Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

CNN has a very accessible map of the different areas targeted by terrorists this week. One feature that makes it stand-out from other similar maps is that it shows a series of images with simple captions when you click on each location that takes you through the events of the last four days.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources To Teach & Learn About The Terrorist Attacks In India.

Today was the deadline to vote for The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2008.

Here are the top five choices of readers:

1. My Great World

2. Flash Earth and Kakomessenger tied for second place.

A multiple tie for third place:

Wordle

OneSens

Language Of Flavor

Propaganda Filmmaker

Viscosity

Wildlife Filmmaker

Help The Honey Bees

You can see descriptions for all of these and more at my original post, as well as the criteria I used for a site to qualify for the list.   I, though, didn’t rank them.

How Design Can Save Democracy is an interactive graphic from the New York Times that shows a sample Presidential ballot and how it can be designed to be more user-friendly.

It’s obviously a bit late, but I’m still adding it to The Best Sites To Learn About U.S. Presidential Elections.

Tricia Stohr-Hunt has a nice blog called Open Wide, Look Inside. She highlights social studies, science and math books that are particularly accessible to children, as well as sharing connected activities.

I was particularly impressed by her listing of civics-related books, many which I use with my English Language Learners and that I learned about through a whole lot of searching.

Tricia’s blog will save you a whole lot of time if you’re interested in finding literature accessible to Beginner and Early Intermediate English Language Learners in the content areas.

Here is one more addition to The Best Places To Learn About Christmas, Hanukkah, & Kwanzaa:

Make a snowflake, describe it, and post the link on a student/teacher blog or website.

Smithsonian Magazine has a ton of excellent slideshows and interactives in their Photo Galleries. Most of them are accessible to English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the on my website under Multimedia Resources From News Outlets.

I’m adding a Breaking News English lesson called Questions Asked About Mumbai Attacks to The Best Resources To Teach & Learn About The Terrorist Attacks In India.

Death In Sakkara is a series on online video games from the BBC about archeology and ancient Egypt.

They are award-winning and very engaging, but pretty heavily text-based. I’d say they would be accessible to very high Intermediate or Advanced English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my website under The First Civilized People.

The Orange County Register newspaper in southern California has a collection of excellent interactive graphics. I’m adding three of them to The Best Places To Learn About Christmas, Hanukkah, & Kwanzaa.  Coincidentally, they have ones on each of them.  Here are the links:

Kwanzaa

Christmas

Hanukkah

Ziggity Zoom has about ten “talking stories” that are accessible to Beginning English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Stories.

Thanks to Langwitches for the tip.

Expressivo is a free online tool that lets you type, or paste, in up to 200 characters and it then “speaks” what your wrote.

Of course, there are quite a few of these kinds of web applications, and you can read about some of the best at The Best Listening Sites For English Language Learners and The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners — 2008.

Expressivo, though, has a great feature that the others do not have — it provides a link to what you typed in which you can then email or post on a teacher/bog website so that others can see and hear what your wrote.

I’ll be adding it to those “The Best…” lists I mentioned.

Thanks to Mashable for the tip.

Even though I teach a U.S. History class to English Language Learners in the computer lab each morning (part of my experiment to teach one class entirely using technology and another without and see how the assessments compare) I also try to include some non-U.S. History related current events in the class. I thought on Monday morning we’d talk a bit about the terrorist attacks in India, and looked for the best accessible resources online.

Here is what I’ve found so far:

CBBC Newsround has an accessible summary about the events in India.

Time Magazine has slideshow called Two Days Of Terror In Mumbai

The New York Times has two slideshows — Rescue Efforts In Mumbai and Terror Continues In Mumbai.

The NY TImes also has a very accessible interactive graphic showing the attack sites.

MSNBC’s slideshow is called Attacks In Mumbai.

The India Times has several photo galleries on the attacks.

Here’s an audio slideshow from Australia discussing who and what is behind the attacks.

The Simple English Wikipedia has an accessible, and continually updated, summary of the events.

Here’s a simple interactive from Canada about the attacks that also gives some basic information about the country of India.

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature has some incredible images from India.

Breaking News English has a lesson called Questions Asked About Mumbai Attacks.

CNN has a very accessible map of the different areas targeted by terrorists this week. One feature that makes it stand-out from other similar maps is that it shows a series of images with simple captions when you click on each location that takes you through the events of the last four days.

Mumbai After The Smoke Has Cleared will be, I suspect, the last addition to this list.  It’s from the Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” feature.

Mumbai Picking Up The Pieces is the title of a TIME Magazine slideshow that I’m adding to this list.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for additional resources, too.

This is going to be a short and sweet “The Best…” list.

