Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

I regularly share my picks for the most useful posts of each month. I also publish a list of the month’s most popular posts, based on the number of times they are “clicked-on.”

I also share a list of Post Ranks’ analysis of each month’s top posts. Post Rank uses a variety of ways to measure level of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts.  I have a constantly updated “widget” on my blog’s sidebar that lists these posts, but I thought a monthly post would be helpful/interesting to subscribers who don’t regularly visit the blog itself.

I’m not quite sure, though, if it’s possible to rank posts over a month-long period — at least, I’m not sure how to do it.  But these regular posts highlight what appears to me to be the ones they rank the highest during that period.

Here are their rankings:

1. The Best Places To Find Theatrical Movies On Science, Math & History

2. The Best Sites For Learning About Easter & Passover

3. “Metaphors We Teach By”

4. Google Voice

5. The Best Tools To Help Develop Global Media Literacy

6. Personalized Online Newspapers

7. Excellent Immigration Graphic

Spellbee! is a spelling game where, after you register, you choose a player to compete with in a spelling contest. Each player chooses from a variety of words and challenges their opponent online to correctly spell the word that is spoken to them in the context of a sentence.

It’s a pretty neat concept and, though the text-to-speech software it uses is definitely not top-tier, it’s still a game students would enjoy playing and would be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

It’s quite easy for players to register very quickly. There’s also a slightly more complicated registration process that students and teachers can use in order for teachers to monitor student progress.

I’m adding Spellbee! to both The Best Sites Where Students Can Work Independently & Let Teachers Check On Progress and to The Best Online Games Students Can Play In Private Virtual “Rooms”.

I’m also placing the link on my website under Word and Video Games.

Thanks to Donna Murray for the tip. She comes-up with some real finds…

Teaching For Change probably has the largest catalogue of books and videos for sale about incorporating social justice issues in the classroom.  It has been on The Best Teacher Resource Sites For Social Justice Issues list.

Unfortunately, today  the Teaching For Change catalogue is  closing down.

You can purchase items it still has in stock at a deep discount.

It seems like every other day I’m posting about a good site that isn’t making it during the recession….

Hunch is the brand new site created by the co-founder of Flickr that I think could be beneficial to teachers, English Language Learners, and all students.

It’s not quite open to the public yet (it just opened to the public on June 15th), but I received an invitation with a couple of days of signing-up. I’m sure they received thousands of requests over the weekend in response to the enormous amount of coverage in the major tech blogs over the past few days, so they’re clearly ramping things up. I suspect anybody who registers will get an invite quickly.

Here are links to several substantial posts about it from the tech blogs, so I won’t go into great detail about Hunch here — TechCrunch, Mashable, .and Read Write Web.

Basically, though, it’s a recommendation engine — You choose a question that you’d like the answer to and you’re then led through a simple and engaging process of ten questions or less to help you reach a decision (and they seem accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners). Questions raise from the serious (What kind of blog should I read?) to the not-so-serious (What kind of Star Wars character am I?). After you received the responses, you can leave both positive and negative reactions.

In addition, users can pretty simply create their own question and “build a topic” that others can use to help with their own decision-making. I would very characterize it as creating something very roughly analogous to a “choose your own adventure” style story (also called an “action maze”).

I think Hunch can be useful for teachers professionally as a good site to find recommendations, which is why I’m adding it to The Best Places To Get Blog, Website, , Book, Movie, & Music Recommendations.

Once it develops a larger database of questions, it probably would also be a candidate for The Best Sites For Learning Which Consumers Electronics To Buy list.

I wouldn’t place it on any of “The Best…” lists for writing or reading for English Language Learners, but it could be an opportunity for students to read some engaging material and to write for an authentic audience.

Show Me Now are quite a few step-by-step instructional tutorials designed as simple “infographics.” They came from a book with the same title.

They’re certainly accessible to English Language Learners. A couple will certainly get students’ attention (how to have a memorable first kiss), but they all seem appropriate for the classroom to me.

The main reason I’m interested in this site, though, is that it provides get models for similar instructional tutorials students could either draw with pen on paper or online with one of the many drawing applications I’ve posted about in these “The Best…” lists:

The Best Art Websites For Learning English
The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Animations
The Best Ways To Make Comic Strips Online
The Best New Sites Students Should Use With Supervision

I know it doesn’t quite fit, but I’m going to add Show Me Now to The Best Online Instructional Video Sites list.  There are certainly some similarities, and students can use Show Me Now to also help give them ideas for instructional videos they might be making.

