Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

The Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC) has just performed a great service for recent immigrants by helping to develop and distribute the new U.S. Citizenship test questions in eleven additional languages.

The U.S. government provides translations in four major languages. CLINIC has recruited community organizations from around the country to do these eleven, and are hoping to do more.

I’m adding this link to The Best Multilingual & Bilingual Sites For Math, Social Studies, & Science and to The Best Websites For Learning About Civic Participation & Citizenship.

I’ll also be adding it to my website under Citizenship.

The Muscular Dystrophy Campaign in the UK is sponsoring a “Young Pavement Artists” competition. On their website, if you click on “click here to draw online for fun” you can use virtual chalk to draw on a virtual pavement. You can then email the link to a friend, and post the link on a student/teacher blog or website.

At our school we sometimes have poetry writing contests with chalk on the pavement. I can certainly see using this online resource as a supplement to such an event. And it can just be a simple drawing tool that English Language Learners would then describe.

No registration is required.

Shmoop is sort of a Cliff’s Notes — but a whole lot better.

It has a literature and poetry section, but I’m less interested in those since I’m not convinced that using the “classics” in any kind of class — mainstream or ELL — is the best tool for teaching and learning. However, I like its History section. It’s probably only accessible to advanced English Language Learners, but teachers could certainly easily modify parts to create more usable materials. It also offers links to additional good resources.

I’ll be adding the link to the Teacher’s Page of my website under Social Studies Resources.

The Jackson Fish Market company has created some neat and engaging web applications accessible to English Language Learners. Their latest is one for Halloween — send someone some “fun and awful” virtual dying flowers.

English Language Learners can pick the flowers, describe them, and then post the url on a teacher/student blog or website. It’s bizarre, but I suspect that some of my English Language Learners (particularly teenage boys) would like it a lot.

I’ve written previously about “They’re Beautiful” flowers site, where you can send someone virtual normal flowers.

The ugly flower site is weird enough not to add to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween.  However, I’ll probably include it in the next edition of “The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly.”

Gatuno In Halloween is a brand-new online video game from the developer of the great Esklavos series of games.

As in the Esklavos games, you have an option of playing it in English or Spanish. Playing them in English provides numerous opportunities for language-development since many items are given text labels.

This Halloween game is so new that no one has yet posted a “Walkthrough” (the instructions to win). As I’ve described previously, English Language Learners playing these types of games with walkthroughs maximizes their use for language-learning. However, even without it, this game would be good for ELL’s. As soon as I find one I’ll add both to my website under Word and Video Games.

I have, though, already added the game to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween.

Liz Davis has expanded her excellent screencasts on how to use popular Web 2.0 tools and put them on her wiki, called 21st Century Tools.

They’re so good I’m adding her wiki to my The Best Places To Learn Web 2.0 Basics list.

I’ve added Newser to The Best Visually Engaging News Sites.

The site shows a large grid of news photos, along with a headline, short description, its source, and how long ago it has been published.  If you move your cursor to the “more” section of each photo, you get a longer summary.

I’ve been surprised to find that my English Language Learners students have found some of the sites on this list more accessible to them than a few that have made The Best News/Current Events Websites For English Language Learners — 2007.

In the future, I’ll be writing a more extensive post about my students’ experiences with the sites on both lists.

It looks like the Blog Carnival site might have fixed things after a week of technical problems, so…

The deadline for the next edition will be Friday, November 28th.  You can use this easy submission form to contribute posts you think are helpful to the practice of teaching English Language Learners.  Examples of student work are welcome.

If the submission form isn’t working when you contribute a post, just go to my contact form and just send me the link (just the link please) to your submission.  But try the submission form first.

Youniverse could be a great site for English Language Learners if it didn’t have one easily accessible feature that is too sexually explicit for use by young people.

It’s really unfortunate.  The site has a bunch of short personality-type “tests” that ask simple questions and then you respond by clicking on various images.  Reading the questions, choosing the photos, and then seeing the results would be a very engaging English-learning exercise for students.   I know my students would enjoy it.

However, even though the vast majority of the site would be appropriate, one of the quizzes uses sexually explicit imagery.  You’re supposed to swear that you’re over eighteen before you take it, but all it takes is  a click and you’re in.

I suspect that even ESL/EFL teachers of adults in a school setting would probably want to shy away from the site because of that particular quiz.  Perhaps somebody else will decide to develop a similar site that would be suitable for students.  I haven’t seen anything like it before.

If you have, though, please let me know in the comments.

The National Endowment For The Humanities has a nice site called Not Just Halloween: Festivals Of The Dead From Around The World.

It has lesson plan ideas and great links.

It’s a very late addition to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween.

Amaznode is the newest addition to The Best Places To Get Blog, Website, , Book, Movie, & Music Recommendations.

Like some other tools on that list, it’s a visually engaging search engine for books, films, and music carried by Amazon. And, like the others, its primary purpose, as far as I’m concerned at least, is that it might make it a bit more enticing for some of my mainstream ninth-graders to help identify books they might like to read.