Thanks to Sue Waters’ post at The Edublogger (and you should really go there directly to read it and see her example) I’ve learned about a very, very simple way to create a graph with the unfortunate name Crappy Graph. She learned about it from Steve Dembo.

You can make an online graph there in seconds.

Plus, in the comments section of Sue’s post, Donna B. wrote about Graph Jam, another similar tool.

Both places let you create graphs for free and will host it for you if you want.

Sue’s post and the comments talk about some good ideas on how to use these graphs, too.

Online Chart Tool is the newest addition to this list.  It’s not quite as easy as the first two, but it seems to come fairly close.

Chartle is a new online tool to easily and quickly make charts, graphs and maps.  It’s slightly more complicated than some of the other applications here,  but still worth adding to the list.

Graph Jam is another easy tool to use.

Chart Go is another new site that lets you easily make…charts.  It doesn’t have an embed feature, but I assume you can use Embedit.in for that.

I’ve been wondering for awhile if I could ever find an online application to make graphs that I could actually understand how to use. Hohli and Chart Tool are two I’ve tried, but just couldn’t figure them out.

Toucan Talk is a listening game on the Animalia website. The game itself doesn’t have a direct link — you have to go to Animalia and then click on “Games.”

Players are shown a sentence, and then several toucans (yes, I mean the birds) say parts of the sentence out of order. You then have to click on the toucans in the correct sequence. The game has several levels of difficulty.

It’s an enjoyable activity for English Language Learners. Unfortunately, there are other games that are not particularly educational on the games menu, too.

I’m adding a new resource to The Best Ways To Keep-Up With Current Education Issues.  It’s a blog called This Week In Education by Alexander Russo.  He writes at Scholastic’s site for Administrators.

I’ve been subscribing for the past couple of months, and I’ve been impressed by the quality and quantity of his posts.

Last year I invited readers to share their thoughts for a January 1, 2008 post entitled “What Did You Learn in 2007?”

Many people responded, and I’d like to do it again this year.

Feel free to write one-to-three things you feel you’ve learned this year in the comments section of this post.  I’m not going to give a specific restriction on their length, but please try to keep them short.   Please submit them by December 28th. I’ll leave them in moderation until I include them in a January 1st post.

Also, please include a short sentence you’d like me to use to describe you.

Another good Blog Carnival has recently been posted in the blogosphere:

The 199th Edition of the Carnival of Education

And don’t forget that tomorrow, Friday, is the last day to contribute to the next edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival.  It 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.

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 for some reason the submission form isn’t working, you can email the link to your contribution directly to Mary Ann at mzehr@epe.org.

Based on the number of submissions that Mary Ann has received so far, this will certainly be the biggest one yet…

The Center For The New American Dream has a good booklet in PDF form called “Simplify The Holidays.” Its language is not accessible to anyone other than advanced English Language Learners, but teachers can modify it for classroom use. It provides a lot of good information to help students think critically about the massive consumption focus of culture during this time of the year.

You have to register in order to gain access to the PDF, but it just takes a few seconds.

To quote from the website, the Center “helps Americans consume responsibly to protect the environment, enhance quality of life, and promote social justice.” They have a fair amount of good materials on the site.

I’m adding it to The Best Places To Learn About Christmas, Hanukkah, & Kwanzaa.

I learned about this site from the LIbrarian’s Internet Index, which will be on my upcoming “The Best Places to Find Educational Websites” list.

The Let’s Get Cookin’ game is undoubtedly one of the best tools I’ve ever seen to help beginning and Early Intermediate English Language Learners develop food-related vocabulary.

You’re shown simple recipes, along with a vividly animated kitchen, and have to choose the correct ingredients (which are all labeled) and prepare and cook them according to the recipe.

The big problem, however, is that it’s hosted by Shockwave, a very popular online game site that is blocked by many school district content filters.

But if it’s not blocked at your school, or if your students have Internet access at home, it’s a great learning tool.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Food.

Materials about the famous 1914 Christmas Day Truce during World War I seemed to be worth adding to The Best Places To Learn About Christmas, Hanukkah, & Kwanzaa. Here are some:

Social Studies For Kids has a very accessible and short description of the truce.

There are some excellent “music videos” on YouTube showing images with the soundtrack from two good songs about the Truce. Since so many districts block YouTube, you can download them into your laptop and use a converter so it’s viewable at school, or upload it into an Internet service like EdublogsTV.

One video features the song “Bellau Wood” and is sung by Garth Brooks. Here are the lyrics. The language is fairly accessible to English Language Learners. Here’s another video using images from the truce with the same song.

This video has good images and uses a different song called “Christmas In The Trenches.” It’s sung by John McCutcheon, and you can find the lyrics here. The language is a little difficult and “old-fashioned” since it’s taken from a letter written by a soldier who participated in the Truce.