Thanks to The Make Use Of blog for the tip.

SMILEand CLEAR  are web tools that are both from Michigan State University, and allow teachers (and students) to easily create clozes, drag-and-drop exercises, and sequencing activities. They also allow you to use audio and video with the activities, and will host them as well.

I’ve listed them previously on The Best Web 2.0 Applications for ESL/EFL Learners — 2007 and The Best Ways To Create Online Tests.

It looks like they’ve added even more great tools to their site that are free-to-use.

Barry Bakin, a talented ESL teacher in Los Angeles, has just written a post about one of them, called an Audio Drop Box.

Read his post, and check out all the other free online tools SMILE & CLEAR offer.

Using Songs In The English Classroom by Hans Mol, a teacher in Australia, is a short article that was just published in Humanising Language Teaching Magazine (which is on The Best Resource Sites For ESL/EFL Teachers list).

It gives a very good overview of different language-development activities that can be done with music.

I’m adding the article to The Best Music Websites For Learning English list.

World Religions has nice explanations of the world’s major religions. Each one begins with an interactive graphic that is accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners, and then provides more information accessible to high-level students.

I’m adding to to my The Best Websites To Learn About Various Religions & English list.

PicFindr lets you search many photo sites simultaneously and, in addition to defining the image you want, you can define the restrictions for use. For example, I typed in that I was looking for a picture of a lion for educational use, checked the “none” box for licensing requirements (which means anybody can use it — even without crediting the photographer) and got several hundred images to choose from.

I’m adding it to The Best Online Sources For Images list.

Thanks to The Make Use Of blog for the tip.

Each month, I publish a feature where I “look back” at posts I’ve made one and two years ago (at about this time). I share ones that I think people might still find useful.

Here are some from one year ago:

What The World Eats

Visual Geography

The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English

The Best Websites For Learning & Teaching Geography

And here are some interesting ones from two years ago:

Talking Dictionary

Phrase Builder

The Learning Edge

Here are recent additions to various “The Best…” lists:

Cesar Chavez Day is being officially celebrated in California today.  The Sacramento Bee has a slideshow on a Cesar Chavez Day march that took place this past weekend, and I’ve added it to  The Best Sites For Learning About Cesar Chavez.

I’ve added some coverage of this past weekend’s Earth Hour’s events to The Best Sites To Learn About “Earth Hour” :  Earth Hour Around The World is MSNBC slideshow and the Associated Press has an online video about Earth Hour events in 2009.

Residents Prepare For Red River’s Crest is another slideshow from The New York Times that has been added to  The Best Sites To Learn About North Dakota Flooding.

Red River Recedes But Danger Continues is another slideshow from The Wall Street Journal that I’ve added to the same list.

In The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Videos (Using Someone Else’s Content), I shared very simple ways English Language Learners could “mashup” video clips created by others and make their own.  Those could then be posted on a teacher website or student blog.  In addition to the language-development benefit in creating a cohesive video sequence, most required the use of titles and the inclusion of some dialogue.

I’m adding three more video mashup tools that all use a very easy editing system, and none require registration.

All three use the video editing system developed by Gorilla Spot, which I posted about last year.

I’ll probably also be adding these three applications to a future edition of  The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly.

Here are the three:

Make a video clip using the Huri Humi’s, who, I guess (I’ve never heard of them before) are some sort of TV cartoon characters.

Make one with highlights from this year’s NCAA College Basketball Tournament. This is from CBS Sports.

You can create some scenes from the TV program “Everything’s Sunny In Philadelphia,” which I’ve never watched, but which I’ve heard has gotten good reviews.

I definitely teach phonics to Beginning English Language Learners when I have that class (which I will during summer school), but not in the mind-numbing and devoid of meaning way I hear (and read) that it’s taught in some places.

Thanks to Susan Ohanian, I learned about this article over the weekend titled The sound and the fury about making sense of written words by an Australian professor.

Here’s the prologue:

He has been criticised over his refusal to bow to the idea that phonics is the only necessary first step in learning to read. Associate professor Brian Cambourne argues his case.

It’s a good article.

Nik Peachey will soon be hosting the Tenth Edition of the bi-monthly ELL/ESL/EFL Blog Carnival.  There have been quite a few submissions of blog posts related to teaching and learning English, but you still have two days before the March 31st deadline to contribute one.  You can use this easy submission form.

