Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

About a month ago, after a successful series of lessons on how learning physically makes the brain grow stronger, I wrote some preliminary thoughts on preparing a similar lesson on student “self-regulation” and self-control.

I got sidetracked by a variety of things, but then two things happened to move it up on my priority list:

First, I began thinking more about it earlier this week when Alice Mercer and I spoke, and she talked about a similar lesson she was putting together. She did the lesson, and just posted about it today. It’s a must-read, and I think it’s a great way to go, especially if you are teaching younger learners (though she’s got some great stuff there for teachers at any grade-level). It’s just another reason why educators should definitely be subscribing to her blog.  It’s definitely one of my favorites.

Secondly, yesterday I had a few relatively minor behavioral issues in my mainstream ninth-grade English class. It wasn’t a big deal, but it hadn’t happened before. It was also, I think, a result of an error I made — it was the first time this year I had students do group work in greater than a pair (we tried groups of three), and it was earliest I had ever tried that in a school year. Even for as good a class as this one is, I should have known it’s just too early in the year to do have a bigger group with ninth-graders. And since I’m not going to be in class tomorrow (I’m leading a workshop on developing parent engagement), it’ll be the first time they’ve had a sub. That combination made me decide early this morning that today would be a very good time to have a lesson on developing self-control. It’s another one of several I’m trying out that might encourage students to see how learning can more directly benefit them beyond the schoolhouse door.

The lesson went quite well. In fact, it went so well I decided to modify it and immediately do with my Intermediate English class, too.   Over the weekend I’ll write a “Part Two” to this post sharing a complete description of how things went in that class (quite well, in fact) and include examples of student work).  The title of this post comes from what a student in that class wrote about what he learned today.

NINTH-GRADE ENGLISH

Part One: Lesson Introduction (took about ten minutes):

I began by asking students to take a minute and write down what they thought “self-control” meant. After a minute, students shared their definitions with a partner, and I asked some to share what they wrote with the whole class. Here are a few examples:

“Self control is when you can control yourself, like behave when you are in a tough situation.”

“Control yourself and control your actions.”

“Control yourself from doing bad things.”

“The ability to control strong emotions.”

“Self-control means to hold yourself from doing bad things.”

I theatrically modeled self-control while sitting at a school desk stopping myself from throwing a pencil at a student (it was obvious that I was pretending to be a particular student in class and everybody was cracking-up — including that student. I also gave other examples in my own life (not eating a Reese’s Peanut Buttercup, etc.).

Next, students thought of a time when they did not have self control and wrote about it for a minute. They then shared those stories with a partner, and a few shared with the entire class. Here are a few examples:

“I lost control when I had a bad attitude with my mom and yelled at her.”

“Yesterday in school because somebody stole my iPod from the locker. I ended up socking the wall and door in the locker room.”

“When I took $5 from my Mom’s purse.”

Then, students thought of a time when they showed self-control, shared it with a partner, and then a few with the class. Here are some examples:

“Everyday when I come to school.”

“When I didn’t hit my friend.”

“When we had a sub in my other class and I was doing my work instead of talking.”

Part Two: Reading (about thirty minutes)

Students were divided into pairs. For the first time this year (and perhaps the only time) I decided to let them choose their partners, and that worked out fine.

I gave them part of The New Yorker article titled DON’T: The Secret of Self Control. The article is about the famous experiment where children were tested to see if they could wait fifteen minutes without eating a marshmallow in front of them. If they could, they’d receive a second marshmallow. With a few minor removals, I just used the first two-and-a-half pages that print-out. They took turns reading each paragraph to each other. After each one, they highlighted what they thought was the most important part of the paragraph — up to six words. After they completed the reading (they handled it pretty well — the only phrase I reviewed with them was “delayed gratification” — each pair got a sheet of paper and made a mini-poster writing what they thought were the three most important parts of the article. Then I “paired-up the pairs” and each group shared their poster, and a few shared them up-front. Some examples included:

“We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.” (that’s a quote from the article.

“Kids that can’t wait have behavior problems.”

“Kids that can wait have a better mind.”

Part Three: Video (ten minutes)

I then showed the engaging six minute TED Talks video showing a replication of the experiment . Students loved it.

In-Class Experiment, Read Aloud & Modeling (ten minutes):

I put a lollipop on the desk of each student (I got that idea from Alice Mercer), and told them if it was still there thirty minutes later, I’d give them a second one. Students loved it.

I then gave copies of a later excerpt from The New Yorker article that talked about how young people can develop self-control, and read it aloud as students read along. It was particularly timely because this part mentions metacognition, and we had been discussing that word and its meaning in the context of learning reading strategies:

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings “What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

I then did some theatrical role-modeling again, holding myself back from throwing a pencil and saying to myself, “I need to focus on reading so I can make my brain grow” and “I don’t want to throw the pencil because I want to do well in this class.” I talked about other things I could say to myself when the TV is yelling “Watch me now!” when I know I should be doing work instead, and gave a few other examples.

