Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

This is a “companion” The Best… list to to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience” list. I think it’s worth checking-out that list to learn more about my thinking behind creating this kind of list and identifying places where students can find an “authentic audience” (not just me) for their work.

The companion post to this list focused on places where the primary purpose was writing. Writing is obviously a part of the work created with the web tools on this “The Best…” list, but it’s not necessarily the main work required.

I don’t really describe the individual sites in detail, but, since all of them appear on various “The Best… lists”, you could locate broaders descriptions there.

The criteria to get on this list is extremely similar to its companion list:

* The work required to create the learning and/or teaching object would not be that great, and could be finished in a reasonable amount of time — a few days at a maximum and preferably much, much less.

* The creating and posting process is simple — accessible both to my English Language Learner students and to me.

* Posting the piece does not necessarily require any kind of ongoing commitment for communication — once it’s up, it might be interesting to check-back after awhile to see if there have been any reactions (if the site is set-up for that kind of involvement), but it’s really just a matter of sticking it up there in a place that gets a fair amount of “traffic” and  knowing that it’s likely others will read it.

* There seems to be some kind of enforced standards for all the content that’s posted on the site.  In other words,  when students explore it to see models of what others have written, it’s unlikely they will encounter something that is inappropriate for classroom use.

With that criteria in mind, here are my picks for The Best Places Where Students Can Create Online Learning/Teaching Objects For An “Authentic Audience”:

QUIZZES: ProProfs and Bab.la are easy sites where students can create quizzes for the public.  Bab.la is especially good because it’s designed specifically for second-language learners. The I Know That Quizmaker is a newer addition to this section.

LEARNING GAMES: Students can easily create learning games at Purpose Games, What 2 Learn, My Language Exchange (another good one because it’s designed for second-language learners), and Study Stack.

FLASHCARDS: I have three favorite sites for students to create flashcards: ProProfs again (this link will take you to their flashcard site; Study Stack (again) where you can also make hangman games, word searches, and many more activities; and Ediscio which, like ProProfs, lets you grab images and videos off the Web to insert in the virtual cards.

SURVEYS/POLLS: The sites that meet my criteria are All Rankings , Zoho Polls, and ProProfs’ poll-making feature.

ANIMATIONS: English Language Learners should be able to make simple animations pretty easily at DoInk.  I especially like what sounds like a strict and pro-active policy at ensure classroom appropriate content on the site.

COMIC STRIPS: This is a little tricky because of concerns around hosted content.  I’d say the site that’s easy to use, and is the least likely to have objectionable content, is going to be Pixton.

INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS: These are obviously more complicated to create. However, if you have the equipment, energy, and the time, I think the best sites to use are Graspr and Monkey See,

CAPTION-ONLY SLIDESHOWS: Mixbook meets my criteria the best in this category for online slideshow creation.  Of course, you can also upload PowerPoint presentations to Slideshare and Author Stream.

AUDIO SLIDESHOWS: These are more complicated and take more time to make (at least with English Language Learners) than slideshows that only use written captions, but can obviously be useful for speaking practice.  I’d recommend  VoiceThread, Show Beyond, and Slide Six in this category.

PODCASTS: PodOmatic looks like an extraordinarily easy way to create a podcast. Sign-up and your class has your own channel — all you need is a computer microphone.

TIMELINES: Xtimeline and Dipity are two tools that students can use to create text and visual timelines of historical events.

VOICE MESSAGES: Woices allows the user to easily leave an audio message about a specific place. That message can then be listened to by others. Similar English-speaking practice can be done by using sites listed here, but Woices would provide an authentic audience for English Language Learners. They could leave messages about where they live now, places they’ve visited, or their native countries.

Save Our Sounds is an effort to permanently save unusual sounds.  You can see a pretty neat world map and easily listen to the sounds and read their descriptions.  I was thinking of suggesting that some of my students might want to consider recording, or bringing their family members in to record, music from some of their traditional instruments (like the Hmong flute). Students could then write a description to go along with it. A web tool like Vocaroo (which is on The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English list) could be used to record it.  All you have to do is click “download this message” and send it to the BBC using the form on the site.

WALKING MAPS: I’m adding Bluewalks to this list. You can easily create a “walking tour” with text you write and images you can grab off the web.

OTHER POTENTIAL LEARNING OBJECTS: There are two new sites with potential.  I’d still like to explore them further, though.

One is Hunch, which is basically a recommendation engine (but much more). 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”).

The other is called Lunch. It, too, is a recommendation engine. It also lets users create a game called ExhilaRATE, which is basically a survey/poll with bells and whistles.

Save Our Sounds is an effort to permanently save unusual sounds.  You can see a pretty neat world map and easily listen to the sounds and read their descriptions.  I was thinking of suggesting that some of my students might want to consider recording, or bringing their family members in to record, music from some of their traditional instruments (like the Hmong flute). Students could then write a description to go along with it. A web tool like Vocaroo (which is on The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English list) could be used to record it.  All you have to do is click “download this message” and send it to the BBC using the form on the site.

As always, feedback is welcome.  Feel free to offer additional suggestions for this list.

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.

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