Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Here’s another one of my “The Best…” lists, this one focusing on online video sites for learning English.

This list is not about students creating their own videos. If you’re interested in those sites, you can check-out one of my previous lists — The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Videos (Using Someone Else’s Content).

Here I’m focusing on sites that are specifically designed for providing online videos to assist English Language Learners develop their language skills. In addition to meeting that criteria, in order to make this list a site has had to have the following elements:

* The videos had to provide engaging content, and not just a teacher talking.

* It was free-of-charge.

* It had online follow-up language development activities after watching the video.

* It had to have classroom content appropriate for the classroom.

There really aren’t many sites out there that meet all of that criteria, so this list is short. In fact, I considered narrowing it even further by excluding sites that use a lot of YouTube videos since many school districts, like ours, have content filters that not only block the YouTube site but also block all YouTube videos that are embedded in other sites. But if I had done that this list would have even been smaller. I do, however, place those nearer the bottom of the list.

Here are my picks for The Best Online Video Sites For Learning English:

Number seven is ESL Video. It allows you to easily create a quiz for just about any online video out there. Plus, it has a bunch of videos and quizzes that have already been posted.

I’m ranking Real English ESL Video Lessons at number six. Tons of videos and a variety of follow-up activities can be found here.

I like the “Movies” section of Diana’s Place For Hot Potatoes for the fifth spot. She uses snippets of popular movies for accessible cloze exercises.

Number four is the Study English page of the Australia Network has an extensive collection of videos with follow-up activities, though I do wish there was more of a variety of them.

Lingual Net is number three and has a particularly wide range of videos along with quizzes.

I particularly like the sites I’m ranking as number two and number one because they both allow teachers to create virtual classrooms so student work can be monitored. It works great with our Family Literacy Project.

Number two is English Trailers. It has many trailers from popular movies along with comprehension and cloze activities. We just added that site as one our students can use at home and they love it.

And now, my pick for the number one Best Online Video Site For Learning English is…. English For All (EFA). Its videos cover many life skills and have numerous online activities.

I’d love to include the new online video site called Yolango high on this list, but I can’t even put it on my website because it has a very small number of videos that are not appropriate for classroom use. They are considering creating a second site with content solely suitable for schools, but until they do so I can’t recommend it.

Feel free to offer feedback in the comments section. You can also find links to other sites that didn’t make this list on my website under Video.

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