Poster & Final Reflection (45 minutes or so):

I showed students a poster I had made. One side was titled “When I Want To Do This:” and the other side was titled “Instead I’ll Do This:” The first side showed a drawing of me throwing a pencil at someone. The second side showed me sitting at a desk reading and thinking “I want to do well in this class.”

I told students I wanted them to think of a time when they didn’t have self-control — they could use the example they had written about or think of another time. They would draw that on the first side. On the second side I wanted them to draw what they wanted to do instead, and write in a “thought-bubble” how they could divert themselves from losing control.

Students didn’t have time to finish the poster today, and will finish them tomorrow. I’ll create an online slideshow of them as I did for the “growing the brain” culminating project and share them here.  They looked pretty interesting.

In the final few minutes I asked students to write if they found the lesson useful or interesting, and to include why or why not.

As I mentioned earlier, the title of this post is what one of my Intermediate English students wrote in response to this question. Here are a few responses from my mainstream ninth-graders:

“It was interesting because I need to learn self-control.”

“It was interesting because the project is really cool that it could tell about the kids that are successful and are not.”

“This was interesting cus it was showing us how to control our self from doing something bad.”

“It was interesting because I wanted to see if any one in our class ate the lollipop.”

In fact, no one did, so everyone got a second one. Right before the bell rang, I asked the class what it meant that they all got the second candy. Just about everybody yelled, “We’ll be successful!”

I know, that ending sounds a bit simplistic.  But I certainly can’t complain about all my students leaving class feeling like they’re going to be successful.

The success of my lessons on learning’s physical impact on the brain has prompted me to think of creating similar lessons that might encourage students to see how learning can more directly benefit them beyond the schoolhouse door.

I’ve begun developing a lesson on the importance of having self-control. Studies show that the ability to have self-discipline (also known as self-regulation) can result in tremendous learning and life benefits.

I’ve just begun to think about it, and am open to hearing ideas.  I’ll be posting what my final plans look like.  Here are the resources I’m reviewing now:

A TED Talk by Joachim de Posada focused on the lessons from famous marshmallow experiment. A marshmallow was put in front of children, the researcher left the room after telling the child he/she would be back shortly and if the child could resist grabbing the one marshmallow she/he would get more upon the researcher’s return. Years later, those who showed self-control were much more successful in their lives.

I briefly explained this study to a joint class we were training to use a web tool to make a slideshow yesterday. The application requires that students email their final creation to themselves in order to obtain the url address of the finished product, which in turn students can then post on our class blog. After taking a minute to summarize the researchers findings, I talked about how tempting it would be once they went to their personal email to open-up other messages from friends in addition to the one from the slideshow site. But I wanted them to “remember the marshmallow.”

These students actually do work for our English classes in a different computer applications class. I spoke to the teacher after school, and he told me that — as far as he could tell — no students did anything other than open up the one email from the slideshow site.

Three other excellent resources on this topic are:

DON’T: The Secret of Self-Control from The New Yorker magazine.

Self-Regulation Supports Student Learning and Achievement by Kevin Washburn

Just today, The New York Times published Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

Any other suggestions of resources or ideas are welcome.

Daniel Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. It’s a book aimed at the business community, though I know a lot of people in education have been reading it. My copy has been sitting on my nightstand for quite a while.

However, earlier today I saw that he had given a TED Talk “On The Surprising Science of Motivation.” (see The Best Teacher Resources For “TED Talks” to learn more about these events). It looked like an interesting title, so I checked it out, and was glad I did.

It’s eighteen minutes long, and I’d encourage you to look at it. He, again, is aiming his talk towards business, but it’s very applicable to schools.

He cites a lot of research debunking the effectiveness of extrinsic rewards on motivation. This isn’t news to the many of us whom have read Alfie Kohn’s excellent book Punished By Rewards. However, he seems to provide a slightly more nuanced critique.

Pink basically says (at least, this is my interpretation — please leave a comment if you think my summary is incorrect) that extrinsic rewards do work — for mechanical work that doesn’t require much higher-order thinking.  But he says research says that it will not work for anything that requires higher-order thinking skills and creativity.

This analysis mirrors my own experience in the classroom.  In Have You Ever Taught A Class That Got “Out Of Control”? I shared the challenges I faced last year in using extrinsic motivation to get students into a new pattern of behavior, and then moving them back toward intrinsic motivation. Using “points” was definitely effective in getting the class under control. They received them for being focused and doing their work.

However, I didn’t think students started doing their highest quality work until they were “weaned” off the point system and began to gain what Pink calls “autonomy, mastery, and purpose.” Pink says that those are the three essential elements in generating higher-order thinking skills.

I’d be interested in hearing comments after you watch the video.

I’ve written several posts recently about TED Talks, and thought I’d pull together a short list of resources that would be helpful to other teachers (and me) as we consider how to use them most effectively in our classes.

I’m going to start off with a quote from their website explaining what these “things” are:

“TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 400 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks feature closed captions in English, and many feature subtitles in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.”