So far, previous hosts have included David Deubelbeiss, founder of EFL Classroom 2.0; Mary Ann Zehr from Education Week’s Learning The Language blog; and this blog.

The eleventh edition will be published on June 1st. Leave a comment if you’d be interested in hosting that edition or any future one.

Langwitches has just shared another great resource. This time, it’s a slideshow from Darren Kuropatwa and others who created a presentation titled Teaching Well.

It’s an inspirational and informative slideshow on what it takes to…teach well.

This post contains a listing of the most popular posts in this blog during the month of March,  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 can see previous reports on my Most Popular Posts here.

THE TOP TEN “THE BEST…” LISTS:

1. The Best Places To Get Royalty-Free Music & Sound Effects

2. The Best Sites For Learning About St. Patrick’s Day (and April Fool’s Day)

3. The Best Sites For Learning About Easter & Passover

4. The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2008

5. The Best Sites For Learning About Cesar Chavez

6. The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2007

7. The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers

8. The Best Sites For Free ESL/EFL Hand-Outs & Worksheets

9. The Best Online Learning Games — 2008

10. The Best “Cause-Related” Online Learning Games

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

1. Have You Ever Taught A Class That “Got Out Of Control”?

2. Virtual Grammar Lab

3. Free Rider 2

4. Accessible Multiple Intelligence Test

5. Awesome Stories Has Just Gotten More “Awesome”

6. 100 English Lessons

7. Two Excellent Sites For Beginning Readers

8. Excellent Immigration Graphic

9. How Do You Find The Right Camera, Camcorder, Computer, Etc.?

10. Superb English Site Back Online

TOP TRAFFIC SOURCES TO THIS BLOG (not including sources like Stumbleupon, Delicious, Twitter, etc):

1. Making Teachers Nerdy

2. JimmyR

3. Core Knowledge

4. EFL Classroom 2.0

5. I Want To Teach Forever

6. Interesting Pile

7. Ressources Pour Le College

8. TechCrunch

9. Classroom 2.0

10. The Edublogger

Conference.io is the newest addition to The Best Online Tools For Real-Time Collaboration list.

It’s extremely simple to use.  All you do is go to the site, choose a document to upload from your computer, and send the url address you choose for it to anyone you want.  They can then view the document, and you have a live chat ability to discuss it.  You don’t have to register, and you don’t need a password.

Gcast, a podcast service used by quite a few teachers for having their students record by phone, has announced they’re starting to charge for that feature (thanks to Ann Shelley, an ESL Community College teacher here in California for the tip). The cost will be $99 per year.

Gcast won’t charge for uploading audio files from your computer.  However, if you’re going to have students record with a computer mike, I think there are a lot better and easier options on my The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English list.

There used to be several web tools that let you record by phone for free but, as far as I can tell, they all charge for that feature now.  Does anybody know of a site that still lets you do it without charging?

A future “The Best…” list is going to be titled “The Best Sources For Ideas On How To Use Technology With English Language Learners,” and I’m looking for suggestions.

I’m primarily interested in simple, very accessible and well-organized resources that can provide teachers with a wide variety of ideas on how to effectively used technology with English Language Learners.

For example, here are some resources that I think meet that criteria:

A video from Nik Peachey called Web 2.0 For EFL/ESL Teachers.

A good slideshow presentation titled Using Web Logs In The EFL Class. It’s from an English teacher in Greece, Christina Markoulaki,

Ana Maria Menezes has used the web tool Flowgram  to create a great presentation entitled Web Tools To Develop Projects With Language Students.

Language Learning And Web 2.0, a video by Graham Stanley.

The “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled and some articles that I’ve written.

Please leave additional suggestions in the comments section, and don’t be shy about contributing links to your own work.  Even if it doesn’t make “my” list, I’ll still include links to all recommendations and credit those who made the recommendations.

Please send in ideas prior to April 7th.

U.S. News & World Report has a phenomenal online feature on Manzanar, the camp where Japanese-Americans were interned (imprisoned) during World War II.

I’ve placed the link on my U.S. History page.

In fact, there are now so many high-quality online materials on that shameful part of U.S. History that I’m going to prepare a “The Best Sites For Learning About The Internment of Japanese Americans During World War II” (though I might shorten the title a bit).