April 30, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Here are more additions to The Best Sites For Learning About The Swine Flu Outbreak:
Containment Efforts is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal.
The BBC has a good and regularly updated map of the outbreak (thanks to The English Blog for the tip).
The CBBC Newsround has added quite a few very accessible materials on the swine flu. You can see a commercial/public service announcement about the flu that is being played in the UK at the same site.
April 30, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Sue Waters has done it again with a great post titled Ideas For Student Bloggings From….How Do You Do What You Do!.
It’s filled with “how-to” tips for teachers.
I’m adding it to The Best Sources For Advice On Student Blogging.
April 30, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
Here is how the American Library Association describes today:
“Children’s Day/Book Day, also known as El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Día), is a celebration of children, families, and reading held annually on April 30. The celebration emphasizes the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
Día is an enhancement of Children’s Day, which began in 1925. Children’s Day was designated as a day to bring attention to the importance and well-being of children. In 1996, nationally acclaimed children’s book author Pat Mora proposed linking the celebration of childhood and children with literacy to found El día de los niños/El día de los libros.”
Mary Ann Zehr at Learning The Language also shares some interesting, and disturbing, statistics about English Language Learners that were released today.
April 30, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…
Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:
* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.
* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.
* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.
* provide some language-learning opportunity.
* not require any registration.
You can find previous installments of this series with the rest of my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year. Several hundred sites have been highlighted in these past lists. You might also want to take a look at the first list I posted in this series — The Best Ways For Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly, and Painlessly.
Here are my latest picks:
SEND A HEALTHY E-CARD: The Centers For Disease Control have a huge collection of E-Cards related to health. You can add your own message, email it to a friend/teacher, and then post the url on a website or blog.
CREATE A DONUT: Yes, you can create your own donut at this Dunkin Donuts site. It doesn’t exactly promote healthy eating habits, but it does provide easy and fun vocabulary-building practice. After students have used all the ingredients, they can post their creation on a student/teacher website/bog and describe it.
MAKE A MUSICAL PAINTING: Labuat is a Spanish site, but speakers of any language can figure out how to use it. You listen to music and then, with your mouse, paint a psychedelic picture. Your process is recorded, and you can email the link to your picture to a teacher or friend for posting on a website or blog. ELL’s can then describe their artistic creation. There’s no language-development opportunity in the actual use of the site, but there could be in writing and talking about it.
CREATE A TALKING FACE: I’ve posted about PhotoFace before, but they’ve just created a new version is called PhotoFace Demo V2. You can record audio, upload your own photo or choose from a variety on PhotoFace. Then, you can “age” it, make the person heavier or lighter, make a number of other edits,and then make it talk. Once you’re done you can email the link to a friend or teacher for inclusion in an online journal or blog. The new version has added: facial art, taking on a celebrity appearance in one click, race and gender sliders, hair options, online face search and webcam, and more
As always, feedback is welcome.
If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.
April 30, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
As readers know, I’ve recently added several accessible resources on the 1918 Flu Pandemic to The Best Sites For Learning About The Swine Flu Outbreak. Here’s one more:
LIFE Magazine has a great slideshow on the 1918 Flu Pandemic.
April 30, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Behind The News is a weekly news show from Australia designed for teenagers. It’s accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners, and you can see the transcript of the video reports as they’re being spoken.
I’ve placed the link on my website under News.
April 30, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
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 Sources For Ideas On How To Use Technology With English Language Learners
3. The Best Places To Get Royalty-Free Music & Sound Effects
4. The Best Sites For Learning About Easter & Passover
5. The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”
6. The Best Websites For Learning About Modern & Historical Pirates
7. The Best Digital Storytelling Resources
8. The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2008
9. The Best Web 2.0 applications for Education 2007
10. The Best Sites For K-12 Intermediate English Language Learners
11. The Best Sites For Learning About The Swine Flu Outbreak
THE TOP TEN POSTS THAT WERE NOT “THE BEST…” LISTS:
1. Post Rank’s Ranking Of The Top Education Blogs
2. What Do You Do When You’re Having A Bad Day At School?
3. Wallwisher Is A Winner — Big Time!
4. When A “Good” Class Goes “Bad” (And Back To “Good” Again!)
6. ESL Carnival
7. Another Good Collection of Web 2.0 Tools
8. Have You Ever Taught A Class That “Got Out Of Control”?
9. Free Rider 2
10. Excellent Immigration Graphic
TOP TRAFFIC SOURCES TO THIS BLOG (not including sources like Stumbleupon, Delicious, Twitter, etc):
6. Free Technology For Teachers
7. TechCrunch
9. Bloomingdale School District 13
10. The Edublogger
April 29, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
4 Comments
I posted yesterday about a few student-created multilingual resources on swine flu.
Today, we had more time to to spend on them, and I think they look pretty good. They’re simple, and share a few tips on preventative measures people can take. Students made copies to distribute to their family and friends. My assumption is that people are more likely to want to read something created by those with whom they have a relationship.
Here they are:
Hmong/English by Hlee
Hmong/English by Tong
Hmong/English by Tae
English/Hmong by Ying
English/Hmong by Joua
English/Hmong by Pov yaj
English/Hmong by Pao
English/Hmong by Zang
Hmong/English by Kia
Hmong/English by Steve
Hmong/English by Mai Yia
Spanish/English by Daniel
English by Richard
English by Myriam
Spanish by Ericka
April 29, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
11 Comments
I’ve written quite a bit about some of the challenges my students and I face at our inner-city high school, and some of the strategies and specific tactics I use to respond to them (see What Do You Do When You’re Having A Bad Day At School?)
One of the newer things I’ve been trying is writing a personal letter to a student, placing it in a sealed envelope with his/her name on it, and just giving it to him/her in a matter-of-fact way. It’s been amazing to me to see the effect these letters have had. I can’t believe I haven’t tried it before!