Here are my choices for The Best Teacher Resources For “TED Talks”:

The number one place to go is a wiki created by Jackie Gerstein that is called Teaching With Ted. It shares videos along with lesson ideas connected to each one.

Jeff Mummert has just today published an incredible post titled TED Talks Demystified For Teachers. In it, he highlights the videos that he thinks are particularly useful and divides them by subject area.

Links to a Google doc that lists all of the Ted Talks, including links and descriptions, has been circulating on Twitter for weeks. It’s not clear, though, who created such a helpful document. If it was you, let me know!

Tim Longhurst uncovered The TED Commandments – rules every speaker needs to know. They’re the list of ten presentation rules that are given to each TED speaker, and they’re good to keep in mind for any type of public speaking.

Tom Woodward has created a neat searchable website utilizing all of the TED Talks. He is using software from MIT called Exhibit and just posted it. TED must be “in the air” today!

Here are two lists of favorite TED Talks made by education bloggers whose judgment I trust:

Top Ten TED Talks by David Deubelbeiss

Dangerously Irrelevant has posted the Top 20 TED Talks podcasts for busy school administrators.

Learn Out Loud also has lots of audio and visual resources that I’ve found useful in my own teaching. They have their own list of favorite TED Talks.

There’s now an application that lets you watch all the great TED Talks from your desktop without having to be connected to the Internet.

Suggestions and feedback, as always, are 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.

I’ve written several posts about TED Talks.

Here’s one on the world’s interest in learning English. It’s described like this:

Jay Walker explains why two billion people around the world are trying to learn English. He shares photos and spine-tingling audio of Chinese students rehearsing English — “the world’s second language” — by the thousands.

I‘ve posted about my interest in using TED Talks in my International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge class next year, and my interest in adapting some of those lessons for use in my Intermediate English class.

Using them with English Language Learners just got easier with the announcement they’re adding subtitles to the videos. You can read about it at Free Technology for Teachers.  You can also read more at the National Public Radio All Tech Considered blog.

Many of you might be familar with Videos from TED, called TED Talks (18 minute presentations from creative figures that are presented at an annual conference).

Teaching With Ted is a wiki put together by Jackie Gerstein to help teachers use these talks in the classroom.

Blogger Tim Longhurst has just published the list of ten presentation rules that are given to each TED speaker, and they’re good to keep in mind for any type of public speaking.

I’m going to reprint the first five here, but, since he did the work to find them, I figure it’s only fair that you should have to visit his blog to find the last five (Tim is a gracious guy, and was kind enough to leave a comment on this post sharing the remaining five rules so people don’t have to go to his website to get them.   You can find them in the comments here, but I’d still encourage you to go to his blog)

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.

2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.

3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.

4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.

5 Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.

Videos from TED, called TED Talks (18 minute presentations from creative figures that are presented at an annual conference) are regular subjects of discussion in the education blogosphere.

To tell you the truth, though, I never paid much attention to them — yes, I was sure they’d be good for intellectual stimulation, but I didn’t think they would be too applicable to what I’m teaching in school.  There’s only so much time in a day…

The training in Houston last week that I took to prepare for teaching the Theory of Knowledge class for our International Baccalaureate program mentioned these TED talks as good sources for that class and, just as I was thinking I should explore it further, Richard Byrne posted about a wiki called Teaching With Ted.

It shares videos along with lesson ideas connected to each one.

I think it’s a good place for me to start.  I should say that, though I’m sure I’ll be able to adapt many of the lessons I design for Theory of Knowledge so that they will be accessible to my English Language Learners, I’m less sure I’ll be able to do the same for ones requiring use of TED videos.  The language in most of them are just too advanced.   However, I suspect I might be able to still use the “essence” of what I come-up with.  I’ll write about my experiences giving it a try here.

This “The Best…” list requires a bit of an explanation.

I’ve already posted The Best Websites For K-12 Writing Instruction/Reinforcement.  That list primarily contains links to sites that provide direct writing instruction.  And I’ve also posted several lists of Web 2.0 tools where writing is a key feature to using them, including The Best Ways To Create Online Slideshows, The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Animations, and The Best Ways To Make Comic Strips Online.

I thought, though, that it would be useful to create another list of the best places where the primary purpose is just to write, and which make it interesting and easy for English Language Learners and other students to do so.  I don’t think that’s an artificial distinction and, if it is, so be it!

Here are my choices for the Best Places Where Students Can Write Online:

BLOGS:

Obviously, Edublogs has to be on this list. I know many teachers have successfully had their students write their own individual blogs. However, I’ve found it easier to have class blogs and have students write comments. In addition, the ability to have Edublogs Forums (basically a chatboard) is another real benefit. In our International Sister Classes Project, my U.S. History students have been able to write back and forth to a EFL class in Spain (using the Edublogs Forum) asking them about how Columbus and the Conquistadors are taught in that country.  And Edublogs is often the only blogging tool that’s not blocked by school content filters.  You might also find Sue Waters’ post on Tips On Blogging With Students helpful.

