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.

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.

Visual Recipes is a new site where recipes are listed step-by-step along with accompanying photos. It’s a great place where students can both read and easily add recipes. However, the site has a strange “terms of use” policy which says you’re supposed to be at least eighteen years old in order to post a recipe. That’s an unfortunate restriction which doesn’t make much sense to me.

Docs Teach from the U.S. National Archives lets you easily create online activities using primary sources. Plus, you can access the interactives that others have created, too. It’s super-easy to register. Creating the interactives is not as intuitive as I would like, but it’s still pretty easy.

USA Today has begun a “Voices” Project, where the paper poses a question and then people can respond in writing (via Twitter) or video.

Some of the questions have included:

What is the American Dream?

How has the oil spill changed you?

What does freedom mean to you?

Sharendipity lets you create online games that you can either link to or embed on your own site. It seems particularly easy to create a quick Word Search. I’m generally not a big fan of word searches, but they can have some value for Beginning English Language Learners if they are the ones who create them

Broadcastr is a new site that lets you record audio for up to three minutes and then “attach” it to a map location. It also gives you the url address of your recording. This could be a great resource for English Language Learners and all students. They could write, and then record, reflections from a field trip, describe their home countries, talk about something that happened in a particular place in a work of fiction, and then attach it to that geographical location. In addition to being there for an “authentic audience” (someone other than their teacher and classmates), the link to the recording can be posted on a student/teacher blog or website.

Swayable lets you create a simple survey that can include two photos (you can either upload them or grab them from the Web) and a question.

tildee lets you very easily create a simple step-by-step tutorial for just about anything. You can add text, maps, videos and photos (unfortunately, though, you can only upload photos — not grab them from the Web). And you don’t even have to register for the service.

Tricider lets you write a question (without registration) and then anyone can propose an answer with supporting reasons. People can then vote on which answers they like best. Responses are not moderated, but it appears that the originator can delete them. You can see an example that Nik Peachey created: How do we encourage pedagogically sound exploitation of technology in language learning?

My City Lives lets you upload videos(or post the urls of already uploaded ones) which are then placed on a map. Students could create videos on field trips, or about places in their neighborhood, and post them there.

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

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