Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

David Deubelbeiss from EFL Classroom 2.0 has  created a page with information about the next ELL/ESL/EFL Blog Carnival.

He’s got a fun contest planned, so check it out and send your submissions by July 31st.  We’ve already received some excellent contributions!

Language Magazine has just published an article co-authored by our school’s principal and me about how we feel our whole school has benefited by having over half of our students being English Language Learners. This year our school became one of the few high schools in the country to exit fourth-year Program Improvement Status under the No Child Left Behind Act.

You can’t access the current issue of the magazine on the Web, and I certainly encourage you to subscribe to it. However, I have posted our article on my website, and you can read it here.

The Science Learning Network is a group of science museums from around the world that have developed a number of excellent online science resources — many of which are accessible to English Language Learners.  I’ve posted about some of the individual activities in the past, but thought it would be useful for people to check-out their main website.

I’ve also placed the link on my Teacher’s Page under Science Ideas.

The Life or Death Game comes from the Discovery Channel.  In it, your helicopter has crashed into the jungle, and you experience lots of danger.  At each crisis point, you have to choose between two or more options.  It’s sort of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” game.

It’s probably accessible to higher Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my Intermediate English page under Word and Video Games.

Posterous is definitely the newest addition to my list of The Best Sites To Easily Create And Display Online Projects.

Basically, users just email what they want posted on their “micro-blog” (it’s similar to Tumblr) and it is automatically posted with the subject line as the title and the body of the email as its content. I was able to copy images off the web and paste them in my email, along with a written description, and it all immediately appeared in my “Posterous.” You can also email attachments and some embeddable applications.

There have been several posts about it today in different tech blogs, but the one in TechCrunch gives the best explanation.

It doesn’t have comment moderation — yet. However, you can disable the comment feature under the “Manage” function.

You can visit the ancient Acropolis in Greece via a Panoramic Tour.

The audio commentary is probably beyond anyone but advanced English Language Learners, but the extraordinary 3D photos certainly are accessible.

I’ve placed the link on my World History page under Greece and Rome.

I learned about this site from Phyllis’ Favorites.

Barry Bakin, a talented ESL teacher in Los Angeles, blogged today about a new web application called Wikisend.

It allows you to get around being blocked from emailing large files as attachments. Instead, you just upload to Wikisend and get a url address for it.

Barry writes in his post about some ways it can come in handy, so it’s worth reading it. I know there are some other applications that sort of allow you to do something similar, but those that I know of require downloading software. This one seems like the easiest.

I’ve posted the link on my website under….Sending Large Files.

Hidden Children and the Holocaust is an online exhibition from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  It includes closed-captioned video about the saga of Jewish children who were hidden from the Nazi’s.

It’s accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my World History page under The World In The Twentieth Century.

The excellent Teacher List just shared some great images from the recent flight to the International Space Station.

I’ll put the link on my website under Planets and Space.

I’m going to be adding one more online poll/survey application to my recent “The Best Sites For Creating Online Polls & Surveys list — PollDaddy.

Not only is it easy, and has a lot of features the other sites on my list have, it also is one of the few that has a security feature to prevent multiple voting.

It’s time for another edition of my multi-part series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. This series, of course, is part of the larger number of “The Best…” lists.

You can read more about the purpose of these twenty lists and the criteria I use to determine which sites make it onto them by reviewing previous ones.

Here are the latest additions:

COMPOSE AN ANIMAL MUSICAL: You can compose your own song of musical animals sounds at Nim’s Island Animal Jukebox, and then email it to a friend or teacher for posting on a website or blog.

MAKE A WORD CLOUD: Tag Crowd will let you create a “word cloud” visualizing the frequency of words on a document or website. You can read more at my previous post about the site.

WRITE A NEWS STORY WITH YOU AS THE STAR: You can use Name In The News to develop a personalized news story about you or someone else you know.

LEARN ABOUT BINARY CODE & COMPOSE DIGITAL MUSIC: It’s a lot easier than it sounds. Go to Digital Composer and post your composition on the Web.

CREATE YOUR OWN MANDALA: Make your own “kaleidoscope-like design” at Mandala-Maker and then post it on a blog or website.

SEND A CODED MESSAGE: With Cryptic Codes you can send a message to friend that they have to decode.

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The British Science Museum has a series of energy-related games that I’ve placed on my Science page.

They include Building Bonanza and Energy Ninjas, both which have text and audio support.  All the games are accessible to Early Intermediate or Intermediate English Language Learners.

Here are links to two new blog carnivals that showcase posts from throughout the education “blogosphere”:

177th Carnival of Education

Active Learning Blog Carnival

Wix, as of today, is open to the general public. It’s a fairly easy site that lets you use FLASH to create a website or content that you would like to embed into a website or a blog. The final product can look pretty neat.

