Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

A key concept that’s important for students to learn is the importance of engaging with the text — not just being a passive reader.

There are obviously many effective instructional strategies to help them practice that lesson.  One pretty explicit way is for them to have access to reading “choose your own adventure” stories where they are periodically given choices of what they want characters to do, and then participate in the construction of the story itself.  The Goosebumps series of books is a well-known example of this genre.  In the world of English Language Learner teaching, these kinds of stories are also called “Action Mazes.”

There are many other examples of “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories on the Web that are accessible to English Language Learners, and this “The Best…” list will share links to them.  My students have always enjoyed reading these online versions.

In addition, writing these kinds of stories has the potential of being a fun and educational group writing activity for English Language Learners and other students.  There are several free online tools out there now (and I share them in this post), though I haven’t been able to find an ideal one for use in class.   I’ll also be sharing what — at this point — is the best way that I’ve come-up with to create one, and I’m also very interested in hearing about better ideas.  I’m planning on experimenting with creating them during my ESL class during summer school.

This list is divided into two sections.  The first one shares links to accessible online Choose Your Adventure stories for students to read (some also include animation with the text).  The second shares ways teachers can work with students to write their own.

Here are my picks for The Best Places To Read & Write “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories:

STORIES TO READ:

Castaway is both entertaining and accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners. You are stuck on a deserted island and have to get off.

Here are some very accessible examples from John’s ESL Community, including:

The Evil Landlady

First Aid Exercise

The Caves of Mull was written by an English class in Australia (using a wiki), and is accessible to Intermediate ELL’s.  It’s filled with “death, destruction and treasure” (and fun).

In the Frontier Alaska game, you having a very hard time in a dog sled. It’s a “choose your own adventure” activity where you are regularly giving challenging scenarios and then have options on how to proceed.

Life Or Death: In The Jungle, Life Or Death Game: Snow; and Life Or Death Game:Lost At Sea are all similar games from the Discovery Channel.

A Seat At The Table is a “choose your own adventure” game related to hunger issues and is accessible to high Intermediate ELL’s.  It’s from Oxfam.

Take A Walk is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” game from World Vision. Players assume the role of the head of a Rwandan family, and have to make a variety of survival decisions.  It would be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

“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.

Klondike: Rush For Gold is an online game from the Virtual Museum of Canada. It’s in the “Choose Your Own Adventure” genre, and the player puts him/herself in the position of being part of the Gold Rush frantically heading to the Yukon.  It’s a nice game, though it’s not animated and has a fair amount of text. However, it should be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

The Medieval Game of Life is from the Museum of London.  The player takes on the role of someone who lived in the Middle Ages and has to make various decisions along the way.

The Sydenham River is a “choose your own adventure” game about early settlers in Canada. You get the play the part of a couple coming from Europe.  The language is fairly simple and is accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

Fairy Tales from Penguin Books (part of its “We Tell Stories” series) seems particularly well-suited to English Language Learners. It’s short, the language is accessible, and the reader actually helps “write” the story.

Niki’s Adventures, I can say with authority, is the only online video game starring a hummingbird.  It’s from the Virtual Museum of Canada, and appears to be in the “choose your own adventure” genre. You’re given various options for actions Niki the Hummingbird can take, or responses he (maybe Niki is a she?) can make.  It’s a fun language development activity for Early Intermediate English Language Learners.

National Geographic has its well-known Lewis and Clark Adventure, where the reader is a member of the Expedition.

The National Geographic has an equally well-known simulation where you the play the role of an escaped slave on The Underground Railroad.

It’s Your Story is a series of stories designed to teach about the law and abused women.

Here are quite a few interactive stories written by a fifth grade class. Their teacher also offers some good planning materials.

Against All Odds is an online game created by the United National refugee agency.  In it,  you play the role of a refugee in various scenarios.  It’s probably accessible to high Intermediate English Language Learners.

Dunnbar Bound is a sailing adventure accessible to high Intermediates.

In The Jamestown Online Adventure, you play the role of an early settler in…Jamestown.