Posterous is another great blogging application.  Users can just email what they want posted on their blog and it is automatically posted with the subject line as the title and the body of the email as its content. I was able to copy images off the web and paste them in my email, along with a written description, and it all immediately appeared in my “Posterous.” You can email attachments and some embeddable applications.  You can also post directly to your blog without emailing.  I have students use Posterous together with our United States U.S. History Class blog through Edublogs. Posterous has also just added a group blog feature.

The newest blogging tool that looks pretty darn easy is called On Sugar. It has a lot of intriguing features built-into it, including the ability to create a quiz or poll.

MiCRO-BLOGS:

Micro-blogs are designed for users to write short posts, and to easily add multimedia to them.

Tumblr is the most popular, and was ranked first on The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2007.   Soup is another one that’s easy to use, and is similar to Tumblr.  Posterous is another one.

Diary is a new micro-blogging application that is simple to use. However, you are limited to posts containing 255 characters or less.

I’m adding a new site to this list and it’s called “You Are.” You can only type in 140 characters per entry, but “You Are” stands-out because it lets you easily send the url of an image as well. Having that ability enhances its use with English Language Learners, who can use the tool to also describe photos.

Kontain is a micro-blogging application that’s been around for several months, and it’s quite simple to use. I haven’t blogged about it before because, up until now, it hasn’t had the ability to let you grab images off the Web. They’ve just added that feature.

WRITING ONLINE BOOKS:

There are two stand-out sites that allow users to very, very easily and quickly create their own online books.

Tikatok is a new site that is a real find for English Language Learners (and lots of other students). Users can create online books that they write and illustrate (they can also use lots of images available on the site).

It has a number of features that really make it stand-out. You can make a book from scratch, or you can use one of their many story frames that contain “prompts” to help the story-writer along. In addition, you can invite others to collaborate online with you to develop the book.

Once the book is done you can email the link to a friend, teacher, or yourself for posting on a blog, website, or online journal. You can create the online version for free, but have to pay if you want them to print a hard-copy version.

The other exceptional site is called Tar Heel Reader. It has two great features: 1) It has 1,000 simple books with audio support for the text immediately accessible to Beginning English Language Learners and 2) It makes it as simple as you can get for students to create their own “talking” books using images from Flickr.

Anybody can read the books on the site.  However, in order to have your students create talking books using their “easy as pie” (and free) process, you need to register and have to have a code.  They’re rightfully concerned about publishing the code because of spammers.  Gary Bishop from the site, though, is happy to provide it to teachers.  Just write him at gb@cs.unc.edu and he’ll send it to you.

Storybird is a neat new site where users can choose artwork from a specific artist and then add text to create a storybook. Susan Stephenson from the excellent Book Chook blog has written a post about it, and I’d encourage you to go over and read her description.

E-CARDS:

There are three E-Card sites that I think are a notch above the rest for providing students excellent images and good opportunities for writing.  No registration is required for any of these three sites, and the link to the students creation can be posted on a teacher or student blog or website.

One is Picture History, which offers an enormous number of American History images. All of them can be sent as E-Cards.

Smithsonian Images provides access to that incredible collection, and also allows you to use any of them as E-Cards.

Nations Illustrated has 8,000 images from around the world, and also provides an E-Card feature.

ONE FINAL SITE:

Even though this last site is already on my “The Best…” list for slideshows, I feel I have to include here because it’s so easy to use, and my students have often used it effectively for writing.

Bookr is another great tool for anybody, including Beginning English Language Learners. You just type in a “tag” to search Flickr for images, drag them into a book and write about them. Here are samples made by my students.  No registration is required.

Five Card Flickr Story lets you pick five photos from a group of pre-selected images from Flickr and then write a story about them. It saves your selection and story, and provides you with a link to it. No registration is required.

This Moment is a new blogging/presentation platform that is easy to use. After registering, you can click on a number of emotions and then either upload images or search for them on the web to add. You can also write more if you wish.

The Art of Storytelling is from the Delaware Art Museum. At this site, you can actually use art from the museum’s collection to create your own storytelling experience. It’s pretty neat, and very accessible.

Additional suggestions are 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.

Jeez, there are sure a ton of ways to find images on the Web, as well as many places where you can find lengthy link lists to image collections.

I’d lay odds that most people, including myself, just use Google Image Search when they need to find an image. However, there might be instances when you want to use another tool — perhaps you’re a language teacher searching for just the right clip art or photography to illustrate a verb, maybe you have very young students and are concerned about what they might find on Google,  possibly you’re particularly teaching about copyright issues, or you want your students to easily connect an image to a writing exercise and have them send an E-Card. (Google has recently added an option in their advanced image search feature — go to the bottom left under “license” and choose “labeled for reuse”)

I thought a “The Best…” list might be helpful in one of those, or other particular, instances.