Recipe Matcher lets you type in the ingredients you have on hand (either literally or in your imagination) and then shows you simple potential recipes you can prepare with them. It also lists one or two additional ingredients you might need to get to prepare the recipes.

One of the features I particularly like for English Language Learners is that when you start typing the name of an ingredient you have a menu appears with potential matches. You can use the site without registering, but you do sign-in you’re given a pre-printed list of food items you can just check.

Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t appear that you can add your own recipes to the collection.

This might be a simple way and engaging way to help Beginning or High Beginning ELL’s get a little more familiar with food vocabulary. I’ve place the link on my website under Food.

I posted about a new online Spelling Bee earlier this week that I thought would have some value for English Language Learners. Now, I’ve just learned about another one that looks very good. Marc Tinkler, one of its developers, alerted me about its existence.

It’s the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee.

You don’t have to register to play, and it automatically adapts to your spelling ability. It remembers which words you got right and wrong and quizzes you periodically on words at your spelling level that you spelled incorrectly in the past. A human voice, and not a computerized one, says the words. Plus, it shows you a diagram of similar words.

It doesn’t give you a sentence example using the word, but I guess you can’t have everything…

I’ll be adding the link to my website under Spelling.

I’m particularly excited about my next “The Best…” list,  The Best Social Studies Websites — 2008,  which I’ll be posting next week.

It’s going to be a fairly lengthy one, and I haven’t posted previously about most of the top-ranked ones.   I’ve found them to be quite useful in my classes this year.

You might also want to take a look at last year’s list — The Best Social Studies Websites — 2007.

Here are the most popular posts for this month.   These are the ones that have been most “clicked-on,” and are different from my Websites Of The Month. Those are the posts that I personally think are the best and most helpful.

Because of the popularity of my “The Best…” lists, it should be pointed out that often the most clicked-on posts are not necessarily ones that I wrote that month. Instead, they might have been written earlier, but then one of these older ones has just been highlighted elsewhere and all of a sudden become popular.

You see previous reports on my Most Popular Posts here.

TOP SIX “THE BEST” LISTS:

1. The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2008

2. The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2007

3. The Best Online Resources About Christopher Columbus

4. The Best Sites To Learn About U.S. Presidential Elections

5. The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween

6. The Best Websites For Beginning Older Readers

THE TOP SIX POSTS THAT WERE NOT “THE BEST…” LISTS:

1. Poptropica

2. Tutpup Math and Spelling Games

3. Free Brainpop Election Movies

4. One Of The Coolest Music Tools Ever!

5. Listen and Read

6. Free Rider 2

TOP TRAFFIC SOURCES TO THIS BLOG:

1. Teachers Love Smartboards

2. Classroom 2.0

3. TechCrunch

4. Edublogs

5. Learning The Language

6. Ressources Pour Le College

7. EFL Classroom 2.0

8. Lexiophiles

9. Jog The Web

10. Learning Technology Teacher Development Blog

Statetris is another creative way to reinforce geography knowledge. It’s a game, modeled on the popular Tetris blocks, where you have to position maps so the states or countries fall into the right place.

I’ve placed the link on my Geography page.

I posted last week about the next ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival.  However, the site that most Blog Carnivals use to coordinate entries appears to be having a lot of technical problems and has been down most of the past week.

So, at least until they fix their problems, you can go to my contact form and just send me the link (just the link please) to your submission. Or, you can leave the link in the comment section of this post.

As I mentioned last week, the next edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival will be published on December 1st, and will be hosted by Mary Ann Zehr at Learning The Language, the blog hosted by Education Week that focuses on English Language Learners. That blog is on The Best Ways To Keep-Up With Current ELL/ESL/EFL News & Research list.

The deadline for the next edition will be Friday, November 28th.

You can see the previous seven editions of this bi-monthly Carnival here.

Convey This is a translation tool that can be added to webpages by inserting a small snippet of code on the site.

Richard Byrne’s Free Technology For Teachers blog has some good ideas about how teachers and schools could use it to communicate better with parents.

Thanks to Mashable, I’ve learned about Happy Halloween! from PBS. It contains links to many accessible online Halloween-related activities on PBS sites.

I’m adding it to the ever-growing The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween.

It’s Time To Feel Better is part of a new site sponsored by the CIGNA health insurance company. It’s a very ambitious (and quite accessible to English Language Learners with audio support for the text) interactive site with a ton of information about how health insurance works, along with information about the national health care debate that’s going on in the presidential election.

In addition, it has a Water Challenge quiz, and they say they will donate funds to help provide clean water to the developing world for every correct answer.

I’m certainly extremely suspicious of any political analysis of the health insurance debate coming from an insurance company. I didn’t have time to go through the whole site, but from what I did see it they tried to make that resource section somewhat objective.  I’d be interested in hearing if anyone else sees something I did not.

I’ll be placing the link on my website under Health, though I won’t be adding it to The Best Health Sites For English Language Learners.