Muck and Brass is a game from the BBC that puts you in the role of a city leader during the Industrial Revolution. You have to make decisions on how to respond to various problems that resulted from industrialization.  The English is much more complex, if not arcane, than it has to be, but Intermediate English Language Learners should be able to understand it.

A company called Zap Dramatic creates many excellent “online negotiation games” and “interactive dramas” that use the “choose your own adventure” technique.  The games are generally designed to teach negotiation skills. Their games, though, are probably only appropriate for high school students and above. They include:

Move or Die

Ambition 1
Ambition 2
Ambition 3
Ambition 4
Ambition 5
Ambition 6
Ambition 7
Ambition 8
Ambition 10

Gangs, Guns & Knives Awareness has a British bent, and focuses on how young people can stay safe.

Play a “choose your own adventure” game when you pretend to be Thomas Edison. Click on “Inventing”.

Tales Of Twentieth Century London lets the user play the role of a child in….twentieth century London. It’s sort of a “choose your own adventure” interactive, and is quite engaging and well-designed, not to mention accessible to English Language Learners.

Over The Top is an exceptional online game from the Canadian War Museum that puts you in the role of a soldier in the trenches. It’s like a “choose your own adventure” game.  It’s particularly accessible to English Language Learners because it provides audio support to the text.

A Dog’s Life is a simple choose your own adventure story from Scholastic. It’s about…a dog.

A Day In The Neighborhood is another similarly structured game, though this one has serious message on preventing gun violence.

I just learned about an extremely innovative use of this “genre” by journalists who created an online documentary titled Journey To The End of Coal using a “Choose Your Own Adventure” method. It’s an investigation into the lives of Chinese coal miners. It’s really interesting, and probably accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

WRITING “CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE STORIES”:

After students have had an opportunity to try-out some of the stories in the first section, an obvious next step is to have them try writing their own.

I’ll be listing a variety of tools later in this section, but thought I’d start off with what appears to me to be the easiest and most simple way to create them.  Unless I hear a better idea from readers (and I’m all ears!), this is what I plan to do:

After giving students some background, have them read the stories in the first section.

Second, use a simple graphic organizer from a Read Write Think lesson (the lesson itself, I think, is a bit too cumbersome) to show a model lay-out of a short “Choose Your Own Adventure” story.  Work with the class to create one together, and then have students divide into small groups to create a rough “storyboard” outline.

Third, have students create text and visual “mock-ups” of their individual pages.

Fourth, go to the computer lab to use Microsoft Word to create their individual pages, including titles and images grabbed off the Web.

Fifth, upload each page using File2.ws.  It lets you, without registering, quickly upload any document and turn it into a webpage.  That’s what we used in creating resources on the swine flu.

Sixth,  have each student email me the url address of their page, along with its title.  Using their storyboard, I should then be able to fairly easily and quickly re-copy and paste their pages (now including links to the other pages) and post the story.

A process like this is doable with a handful of very short stories, but isn’t workable to more lengthy ones.

Here are the options I know of right now that don’t necessarily put the work on a teacher to put it all together.  However, they all have some drawbacks, including potential technical challenges to ELL’s:

Based on what I know now, I’d say the Writing.com site would be my choice for having students write more complex Choose Your Own Adventure Stories. You can’t add graphics, and it’s a pretty cluttered site filled with ads, but it does seem pretty simple to use and it’s set-up to write these kinds of stories.

You can make your own stories by using the Quandary software program. Of course, it’s a bit problematic to download software to school computers, and I don’t think (but I may be wrong) you add graphics.

Protagonize is a free online website designed for people to write these kinds of stories. Next month they are adding the ability to create private groups where only those with invitations will be able to contribute writing (right now anyone can). It’s very easy to create the stories. However, there is some content not appropriate for classroom use available on the site.

Here’s a VoiceThread created by young students as a “Choose Your Own Adventure Story.”  I hadn’t really thought of VoiceThread as a tool for that task, but they pulled it off.  If I was going to have my students make one, I’d suggest they make the “chapter numbers” bigger and bolder so they could be seen more easily (that comment will make sense if you watch the story).

Here are some instructions from Microsoft on how to use PowerPoint to create “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories. It’s not accessible to ELL’s, but teachers can use it as a guide.