You can also find the links to sites on this list, as well as links to many other image sites, on my website under Images.

So here are my picks for The Best Online Sources For Images (not in order of preference):

Search by Creative Commons provides excellent explanations about what Creative Commons licenses are, and offers a way to search throughout the web for images that have them.

Flickr Creative Commons is another way to find Flickr images offered for use with a Creative Commons license. Flickr Storm is search tool for the same photos (be sure to click “Advanced Search” to make sure your results include only those with a CC license) — just perhaps in slightly more engaging way.

Smithsonian Images provides access to that incredible collection, and also allows you to use any of them as E-Cards.

Nations Illustrated has 8,000 images from around the world, and also provides an E-Card feature.

The University of Victoria Teaching Clipart Gallery has three thousand images specifically designed for language-teaching.

The Royalty Free Clip Art Collection For Foreign/Second Language Instruction from Purdue University is another place to find images useful for teaching English Language Learners.

The Japanese Language Course Support Site is a smaller, but useful, source of language-learning images.

Pics 4 Learning is specifically designed for teachers and students, and has thousands of images that can be used freely.

Clip Art ETC from Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse offers over 38,000 pieces of clip art for students and teachers.

Edupics is one more source of clip art for use in schools.

Photl.com has 160,000 copyright-free images available.

(Mathew Needleman also suggests Morgue File because “it has quite a few images and it’s not blocked in school”)

I’m also adding a direct link to Darren Draper’s excellent post (including additional resources) called The Educator’s Guide To The Creative Commons.

Here are two more simple ways to search for Creative Commons images:

Behold

Simple CC Flickr Search

PicFindr lets you search many photo sites simultaneously and, in addition to defining the image you want, you can define the restrictions for use. For example, I typed in that I was looking for a picture of a lion for educational use, checked the “none” box for licensing requirements (which means anybody can use it — even without crediting the photographer) and got several hundred images to choose from.

I’m adding Wikimedia Commons to this list.  It has four million images, and their reuse agreement states:

almost all may be freely reused without individual permission according to the terms of the particular license under which it was contributed to the project. Depending on what you want to do with it, you probably do not need to obtain a specific statement of permission from the Licensor.

Seems about as broad as you can make it…

I learned about 25 Places To Find Awesome Stock Photos from Lucy Gray, and decided to add some of the sites on that list to The Best Online Sources For Images.  The “25 Places” post has concise and accurate descriptions of the sites, so I’m just going to quote from them.  I’d also encourage you to check-out their entire list:

Free Foto: “Freefoto is made up of 117,600 images with over 150+ sections organized into 3,285 categories. There’s a search function, and usage is completely unrestricted. All you have to do is include an attribution link back to Freefoto.com.”

Free Digital Photos: “Free Digital Photos has a good search function, which is very important when you’ve got this many images under one resource. Photos are nicely grouped into categories for easy and quick browsing.”

Public Domain Photos: “Public Domain Photos is exactly that: a photographer’s domain for public display, all arranged by corresponding categories. There’s a really good search function available, as well.”

Free Historical Stock Photos: “Free Historical Stock Photos contains various historical images, including many by Matthew Brady (Civil War) and Dorothea Lange (Great Depression). This site also includes paintings and vintage posters. The images are gracefully categorized and easily findable with the use of a search function.”

Big Foto is the newest addition to The Best Online Sources For Images list.  It has a large selection of royalty-free images.

Photos 8 is the newest addition to this list. It has thousands of high quality public domain pictures and is easy to search.

100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images is another incredible list of resources.

Heritage Explorer has hundreds of thousands of British-related images available for free educational use.  You can read more about it at the Kent ICT blog.

World Images, according to its site, is a “database that provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains almost 75,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. WorldImages is accessible anywhere and its images may be freely used for non-profit educational purposes.”

Mashable has just posted a great piece, 26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog.  I’ve already included in this post many of the resources they list.  However, they also listed some sites that are new to me, especially the ones that have freely-available video.  I’m also sure that a ton of additional sources will be accumulating in their comments section.  Because of that, for now, instead of just selectively adding some of their sites to my lists, I’m going to include a link to their post here.

All Our Stock has a bunch royalty-free images, and looks pretty good to me.

The Echo Enduring blog just posted a list of eleven sources of copyright or royalty-free images.I’m adding a few of them to this list:

Stockvault

Dreamstime

Stock.xchng

Feel free to contribute your own favorites, too, by leaving a comment.

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.

After I wrote my post on the unique site called Word Count last week, David Duebelbeiss from the great site EFL Classroom 2.0 sent me some more information about Word Count’s creator.

His name is Jonathan Harris, and you can find a bunch of other innovative online projects he created here. I was particularly impressed with the one called We Feel Fine.

David sent along a link to fascinating online TED Talk with Harris.

David also has a nice PowerPoint presentation he made using the We Feel Fine search engine.

Thanks, David!

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences are well-known for their creativity and innovation (and sometimes being, ahem, a little too far out there, too).

