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 (for example, students can write about their creations).
MAKE CHOCOLATES DANCE: You can choreograph a dance for a piece of chocolate, choose the accompanying music, and write a message using this piece of viral marketing. The link can be posted a student/teacher blog or website.
SAY THANKS TO SOMEONE: Thanks For Being There is a simple and accessible web application from State Farm that lets you thank someone for “being there” for you. It’s easy to use, and students can post the url of their creation on a student blog or website.
MAKE DOGS SING: With the holiday season coming-up, you can send a Critter Carol — dogs singing a Christmas song, with a message you write included. Students can create on, and then post the url of their card on a website or blog.
CREATE A WEBSITE:Just Paste It and Axess are very, very simple ways to create websites. They’re ideal for teachers or students who are not very tech savvy, and just want a place to add links or, for example, if students have an assignment where they might need to collect images and then describe them. Axess has an advantage over Just Paste It because it appears that you can return to edit Axess but can’t do that for Just Paste It. No registration is required for either one.
This post contains a listing of the most popular posts in this blog during the months of October and November (usually I do them for each individual month, but didn’t get around to writing one in October). 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.
I periodically look for quotations — for articles, posters, etc. I get pretty frustrated by most of the online quotation sites because they often don’t provide the source for the quotes, nor any information about the person who supposedly said the quote.
I’ve searched and searched, and I still I’ve only found four sites that consistently provide sources for quotes and have a decent searchable database. I do have to say, though, that one way I’ve recently discovered to get around this problem is by pasting the quote in the query box at Google Book Search. Often, that will bring me to the primary source.
Quote Snack (This is a blog. It doesn’t seem to have a complete “search” system in place, but it does have a “tag cloud” you can use).
Another site that deserves an “honorable mention” is called Quotes.net. It doesn’t provide the sources for their quotes, but it does have two other neat capabilities that could be helpful to English Language Learners — it provides audio support for the text, so that users can hear the words; and it provides the option of translating the quotes into many different languages.
iWise is another site that doesn’t meet my criteria, but the fact it offers audio support for the text is a real plus.
Finally, even though the listed sites don’t meet my criteria, you might want to look at the exhaustive list of quote resources that Presentation Zen has at Where to get quotations for presentations? (the post is about three years old, though, so there might be a fair amount of dead links).
I’m often asked for suggestions of good places online where people can learn and practice Spanish for free. In fact, I’ve been asked enough times to make me develop this short “The Best…” list of my recommendations.
Many of these sites also offer lessons in other languages, including English.
Feel free to offer additional suggestions.
I personally have found that going to a language school in a Spanish-speaking country (I went to ones in Mexico and Guatemala) and living with a family to be by far the best way to learn Spanish, but these sites can provide good initial exposure and be helpful for later development and practice.
Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Learning Spanish Online (not in order of preference):
BBC Languages Mi Vida Loca
“Does ‘Counting Our Blessings’ Really Help?” is a report from Cognitive Daily sharing research that shows having students regularly list what they are grateful for helps them develop a more positive outlook.
Doing it daily generated the greatest benefit, but it appears that doing it weekly helped, too.
I don’t plan on trying this with my students anywhere that number of times, but it sounds like a good reflective question to ask now and then.
“Frenchfrog’s Little English Pond” is the name of a blog written by Laurence Haquet. She creates great interactive books that are exceptional learning tools.
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.
I also share a list of Post Rank’s 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.
Here are their rankings for the month of November:
Thumboo! seems like a very quick and easy way to take a screenshot (a picture of a webpage) and add it to your blog or website. An embed code is provided. One negative, though, is it doesn’t appear that you can adjust its size.
One of the trickiest things for me to teach (and to learn!) about Geography is keeping things straight between latitude and longitude. Because of that difficulty, I’ve decided to create another “The Best…” list. You might also be interested in The Best Websites For Learning & Teaching Geography.
Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Teaching About Latitude & Longitude (that are, of course, accessible to English Language Learners). These are not listed in any order of preference:
The Calgary Academy has a great online interactive on the topic that provides audio support for the text. You first have to register for the site, though. Just click “Start Activity.”
As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”
://URLFAN measures the popularity of websites by blog mentions. In fact, you can type in the url address of any website and learn how popular it is using this measurement.
Every month I make a short list highlighting my choices of the best resources I shared through (and learned from) Twitter, but didn’t necessarily include them in posts here on my blog.
I’ve already shared in earlier posts this month several new resources I found on Twitter — and where I gave credit to those from whom I learned about them. Those are not included again in this post.
Since today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and since some of my English Language Learners students are taking science classes, I thought I’d put together a quick list of accessible resources about Darwin.
Here are my choices for The Best Online Resources To Learn About Charles Darwin (and are accessible to English Language Learners);
Here are my nominations for The Edublog Awards 2009 (you can go to that link to find instructions on how you can make your own nominations):
Best Individual Blog
Public School Insights by Claus von Zastrow posts excellent reports on what’s happening in schools around the country, and provides essential critical reflection on what is being done, or should be done, in the name of “school reform.”
Best Individual Tweeter
Again, I’m making two nominations. Steven Anderson (@web20classroom) not only sends out a ton of useful tweets, but works hard to develop a sense of community among educators on Twitter. And I can same the same thing about my other nominee — Shelly Terrell.
Best New Blog
I have two nominees here, too:
David Kapuler has done a fabulous job at his blog Technology Tidbits. Not only does he share new ed tech resources, his interview series with bloggers has been very informative.
I’m going to be a little self-interested here. I’m pretty impressed (if I say so myself) by the work that my colleague, Katie Hull, the students in our two Intermediate ESL classes, and I have done with our Intermediate English class blog.
Best Resource Sharing Blog
Kevin Jarrett’s Welcome To NCS-Tech may be the “Dean” of all education resource bloggers, and continues to churn-out posts about helpful resources.
I had been planning on nominating Paul Hamilton’s blog, but, unfortunately, he hasn’t been posting a lot lately. I hope he’ll be able to get back in the groove again so I can nominated him next year!
I nominated Richard Byrne last year and, since he won, I figured it might be good to give someone else a chance this year. Richard, of course, has continued to do excellent work.
Best Teacher Blog
I’m nominating two here:
Alice Mercer is my Sacramento colleague who writes great posts about both educational policy and the day-to-day life in a classroom. The name of her blog is Reflections On Teaching.
David Deubelbeiss has got to be one of the hardest, if not the hardest, ESL/EFL teachers in the world, and his blog has to be on my list.
Best Librarian/Library Blog
Joyce Valenza at the Never Ending Search shares incredibly useful resources and insights.
Best Educational Tech Support Blog
This is a toughie. Sue Waters at The Edublogger would be a definite nominee here, but I know it was ruled out last year because of a “conflict of interest” (which I’m not convinced is correct since it would just be one of many in that category and people can vote for whom they want).
If that prohibition is still in effect, I’d like to nominate two blogs:
Langwitches is on many of my “The Best…” lists, and is a great source for links and practical advice. Silvia Tolisano does an exceptional job.
The other is Tom Barrett – for his “Most Interesting Ways” series
Best Educational Use Of A Social Networking Service
Here, again I’m nominating two:
EFL Classroom 2.0, which has a community of thousands of ESL/EFL teachers from all around the world.