As I’ve said, I’m very eager to hear better suggestions on how to have students create these kinds of stories, and will post the results of my summer school experiments.  Also, please share links to other stories…

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.

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.

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.

I’ve written in the past about what are sometimes called Action Mazes.

In Action Mazes, readers are basically given various options to choose from at different points in the story, which then lead to other options. These are sort of online versions of the “Goosebumps” books.

Thanks to Tom Barrett, I’ve learned about what may be an easy and accessible way that students can create their own Action Mazes.

It’s called Adventure Island.

After getting a teacher name and password (it’s free, though you have to email them to get it sent to you), students can create their own island adventure with different clues and endings — depending upon the reader’s choices.  The reader’s goal is to find the clues necessary to escape from the island.

I just requested my password, so can’t be sure exactly how accessible the site is to English Language Learners, but it looks intriguing.

If it’s as good as I hope it is, I might consider adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write Online.

Castaway is a simple text-based “choose your own adventure” game. They’re also called Action Mazes.

This one is both entertaining and accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners. You are stuck on a deserted island and have to get off.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games.

First, I want to begin by saying that, obviously, the best place to get good recommendations for any of these categories are people you know and whose judgment you respect.

Secondly, I want to clarify that in this list I’m not going to cover any of the many websites that allow you to see what your “friends” are suggesting, either.

Instead, this “The Best…” list will highlight ways to get recommendations that are (or at least I think they are) based on some kind of computer generated formula. And, in some of them, they might be considered more like a search engine.

I’ve used these applications to identify new resources to assist in my teaching, and I’ve also had students (primarily reluctant-readers from my ninth-grade mainstream class) use one or two of them to find books in which they might be interested.

I’m sure I’m missing some good tools out there, so please feel free to leave suggestions in the Comments section.

Here are my choices for The Best Places To Get Blog, Website, Book, Movie, & Music Recommendations (again, through some kind of computer generated system):

BLOGS & WEBSITES:

Three places are the “related feeds” section in Bloglines, which lists other blogs that are supposed related to the one you’re reading at that time; Google Reader’s “recommendations”; and Stumbleupon.

Stumbleupon has recently added the great feature of being able to access and use it entirely online — without having to download anything. The toolbar now is entirely online. You can read more about it at Read Write Web.

I also like In Suggest. It lets you provide a website you like, and then shows you a bunch more it thinks you’ll like. More interestingly, you can do the same with your del.iciou.us bookmarks (you can also use images).

Wectar has recently  added not only a continually updated listing of the most popular Delicious bookmarks, but with one click of the mouse it will then show a list of related websites, including “thumbnail” screenshots.

Popacular shows the top twenty-five bookmarks from Delicious.com for the last: hour, eight hours, day, week, month, and all-time.  At first, I thought it wasn’t going to be a particularly useful web tool. However, I checked in on it three times today and found two very helpful links.  I probably spent a total of less than five minutes looking at the site.

Garcon is a tool that analyzes your Delicious links and identifies suggestions for other sites you might like. It’s similar to other tools on this list, but it appears like it might be a little more thorough than those.

Type in a “tag” that you’re looking for, and Thagoo will provide you with a list of websites that people have “tagged” with that same description in social bookmarking sites (though it’s unclear which ones).

Popego looks like a real interesting way to get website recommendations. It looks like Stumbleupon on steroids.  It’s a little complicated to explain, but you watch this very short video.

Post Rank rates blog posts by an “engagement” index, and many blogs (including this one) have added their widget that highlights their most popular posts.  Post Rank has just modified their website to let you, among other things, identify not only the most popular posts by topic and by blog, but also the most popular blogs in any particular topic area. Of course, they are using their own criteria to determine popularity and what they identify as “education”, so you have to take their lists with a grain of salt. They change their ratings weekly.  You can see their education  list here.  It changes weekly.:  Again, you can search for any topic you are interested in.

Similar Sites is another web tool that deserves to be on this list, and in this section.