There’s so much you can create that I think it would be a little too overwhelming to English Language Learners. I also suspect that my mainstream students would would want to spend far too much time using it to make their creations look cool and spend less time on the actual content.

However, teachers, I think, might want to use it to create content their students would then access.

I’ll be placing the link somewhere on my Teacher’s Page.

National Geographic has a Monsters of Mystery site showing a globe and links to more information about famous monsters in different areas.  These include Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Abdominable Snowman.

The English would be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.  It might be a fun site for students to use to create a Venn Diagram, or begin a Compare/Contrast short essay.

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

I’ve posted previously about the Search Me search engine. It’s an excellent search engine that shows snapshots of the webpages in addition to text information, which makes it very accessible to English Language Learners.

Today they unveiled a number of new abilities, and it seems like every tech blog is agog about them. The primary addition is that you can now create “stacks” of categorized sites, images, and videos; embed them in a blog or website; and/or email them to a friend or teacher. You’re also supposed to be able write some kind of description, or tag, for each site.

As readers of this blog now, I’m always interested in web applications that enhance higher-order thinking skills like categorization. Search Me would be an extraordinary application for all students (and I hope will be after they work the bugs out) if the tagging function worked well. However, every time I tried writing a description of an individual website within one of my “stacks” the tag was visible, but the website/image/video was not. It kept on saying that “We Are Creating This Image: It Should Be Ready Soon.” But it never was “ready.”  I’ve emailed them about the problem, and will share their response with readers.

Of course, the site is still in “beta,” so it can’t be expected to work perfectly. Once it is, though, it will definitely end-up on one of my “The Best…” lists.

You might also want to check out Middlespot, a similar site that doesn’t look as pretty, and doesn’t yet search for photos (though they say that’s coming soon), but does have a tagging and categorization process that works well.

A few months back I ranked Literactive as the number two site on my list of The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers.

Unfortunately, shortly thereafter the site experienced major technical problems and new people were not able to register so they and their students could use it.

Good news, though, from the excellent Welcome to NCS-Tech blog (which I would encourage people to subscribe to) — Literactive is now fixed and is fully-functioning!

Check it out if you haven’t already done so…

This post is going to be the shortest “The Best…” list I’ve ever written.

When I use the phrase “simple screenshots,” I’m just talking about simple shots that can “liven-up” a blog post or website. I don’t use them in this blog, but do use them liberally in the blog for my mainstream ninth-grade English students so that it looks a little more engaging.

I am not talking about screenshots that excellent bloggers like Sue Waters and Silvia Tolisano use so effectively as instructional tools for those of us who are less tech savvy.

In order to make this list, a site needed to be free, not require registration, and quickly deliver the screenshot in a jpg image that could easily be placed on a blog or website.

I’ve experimented with quite a few of them, and can only list two on this “The Best…” list.

(I had originally thought that Thumbalizr outclassed most other sites because I was under the mistaken impression that they hosted images on their site indefinitely. However, they don’t appear to do so — you have to download the images on your computer first and then upload them to where you want them to appear. Given that, there are several other similar applications that are at least equal to Thumbalizr. They include Snapcasa, WebThumb, and Websnapr.)

One is Thumbalizr. It doesn’t get much easier than that site. All of the images on the blog I have for my ninth-grade class came from there.

The other is Kwout. It’s only a little more complicated to use than Thumbalizr, and the advantage is that the whole image you get back actually functions as a live link to the site. To the right of this post you can see an image of my website that was created using Kwout.

As usual, all feedback is welcome.

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(Editor’s Note:  I just learned from the game’s sponsor that they have been overwhelmed by response to the game and have had to temporarily take it off-line)

Pest Private Eye is an online game where players assume the role of a “pest detective.” Their job is to rid a school of various pests.

The visuals are great, and there’s audio support for most of the text in the game. However, it does take quite a awhile for the game to load.

I’ve placed the link on my Science page.

Thanks to the Escape The Room blog for the info.

On my recent “The Best Ways To Create Online Polls & Surveys” I wrote that I couldn’t find any sites that would allow me to create a poll for free (that allowed more than one question and multiple answers) and provide security to prohibit people from voting more than one time.

I’m happy to say I was wrong.

Abbey Keck from Visu (the site I ranked as number two on the list) wrote in and clarified that they do indeed provide automatic security to ensure that people don’t vote more than once. In fact, she wrote:

” …We use a more sophisticated technique than IP address blocking. Services that only limit votes by IP address are less accurate.”

So not only do they provide a free service, and let you add images to your polls, they do indeed provide the security I want for my experiment in involving readers voting on some of my “The Best…” lists.  I’ll be trying it out here soon.

I’m also suggesting to Visu that they might want to consider making it clear on their site that they provide this excellent feature.  I couldn’t find it mentioned anywhere.