I just discovered this fascinating list of 100 Websites You Should Know and Use that was shared at last year’s conference by an editor named Julius Wiedemann. It’s a year-old, which is a long-time in web-terms, but the few on the list I’ve gotten a chance to look at have been pretty neat.

I’m looking forward to going through them all, and I thought readers of this blog might want to explore some of them, too. This list might be old news to many of you, but this is the first time I’ve heard of it.

Yes, it’s time for another one of my “The Best….” lists. This one will highlight the websites I think are the best for teaching about geography.

As in my other lists, the criteria include that the sites don’t require any software download, and that they’re free, engaging, and accessible to English Language Learners.

I suspect that many will disagree with the fact that that Google Earth is not on my list. It’s not there because, one, it requires a download and, two, I just haven’t found it particularly useful. Yes, yes, I know there are tons of lessons and ideas about how to use it, and many teachers apparently teach with it very effectively. In fact, you can find many Google Earth resource links on my Teacher’s Page under Geography Teacher Resources. I’ve just never felt the potential benefit was worth spending my time trying to figure out how to use it.

My opinion might change, though, since I’ve read in more than one place that Google is planning on moving most of the capabilities of Google Earth to a browser-based application so that a download will not be required.

You can find all of these links, along with thousands more, on my website. If you’re interested in this particular list, you might want to make a point of checking-out my Geography page.

Here are my top picks for The Best Websites For Learning & Teaching Geography:

Number twelve is a very creative game called Scribble States. Players have to “connect the dots” with a virtual pencil, and then have to answer a multiple-choice question about which state (in the United States) they just drew. And the whole thing is timed, to boot!

Mapping Our World from Oxfam is a great series of animated and audio lesson on maps, and the accuracy and inaccuracy of their projections affect our view of the world. I’ve ranked this site number eleven.

Number ten is sort of a tie between three sites that are good reference sites for students to use when they’re researching different countries. One is Fact Monster- Countries. Another is DK Online World Desk Reference. For DK you have to get a password, but it’s free, quick and easy to do so. My students, and I, have found these two sites very informative and accessible. The third one, though, I believe is slightly better because it appears to have more up-to-date data and it includes images. It’s called the World Info Zone.

There’s another tie for the ninth spot on my list. Both offer an extensive collection of online videos from around the world. The two are Geobeats and National Geographic Videos.

Eighth place is yet another tie between Zipskinny and HotPads. They both provide extensive demographic information about individual neighborhoods in the United States. Zipskinny presents in fairly straightforward text, while HotPads shows it more visually. You might find it useful to read my original posts about Zipskinny and HotPads to get a little more information on how the two compare with each other.

Mythic Journeys is number seven. You can see, hear and read animated tales about creation myths from around the world at this site. These will certainly help students learn about different cultures.

The Traveler IQ Challenge is probably going to be just about the most difficult map game you’ll ever play. But it’s a lot of fun, and there are “Challenges” from all parts of the world. I’ve ranked these games number six.

Community Walk is number five. Students can put many sites on a map with descriptions and images (which can easily be grabbed off the web). Students can use these to report on countries, describe field trips, and for numerous other mapping assignments. There are lots of these kinds of site, but I’ve found Community Walk to be the most accessible.

Placespotting is number four. Students are shown a spot on the map, and given a series of riddles to help them determine what it is. All these geographic riddles are user-generated, and students can create their own, too.

Nations Illustrated is number three. You can look at beautiful pictures from around the world individually or in a slideshow. Students can choose images to write about and send them as an E-Card. Links to the E-Card can then be posted on an online journal or blog.

There’s a three-way tie for the second spot. Tripwiser, Yahoo Travel, and TripTie all allow students to learn about places and plan a trip to anywhere in the world, which they can then post on an online journal or blog. The sites require free registration, but it’s easy and quick.

Finally, the number one website for learning and teaching Geography is…. the Social Studies page at I Know That. It has tons of different kinds of map games that are informative and fun. Once you click on each game, an annoying pop-up asks if you want to register. But all you have to do is click “maybe later” and it goes away.

Map Battle is the newest addition to this list, and is a very easy-to-use tool to create geography games online.  It’s like a less-fancy The Traveler IQ Challenge game.

Let me know if you think I’ve missed any particularly good geography sites.

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Words is another typing game that I’ve added to a long list of them on my Intermediate English page under Typing.

It comes from the same people who created Letters, another fun activity for typing practice.

I sometimes get a little annoyed by education bloggers who gripe about teachers who won’t embrace technology. For people who are that concerned about it, they might want to consider the old community organizing adage of leading with ears instead of mouths — identify teacher self-interests through listening and relationship-building, and afterwards help them see how using technology can help them get what they want — if it can.

In my nineteen year community organizing career prior to becoming a public school teacher, one tool we used to encourage people to do something they had never done before — participate in public life — was develop what we called “fixed-fights.” These were small-scale actions where new volunteer leaders had an almost guaranteed chance of success. These victories would help them develop self-confidence and a belief that it was worth continuing on the road to greater risks.

