Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Ana Maria Menezes, my colleague in our International Sister Classes Project and in Learning With Computers, wrote a post today about Jog The Web (by they way, I’d encourage readers to check-out her blog — she shares a lot of good experiments she tries with Web 2.0 tools).

Jog The Web is a good tool that lets you easily create “tours” of webpages, and lets others leave comments on them. This kind of application is excellent for a variety of language-learning activities (Ana Maria has some ideas), including online scavenger hunts.

It’s very similar to Daft Doggy. However, Daft Doggy is getting ready to unveil a radical revision of its site, which will be much more attractive and incorporate audio comments. In addition, Flowgram, another tool with some pretty amazing abilities, will be open to the public in September.

In other words, Jog the Web is a very good tool for now, but within a month or two I think you’ll see it eclipsed by these two other sites, unless it, too, can upgrade its abilities.

The Learning The Language blog just posted about Merriam-Webster’s publishing their own dictionary for English Language Learners.

I don’t think there’s a particular need for another one of those, but I figured I’d check it out anyway.

Most importantly, I found that they also have a very good series of free, online pronunciation exercises calle Perfect Pronunciation.

I’ve also added that site to my The Best Websites For Learning English Pronunciation.

Learn English By Songs is another excellent language-development activity by Henny Jellema. As with his other activities, these are difficult to describe but worth checking-out. I think he creates the best English-language development activities on the Web.

Of course, Mr. Jellema’s has some great other exercises and, in fact, I named his other site number one in last year’s The Best Internet Sites For English Language Learners. By the way, this year’s list will be coming out in October and include a poll for readers to agree or disagree with my picks.

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

The Reading Today blog shares an important report from the International Reading Association World Congress on Reading. It reports the importance of, and connection between, first language literacy and second language acquisition.

This connection is why at our school we encourage so many students to take Spanish For Spanish Speakers and Hmong For Hmong Speakers classes.

National Public Radio just aired, and published, what seems to be one of the better overviews I’ve seen of education positions by the two Presidential candidates.

McCain, Obama Offer Dueling Education Plans offers some good details, including listing their education advisers.

Thanks to Reading Today for the link.

Planet Science has a ton of resources about teaching, learning, and using science in the classroom.

I’ve put the main link to the site on my Teacher’s Page under Science Ideas.  However, it had one interactive activity that I thought was particularly good for English Language Learners called Get Clobbered, and I put that link on my Science page.

In the game,  players have to “dress” the scientist with the appropriate safety equipment he/she needs for the experiment they’re about to conduct.  It’s an excellent opportunity for vocabulary development, and designed so it’s accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners.

I review a lot sites and post their links here. However, url addresses change and resources get taken off-line. I thought I’d write a quick post reminding readers of how I handle verifying links.

Every site I post about in this blog also gets placed in a section of my website, which is designed for student-self-access. In most blog posts I mention under which section it can be found on that site.

I verify all links on my website — now totaling over 8,000 resources that are accessible to English Language Learners — two or three times each year, and remove dead-links. For sites that I think are particularly useful, I try to find if they’ve just been moved to another address.

If during the process of verifying links on my website I find dead-links for sites that I’ve reviewed here, I do not go back and remove the posts or make a note in them that they’re no longer active. I just don’t have time to make those changes.

However, I do go back and update links on any of my “The Best….” lists if I find one of those resources has been removed from the web or had its address change.

If you’d like many more sites like those in my The Best Sites To Teach and Learn About the Olympics, David Deubelbeiss at EFL Classroom 2.0 has created a public Olympics Page definitely worth a visit.

If you’d like access to even more sites, and a ton of other resources, you’ll need to join EFL Classroom 2.0 and go to the “Resources” section.

I’d strongly encourage you to join. It’s free, simple, and I’ve listed EFL Classroom as one of The Best Resource Sites For ESL/EFL Teachers.

The Environmental Intelligence Unit is a learning game about the environment.  Players are sent on various missions to respond to environmental problems.

The language is probably accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners.  In addition to learning about the environment, students will also gain an understanding of some basic vocabulary.  Plus, they’ll have fun doing it!

I’ve placed the link on my World History page under Toward The Twenty-First Century.

This is a one-of-a-kind “The Best…” list.

I don’t think any of the sites on this list are very accessible to English Language Learners. Those sites can be found at The Best News/Current Events Websites For English Language Learners.

This list is just a collection of links I’ve been accumulating for applications that visually represent current news in particularly unusual ways. I certainly wouldn’t get my news from them, but I thought readers might find them intriguing to glance through. I do admire the creativity of their designers, though.

It’s pretty difficult for me to describe them, so I’ll just list them here and let you discover how they work on your own.

Here are my choices for The Best Visually Engaging News Sites:

* Doodlebuzz

* Spectra Visual Newsreader

* Yahoo News Globe

* Visual Headlines

* News Map

* World News Map

* Reverbiage

* Newsmap Virtual Earth

* Interceder

* Newsline

* World News Today

* Discovery Earth Live

Feel free to offer additional suggestions.

I’ve been reading about Slinkset in a number of tech blogs over the past couple of weeks. It sounded very intriguing to me from the first time I’ve heard it, but I’ve been grappling about how and if it could be useful in the school context with English Language Learners.

It’s called a “social news site.” In a matter of seconds, anyone can create their own site where members can join and post links, and comment on the links that others have posted on. It would be difficult to imagine an easier set-up process. You can also create a “walled garden” with only approved members.

