at Photo-Editing) like these useful in resizing images. However, I think that students can easily spend gobs of time playing with their pictures without any real learning taking place.

If I want students, particularly English Language Learners, to do something creative with images (apart from including them in slideshows) then I send them to Student Photos where there are a number of sites listed that they can use to easily add speech bubbles or captions.  That’s a useful language-learning activity.

I’ve been gone for about a week, and have been trying to catch-up today with everything that can pile-up in one’s absence. Here are a few Web 2.0 applications that have recently begun:

Clueray is an interesting looking search engine. It appears to have a bunch of bells and whistles that I’m still trying to figure out. It’s another tool that shows website images in search results, and that’s what makes it most useful to English Language Learners (in my book, at least). I’ve placed the link with other accessible search engines under….Search Engines on my website.

This Is My Jam lets you make a quick and easy mix of short snippets of your favorite songs, and then allows you to embed or link to it. English Language Learners can create a mix, and then write about what songs they chose and why. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the site, but it may be possible that students could access music inappropriate for the classroom. I’ve placed the link under Student Songs.

Spongefish (which I learned about from Mashable) is a new site that allows you to create instructional presentations in a variety of multi-media formats. There are a lot of these kinds of how-to sites around. Spongefish seems to have a step-by-step process for creating an instructional presentation that might be a little more helpful to English Language Learners than some of the others, though.

Every week there seems to be another site that lets you create instant chatrooms for collaboration in real-time. Chatterous is another one that appears indistinguishable from all the others I’ve posted about and have listed on my website under Collaboration Sites — Real Time. Too bad the time zones don’t work for our Sister Classes project or something like this would be really helpful.

ESL/EFL teachers from seven countries (Kuwait, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Sudan, Hungary, and Romania) have brought our classes together online to correspond and to develop joint projects. You can see some of the first efforts by our students in their introductory slideshows, VoiceThreads, animated movies and videos at our Student Showcase. Feel free to leave audio or written comments on the VoiceThreads, and written comments on the blog itself.

We’re also open to other teachers of Intermediate English classes comprised of 15-20 year-olds joining us. You can leave a comment or contact me (or any of the other teachers who are now participating) directly if you’re interested.

We’re exploring a variety of future projects, including creating a Ning-like network (but we can’t use Ning since my School District blocks it) and possibly studying and sharing presentations on topics like how our governments work, the effects of globalization on each of our countries, and our countries’ histories.

The teachers participating now are Dot MacKenzie, Hala Fawzi, Ronaldo, Ana Maria, Tibor Prievara, Rita Zeinstejer, Mona Bran and me.

English Express is a site developed in Alberta, Canada, and has well-done short articles that have text with audio support.  They’re specifically written for ESL students, and have articles at different language levels.

I’ve placed the link on my English For Beginners page under Non-Fiction.

This site is really quite good, and I’m sure will be on my “Top Ten” list for this month.