We can do the same with both teachers and students (and others) who are new to technology by, as the title of this list says, providing ways for them to easily, quickly and painlessly create online content.

It’s really not that big of a deal to me if my colleagues use a lot of technology. I’m more concerned that they engage their students in higher-ordering thinking skills and “learning by doing,” and believe that can be done with or without high tech.

However, I am interested in my English Language Learner students having good initial computer experiences because I believe that technology can be a huge asset specifically in second-language learning.

To that end, I’d like to share in this list (you might also want to check out my other twenty-plus “The Best….” lists) the web applications I’ve used to introduce students to technology and develop confidence through these “fixed-fights.” I think they can also be introduced to teachers who are a little hesitant to use technology in the classroom.

The only skill required to use these applications is to have a very beginning level understanding of the English language. You do not need to have an email address. You also don’t need to know how to type — none of these sites require a whole lot of writing. You don’t even have to know how to copy and paste for the vast majority of these sites, though in a few you do.

In addition, here are a few other criteria the site had to meet to make this list:

1) No registration is required to use the service.

2) It’s available free-of-charge.

3) Users can create attractive and engaging online content in a few minutes.

4) Users can email the link to the content they created from within the site itself. In other words, there is an email feature within the web application so the user doesn’t have to use his/her own email — even if they have one. I have included a few sites, though, that don’t include this feature — instead, they just provide a link or code that the user has to copy and paste. But the vast majority do have this email feature.

5) The online content the user creates is hosted indefinitely on the web application’s server — it is not deleted within a week or a month like many others do.

6) Even though a microphone, or the ability to upload a photo, might be useful on some of these sites, you can still create engaging content even without the extra equipment or image.

Once the online content is created, users can use the site’s email feature to send it to a teacher who can just look at it or, even better, post it on a webpage. Of course, the ideal option is for students to be able to post it on their own site.

This leads me to the one site I’m going to recommend that does require registration — Jottit. It is, by far, the easiest way to create a website, which can be done in less than five seconds. My Beginning English Language Learners and my more advanced students love having their own website where they can post their own work. It also eliminates a problem for me — I don’t have to get a ton of emails. I just create one Jottit page that contains links to all my student Jottits. I can go there to check their work, and they can use it to see what their peers have created. If you are going to use Jottit, I’d also suggest you review a super-short screencast about how to use it from Demo Girl. Oh, by the way, one advantage of Jottit is that it’s easy to embed creations that provide their code. In other words, you’re able to actually put the content on the website and not just links to the content (assuming the site provides that code).

Again, you don’t have to use a website. Instead, teachers could just have their students email their user-generated online content to them for review.

This list is going to be a little different because I’m not going to rank the sites. All of them are pretty good, so I’m just going to put them in topical categories instead of “good, better, best” ones. In fact, there are so many good ones that this is going to end up being “two part” post since I don’t have the space, nor the time, right now to include every worthy application.

(In fact, I have posted Part Two , Part Three , and Part Four in this series listing many more good sites).

And, now, here are the best ways for students (and anyone else) to create online content easily, quickly, and painlessly:

MAKE A MOVIE: Use Dvolver Moviemaker to create short animations with text bubble dialogue. You can see many examples of these films on my Examples of Student Work page.

WRITE A SONG: Use Let Them Sing It For You to write lyrics, and have each word sung by a different singer. You have to hear it to believe it…Or, if you’re an American Idol fan, you can try Don Pablo’s Tex Mex Serenade, choose a singer and a song, and then use a text-to-speech feature to act as one of the judges. For more ideas on how to use viral marketing gimmicks like this in the classroom, please see my TechLearning article Samuel L. Jackson, My ESL Students, And Me.

MAKE A MAP: There are two sites in particular that allow you easily make and save maps (without registration) that include multiple “pushpins.” These are spots on the map where you can insert more information about different places. These map-making sites are Quikmaps and TinyMap.

CREATE A PIECE OF ART: There are numerous sites that “fit this bill.” They included Imagination Cubed (which actually has multiple uses — see the Solar Systems my students created), Art Pad, Mr. Picassohead, and Etchy (an online Etch-A-Sketch).

CREATE A CARTOON/COMIC: Again, there are a number of great sites in this category. They include MakeBeliefsComix, the Toronto Public Library Tell-A-Story Builder, Scholastic’s Captain Underpants, and Kiddonet.

MAKE A SLIDESHOW: Bookr is about as easy of a slideshow maker as they get. You can search through images with a tag word, drag them into a flip-like book, and add text. My students love it. You can see some of their samples here. For an even easier way to create a slideshow, you can try Colgate’s Smile Slideshow.

PICK AN IMAGE AND WRITE A SPEECH BUBBLE: There are a number of sites that allow you to easily grab an image off the web and add a speech bubble with your text. The best ones are Bubblr and Caption Bubble.