One idea I’ve come-up with is that students could post their favorite links from my website, explaining why they like it, and have other students comment on them.

Any other ideas?

I thought readers might find it interesting to see what student technology projects I’ll be working on this upcoming school year.

Of course, we’ll be continuing the International Sister Classes Project (this time with teachers of Intermediate English classes from ten different countries).

We’ll also be continuing our Family Literacy Project, where forty-three immigrant families are provided home computers and Internet access to further their English skills. As I’ve described, our assessments have shown that students with these home computers have a two-to-three times greater improvement in their English-reading skills than those in our control group.

It also looks like we might be expanding our after-school ESL Lab to even more students this year, where English Language Learner students use my website for an hour each day.

In addition to continuing these three projects, I’ll be starting two others:

* I’ll be teaching two separate U.S. History classes to English Language Learners. One will be in the computer lab most of the time. I’ll be using my usual engaging (at least, in my mind!) non-tech strategies in the other class. There will be a number of assessments for both — measuring higher-order thinking and factual recall, along with self-evaluations. It will be interesting to see how the two compare.

* My mainstream ninth-grade English class will be regularly doing some technology projects related to our class. Only they’ll be doing them in their computer applications class, whose teacher has agreed to give them at least fifteen minutes a day to work on them — the equivalent of a class-period-and-a-half each week. I’ll be comparing their cloze and reading fluency assessments with those of another class not doing these online projects. Of course, it won’t be a fair assessment since there is no telling what the control group scores would be if the had a period-and-a-half of extra English class time doing something else, even just reading a book of their choice. But it will be an intriguing comparison, nevertheless.

There may be one more project I pursue:

Many of our Special Ed students are using my website more and more in class. If I have the energy and time, I might explore with some of their teachers doing some kind of assessments to compare with a control group that does not use the website.

I’m very open to hearing from readers about their ideas how to make these projects more successful.

I guess I should have looked a little closer at the Go Animate website I reviewed an hour ago.

Kathy Shields took a little more time than I did to review the content of Go Animate, and found a fair amount of inappropriate content. So, even though it’s a great tool, I have to pull my recommendation.

Thanks, Kathy, for the feedback.

This may be the third or fourth site I’ve reviewed here (out of 1,500) that I later founded probably wasn’t appropriate for the classroom. Sorry about that.

What Is This Sport? is another excellent language-learning activity from the British Council. Players have to accurately name an Olympic sport demonstrated by a picture. If they get it correct, a Panda (?) successfully runs over a hurdle.

I’m adding this site to my The Best Sites To Teach and Learn About The Olympics and will also be placing it under Sports on my website.

(Editor’s Note:Kathy Shields took a little more time than I did to review the content of Go Animate, and found a fair amount of inappropriate content. So, even though it’s a great tool, I have to pull my recommendation.)

Go Animate is a pretty darn cool new online animation application. It’s a little more complicated than the other sites I’ve listed on my The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Animations, but I still think that most English Language Learners will be able to figure it out, and the results look so great!

You can post the link to your creation or embed it.

One question mark as the site grows will be how well they can ensure that classroom inappropriate content is not accessible on the site. I wasn’t able to find any now, but that’s the only caveat I have. Before you let your students try it out in the fall just check to make sure the site’s screening system as as rigorous then as it appears to be now.

Thanks to Mashable for the tip.

Learn It Lists is a new vocabulary-learning application. You first register by saying what language you want to learn and listing your native language. You then go through a series of steps (learn, listen, speak, write) for vocabulary word lists that show the words in the language you want to learn and in your native language.

It’s all free except for what I see as the most important part, which is the teacher-generated audio pronunciations. Those you have to pay for. However, other native-speakers of the language you’re learning can record the words and you can listen to those sounds for free.

Unfortunately, the words are not provided in any context, which reduces the site’s value in second-language learning. If, though, the teacher audio examples were provided for free (and they just used an advertiser-supported economic model) then “Learn It Lists” would still have a chance to make it on one of my “The Best…” lists. But, with both of those negatives I’d have to say there are other places you’d probably want to look at for specific vocabulary-building and you can look on my website under Vocabulary for those links.

Here are two recent (and good) Blog Carnivals (collections of blog posts on specific topics) that I’ve recently read:

* Tangled Bank: The 110th Science Carnival

* Carnival Of Education: Week 181

This isn’t an “official” Blog Carnival, but it’s a great weekly reflective activity:

* Days In A Sentence

America By Air is a website sponsored by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.  The online exhibition tells the history of airline service in the United States.

There are quite a few interactive exercises/games that Intermediate (and maybe some Early Intermediate) English Language Learners can use.

I’ve placed the link on my Geography and United States History page under Problems At Home and Across The Sea.

Vocaroo is a new, free, and very easy way for students to record audio messages. It would be an excellent way for English Language Learners to practice speaking.

One great feature is that not only can you email the link, but you can also embed your audio message in a blog or website.

Daft Doggy Voice Recording is still the easiest way for students to record and send these kinds of messages (Vocaroo, though very easy, is still a little more complicated).

Links to both sites and other similar ones, are on my website under Student Audio Messages.

Thanks to the Make Use Of blog for the tip.

English Interactive, one of the top-rated sites in last year’s The Best Internet Sites For English Language Learners, recently changed its url address.

I couldn’t find-out what happened to it, and thought they had taken it off-line. Thanks to TeachersFirst, I found it again.

I’ve fixed the link on my list and on my website.