Here’s a sample of one (obviously, the name has been changed):
Dear Miguel,
I’m writing this letter to you because I really want you to hear how strongly I believe you have the ability to go far in life, and that I believe staying in school and doing well will help you get there.
I’m concerned since I understand that you told you mother that you “wanted to be like” your older brother and leave school.
You and I both know that, when you put your mind to it, school work is pretty easy for you. However, for some reason, you often decide you just don’t want to do it.
Graduating from high school is going to open a lot of doors for you in life – for work and for further schooling or training. I hope you make a decision to finish this school year strong and approach next year with a positive attitude.
You are very smart — as your essays and “make-and-breaks” have shown. It would be sad – both for you and for others in your life (including me!) – if you chose not to use all the “smarts” that you do have.
Sincerely,
Mr. Ferlazzo
April 29, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
The Denver Post has an exceptional series of photos called Melting Ice: Glaciers and Ice Shelves.
It very vividly shows the change in size of various glaciers because of global warming.
I’m placing the link on my website under Challenges In Today’s World.
April 29, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
I just wanted to remind readers that you can find all 250 “The Best…” lists (they are all regularly updated) in two places:
“The Best…” page has them categorized by topic (Social Studies, Web 2.0, etc).
The Websites Of The Year page has them all listed chronologically — more or less.
April 29, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
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 on The Best Tools To Make Simple Graphs Online, but still worth adding to the list.
I learned about it through RusselTarr on Twitter.
April 29, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Students can contribute an article to Knol, Google’s answer to Wikipedia. It seems a lot easier technically to contribute to Knol than to Wikipedia. I’ve added it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”.
jQueery is a sort of strange, but engaging, tool to scan the news. I’ve added it to The Best Visually Engaging News Sites.
A Timeline Of Torture is a slideshow from Newsweek Magazine that I’ve added to The Best Sites Sites For Discussing The Morality of Torture.
I’ve added File2.ws, which I posted about yesterday, to Part Two Of The Best Sites For Students To Easily Create & Display Online Projects.
April 29, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
“Centre Of The Cell” is a very engaging and accessible interactive simulation about the outbreak of a flu epidemic in London. Users have to make decisions about what actions should be taken to get the outbreak under control. It’s like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” game — with potential “deadly” consequences.
There are only so many maps, slideshows, graphics, and videos that I can add to The Best Sites For Learning About The Swine Flu Outbreak. Centre of the Cell is definitely a unique resource I’ll be adding to that list.
Thanks to The Whiteboard Blog for the tip.
April 29, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Here are some new additions to The Best Sites For Learning About The Swine Flu Outbreak:
A History Of The Flu is a slideshow from Newsweek.
Major Outbreaks and Pandemics is a pretty impressive multimedia historical timeline from The Wall Street Journal.
More Cases of Swine Flu Emerge is a slideshow from the Wall Street Journal.
In addition, we’ll have more time in class on Wednesday for students to create additional multilingual information sheets to share with families and other students.
April 29, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
Starting with this month, I thought that readers might find it helpful to see a list of all the new “The Best…” lists that I have posted in the preceding thirty or so days.
Here they are:
The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”
The Best Sites For Learning About Planets & Space
The Best Sites To Learn About The Earthquake In Italy
The Best Sources For Ideas On How To Use Technology With English Language Learners
The Best Sites For Learning About Volcanoes & Mount Redoubt
The Best Sites For Teaching & Learning About Cinco de Mayo
The Best Websites For Learning About Modern & Historical Pirates
The Best Sites To Teach ELL’s About Libraries
The Best Sites For Learning About Mother’s Day
The Best Digital Storytelling Resources
The Best Sites For Learning About The Afghanistan War
The Best Sites To Learn About Mexico’s Drug War
The Best Sites For Learning About The Holocaust
The Best Sites Sites For Discussing The Morality of Torture
The Best Resources For Learning About World Malaria Day
April 28, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
I have some additional resources I’ve added to The Best Sites For Learning About The Swine Flu Outbreak, including some simple multilingual resources quickly created by some of my ESL students:
The Swine Epidemic Grows is a series of photos from The Sacramento Bee.
Breaking News English has a resource that provides audio support for the text. It’s called Swine Flu Deaths Expected To Rise.
Swine Flu: The Affected Nations is from The Guardian.
Flowing Data has a good graphic showing how Viruses Can Transform Into Swine Flu.
There’s been a lot of talk about the worldwide Influenza Pandemic in 1918. Here are some accessible resources related to that time:
The Baltimore Sun has a multimedia page on the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.
Lessons From A Past Pandemic is an audio slideshow from The New York Times.
The Guardian has an interactive showing how the pandemic affected London.
Here’s a map and timeline of the 1918 Pandemic from PBS.
Here are links to some multilingual student-created resources:
Hmong/English by Kao
English/Spanish by Edgar
English/Spanish by Esteban
English/Marshallese by Calynda
We really didn’t have much time, and will be making more later in the week. Students will be sharing them with their families and other students.
April 28, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
Nizm Lab is a new site that has human editors identify what they think are the best videos on the Web.
It looks like it might be a good tool to separate the “wheat from the chaff.”
You can read more about it at Read Write Web.
April 28, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
John Thompson has written a great critique of the recent McKinsey Report that has gotten so much attention — “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”
Here’s a sample of John’s post:
“The report resembles an Onion parody, displaying nuggets of information with the full glory of digital graphics while being literally absurd.”
I wish he would stop beating around the bush and say what he really thinks 
April 28, 2009
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Newstin is the newest addition to The Best Visually Engaging News Sites. Click on “Click to open Newstin Map — Visual Navigation” and you’ll get an eye-opening interactive table of contents.