YourVersion won a big award at a conference being put on by TechCrunch. After you register, you identify your areas of interest, and YourVersion then seems to do a good job of identifying sites you might be interested in. It also has a lot of other bells and whistles.

BOOKS, MOVIES, & MUSIC:

Here, one obvious tool is Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item..” section that lists the books, movies, and music that other people purchased who also bought the item you’re looking at.

Live Plasma uses a neat Flash Interface that uses Amazon’s data base to highlight movie and music recommendations.

Zoomi doesn’t quite fit into this recommendation category, but it’s pretty close. It’s another much more visual representation of Amazon’s catalogue that shows books in a virtual bookshelf. You can then access Amazon’s recommendations. I’ve found that some of my reluctant readers are more engaged in looking for books using this tool than Amazon’s usual rather bland interface.  Amaznode is another similar search tool.

Scholastic has recently started the Teacher Book Wizard. It’s a data base of over 50,000 books that’s searchable by keyword, title or author. You can also type in the title of book and indicate if you are looking for similar books at the same, lower, or higher level. I typed in the keyword “immigration” and was able to find quite a few that I know my students would consider “high-interest” ones. I certainly got a better selection that I did when I typed the same word at Amazon’s site. I think this might end up being quite useful to teachers of English Language Learners.

To Read Next lets you type the title or author in its search box, and it then “spits out” recommendations for the book you should read next. The ones I tried seem to work pretty well. Students might find it helpful.

Soundflavor is an intriguing and new music website. It’s basically a source of online music not unlike several others I’ve already posted about and placed on my website under Movies & Music For ESL.However, it does have one unique feature — you can search for music by subject (nature, war, peace, work, money, etc.). It looks like the results are a little uneven, but even so this kind of capability could be very helpful to an ESL/EFL teacher who’s being hard-pressed to find a song connected to a theme he/she is teaching in class.

Netflix’s “Enjoyed By Members Who Enjoyed” and “More Like This” features are also useful sources of recommendations.

Movie Lens is a new recommendation/search engine for movies, and it’s by far the most effective tool — for teachers, at least – I’ve found to search for movies.  The other typical sites that let you search for movies do it by genre (adventure, romance, etc.).  Movie Lens is the first that I’ve found that, in addition to searching by genre, lets you search by what they call “tags.”  For example, I searched for “World War II” and got an extensive list of World War II-related movies — a list that I would not have found through Amazon, Netflix, or any other tool on this list.

Nanocrowd has been written-up by Read Write Web, and their post is probably worth a look. Basically, you start typing in the name of a movie that’s similar to what you’re looking for (as you type letters, movie titles will appear). Click “enter” and you will be led to a page filled with similar movies and descriptive “tags” for those movies, too. Click on the tags, and you’ll see more of the same.  It’s a pretty useful movie recommendation tool — somewhat similar to Movie Lens.

I’m adding Taste Kid to this list. After typing in the name of an author, a title of a book, a movie, or a recording artist,  it will provide you with a number of recommendations.  As with some other items on this list, a tool like this would be useful to help students find books they were interested in reading.

Pickii uses Amazon’s database and shows you the top-rated, by buyers, item by category.

Savvy Graph is another addition to this list.

It’s slightly different from the other sites presently on that list, though.  Most of them will offer movie, music, book or website suggestions of other resources that are similar to the ones you like now.

If you type in the name of a book, author, musician, actor, or director into Savvy Graph, though, it will show you on one screen the Amazon consumer-rating for all of the items produced by that person.  In other words, it’s very easy to see which ones others considered the best and worst.  I could see some of my mainstream ninth-grader enjoying looking for a book from an author who has written many books using a web tool like this one.  It could help them narrow down the search.

Also, if you type in the subject of the book you’re looking for — let’s say “street gangs” — you can find all the books in that category and their customer ratings — again on one screen.

I figure that anything that will make reading, or even looking for high-interest books, a more engaging activity for my students is worth trying.

Again, this list might not “go together” as smoothly as some of my others, but there does seem to be at least a little bit of a common thread that might make it useful to teachers.

(I’m adding Literature Map and Wectar to the resources for book recommendations)

Playericious is a neat little tool that lets you type in a “tag” (for example, ESL) and then all the bookmarked sites on Delicious and Magnolia that have that tag “play” on the screen. It’s sort of a more directed Stumbleupon.

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 (march, 2009), 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 this list.

The Book Seer is the newest addition to this list.  You complete this sentence:

Ambassador, I’ve just finished reading _____________ by ____________ . What should I read next?

After that, you’re shown a split screen with recommendations from Amazon and from “Library Thing.”  I could see my mainstream ninth-graders getting a “kick” out of using it and, more importantly, finding some books they might be interested in reading.

Links to all of these sites can also be found on my Teacher’s Page.

If you’ve found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free and also explore the other 130 plus “The Best…” lists.

Last month I posted The Best Online Tools For Real-Time Collaboration. I was exploring those tools more for my own professional development and professional relationships since, because of time zone issues with our International Sister Classes Project, it seemed unlikely any real-time collaborative work was going to work with my students.

At some point, however, I can see how our classes might consider doing joint projects not in real time (I believe that type of relationship is also called asynchronous. However, if I can’t spell it or pronounce it without a dictionary I’m not going to use it!).

I using the word “Best” hesitantly. I suspect there are quite a few other online tools out there, and I haven’t experimented extensively with any of them. If you have some suggestions, I’d be happy to hear it and put out a revised version in the near future. That’s one reason I’m not going to be listing sites in any kind of ranked order.

In order to make it on this list, the web application had to meet a number of criteria. They had to…

1. …be free.

2. …be accessible to English Language Learners.

3. …have specific collaboration tools. Most Web 2.0 tools, of course, have collaboration potential if you just email your password to somebody else. In order to make this list, however, the online application had to have a specific “value-added” and simple process to invite and work with others to develop shared projects.

4. … not require any downloads.

A number of sites on the “real time collaboration” list are also useful for working together not in real time. Rather than share them again here, I’m going to suggest you just explore that list on your own.

Also, wikis are online tools that should probably be included on this list. However, I still have not gotten around to using them, and still don’t really know how. I’ve posted in the past, though, about some good resources sharing how to use them in the classroom. You can check them out if you’d like.

While you’re at it you might want to review all of my other “The Best…” lists.

Here is my very tentative and unfinished list of The Best Online Tools For Collaboration — NOT in Real Time:

Fliptrack has a “Friendship Slide Show” feature that lets you jointly create slideshows, including music, with friends and family.

WeBook is an interesting new site that lets you create a topic and then invite people to share stories around the same subject. It looks simple and seems like it might have a lot of potential.

Mixbook allows you create a slideshow with collaborators. It seems fairly similar to Fliptrack — without the music — but I might be missing some differences.

Google Maps has a neat feature so you can create maps with others. The fine blog Free Technology For Teachers has a nice video showing how it works.

Zee Maps is another simple tool for collaborative map creation.

Shutterfly seems to have a special collaborative feature that allows you to make joint photobooks.

There are a number of online word processors that invite easy collaboration, and not the least of these is Google Docs. You can find others by looking at the list of sites I’ve made for real-time collaboration.

Write With is a tool I’m adding to this list.  It’s a simple way to create documents collaboratively.  You can watch a short video on it here.

I just added a new one called 2collab. You can read my post about it here.

Here’s one more site I’ve added to the list — Imagination Cubed. You might want to read my post describing it.

I also recently added another site called Sketch Planet. You can read my post about it here.

And here’s yet another application I’ve added to this list. It’s called Panraven, and I’ve posted about it here.

I’ve added one more site — it’s called Dipity. You can read my post about it here.

Etherpad is the latest very, very easy way to collaborate in real time and not in real time. You just paste a bunch of text in a window and, without even having to register for the service, send others the url and everybody can edit it in real time. It also has a chat option.  You can go back to the url address at any time to make further, adjustments, too, which is why I’m also adding it to this “The Best…” list. (Etherpad was bought by Google and is shutting down in March, 2010)

Here are a couple of site that I haven’t really tried yet, but appear to have some potential:

Protagonize is going to be a wonderful site for student collaboration, but not until they create a feature that allows private groups to be created. The site’s owner says that’s going to be coming soon. The site allows you to write basically collaborate in writing “choose your own adventure” stories that take you on different paths. ESL teachers also call them Action Mazes.

Kaltura is another site that seems to have some possibilities, though appears a little complicated to me. It’s a collaborative video-creation site, and you can either modify videos that are already on the web, or ones that you upload.

(Note: I’m adding The Broth to this list)

Grapevine is an audio “chatboard” that I’m adding to to this list.  It’s super-simple to set-up a private forum where students can listen and respond to others and don’t have to be online at the same time.  English Language Learners can communicate with other classes around the world, like in our International Sister Classes Project or just be given a simple speaking assignment to complete.  Anybody can use it to collaborate together.  I love its simplicity and ease of use.  It’s still in Beta, so you need an invitation to join.   I received mine within seconds of requesting one, though.

Revizr lets you upload a document, which then can be “marked-up” by others (each person’s comments appear in a different color). It’s a pretty easy-to-use application, so I’m adding it to this list.

Doodle Wall is a new web tool that lets you easily…doodle. You can draw on your own and keep it completely private, or provide the password to others to draw collaboratively. It also has a chat feature.  It worked pretty easily for me, though once I saved the picture and went back to see it, it kept on moving around when I moved my mouse. I’m sure there’s an easy solution to this, though. And like other tools this list, students could work with students in sister classes to draw a collaborative art project and write about it.

Babelwith.me is the newest addition to this list.  No registration is required, and it takes a few seconds to set-up a private chatroom.  Of course, a number of other tools on those lists do the that same thing.  However, Babelwith.me lets you do it and automatically translates what you’re saying in the recipients language and in the language you’ve written.  This last feature could be very helpful with English Language Learners communicating with sister classes in other countries.  Another great capability — and this is why Babelwith.me is on this list — is that the chatrooms themselves appear to stay active indefinitely, so users can come back to them whenever they want to continue the conversation.

Yack All is a new application that lets you create a private chatroom.  In one way Yack All is less convenient than most of the ones I’ve mentioned because it requires registration and sign-in (though it’s extremely easy to do so).  One nice feature, though, that Yack All has but many of the others do not is that it saves the chat indefinitely.

Zoho Discussions is a super simple way to create “chatboards” that would work well for “sister classes.” There are a lot of alternatives, including ones that have the ability for users to participate in a chatboard by leaving audio messages.  But I’m including it here just because it’s so easy.

Please share reactions and other suggestions!

I’ve posted about Action Mazes in the past, which are basically “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories like “Goosebumps.”  At different points of the story, the reader has to choose among various options about what happens next.  It’s also called Interactive Fiction, though this type of writing can also be used to teach history or provide a training simulation.

They’re excellent writing and reading opportunities for both English Language Learners and native-speakers alike.  However, to easily create them on the computer you’ve had to download software, which is always problematic with school computers.

Protagonize is a new site that I learned about from Mashable.  It makes it very easy to create these stories online.

I’ve been communicating with Nick Bouton, the site’s creator, about how to make his site more conducive to classroom work.  Right now, anyone can create “forks in the road” for any story.

He says it’s very workable to create closed groups in his next upgrade to the site so that you can limit who has the ability to work on a particular story.

We’ve talked about some other ideas, too, that he’s considering.

I’ll post again about the site after the upgrade is in place.

I’ve become intrigued recently by online stories called Action Mazes.  Here are some examples from John’s ESL Community.  These stories are similar to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” online video games I’ve written about when describing how I use these games with English Language Learners.

In Action Mazes readers are basically given various options to choose from at different points in the story, which then lead to other options.  These are sort of online versions of the “Goosebumps” books.

You can make your own by using the Quandary software program.  Here are some more samples of Action Mazes and a “How To” explanation created by ESL teacher Michael Krauss.

Another interesting example of an Action Maze is this series of stories designed to teach about the law and abused women.  It’s called It’s Your Story.

I’ve placed a number of Action Mazes on my Intermediate English page under Reading.  I’ve placed links related to creating Action Mazes on my Teacher’s page under Create Tests and Exercises.