TELL A MEDIEVAL TALE: Use the great Historic Tale Construction Kit to tell a story with images and text while you create a virtual medieval tapestry.

WRITE A POEM: Write ones using virtual refrigerator magnets at Shocked Poetry or Fridge Messages.

CREATE A POLL: Come-up with questions for a poll you want your friends or others to participate in with Snappoll or Flektor (click on “guest”).

DESIGN AN EARTH-FRIENDLY HOUSE: My Abodo lets users design a house and then get a rating for how environmentally-friendly it is.

SUBTITLE A CLIP FROM A BOLLYWOOD MOVIE: Bombay TV lets you choose a scene from a B movie from Bollywood and have fun creating subtitles for the clip.

DESIGN A VERY STRANGE-LOOKING BACKYARD: You can design a bizarre Backyard Paradise, name it and then add a description. Here are some student examples.

SEND A TALKING EGG-A-GRAM: This is another strange example of viral marketing. You can choose the way you want your eggs — scrambled, hard-boiled, etc. — and then use the site’s text-to-speech feature by having your chosen egg “speak” your Egg-A-Gram. Again, you can see some student creations here.

WRITE AN E-CARD: I have links to literally thousands of different kinds of E-Cards on my website. They include ones of images from every country in the world (Nations Illustrated), a Dancing Santa Claus or a Christmas tree, dinosaur pictures, a Valentine’s Day virtual cake, and a big selection of virtual gifts. You can see student examples of these at my website.

CREATE A PICTURE SENTENCE: Write a sentence and select an image to go with each word by using Phrasr.

CREATE A CHARACTER FROM THE DARK AGES: Dress-up the character of your choice from the Middle Ages (Viking, nun, knight, peasant, etc.) with all the accessories.

MAKE A TALKING OTTER: Yes, that’s what it is. Build and send an Ottogram. I wonder how they come up with these things….

DESIGN A FLAG: Go to We Are Multicolored and design and describe a flag that represents you.

CREATE A MUSEUM EXHIBIT: The Object Of History from the National Museum of American History allows you to create a virtual museum exhibition about a number of historical events, including the California Gold Rush, desegregation, and organizing for the rights of farmworkers.

Well, that’s a long enough list for now. I’ll be writing a Part Two of this list in the near future. You might also want to explore my other “The Best….” lists and the 8,000 categorized links on my website.

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Here’s another “Websites of the Year” list. This one will be highlighting Social Studies (Geography, United States History, World History, Economics, and Government) sites I’ve posted about during 2007.

In order to make the list, these sites have to be accessible and challenging to English Language Learners and native-speakers alike. They must also be able to be used by a teacher who only knows how to email and copy and paste a web address.

As in my other lists, a few of these sites were around prior to 2007. However, since I didn’t post about them until this year, I’m including them in this year’s rankings.

I have not included any Web 2.0 applications here. Many of those sites are also useful in Social Studies, and you’ll have to go to those previous lists to find them.

Since I’m covering such a broad area of topics under the title of “Social Studies,” this selection is a little longer than my other ones. I was a able to get it down to nineteen sites, with a tie for first place.

Number eighteen would be a lot higher, but, since it has a history of not being accessible a lot of the time, I’m putting it last on my list. It’s the Holt, Rinehart Winston Social Studies Home Page. It has great free online activities to support their textbooks. Here are two examples. Click on any of the textbooks, then click on any of the chapters, and then go to “Interactive Features” to see the best online exercises. The site has been functioning for the past few weeks, so check it out before it stops working again.

Brainpop is the seventeenth site. It’s made one of my other lists, and it’s only one of two sites I’ve written about that costs money. They have great animated movies and follow-up activities on lots of subjects, including Social Studies. It’s worth the cost. They have various services at various prices. It costs us a few hundred dollars a year.

Number sixteen is DirectGovKids. It’s a very colorful site that, through audio, animation, and text, explains the role of government in the United Kingdom. It’s great for students here in the United States who want to learn how another country’s government works.

The fifteenth-ranked site is the Social Studies page of IKnowThat. Their free map games and quizzes are a hit with both my ESL and mainstream students.

Number fourteen is Wikijunior’s resources on Ancient Civilizations. It’s part of Wikibooks, which is collaboratively developing open source textbooks online.

Hot Shot Business is number thirteen. This is a site from Disney where students participate in stimulations of starting businesses. It provides some good basic economics information, and is very well-designed.

Number twelve is an activity called Consumer Consequences. It’s a pretty sophisticated interactive designed for users to determine their ecological “footprint” and to help them reflect what they could do to reduce it.

The Field Museum’s site called Maps: Finding Our Place In The World is number eleven. The wonderful online activities it offers are too numerous to mention. Just be sure to explore all the links on its “sidebar.”

Number ten is the Geography Challenge from a magazine called Mental Floss. It has a series of good map games that are a little more challenging than the ones on IKnowThat.

Number nine is called Nations Illustrated. It has over 7,000 photos from all over the world. They’re categorized by country, and they’re free to use for non-commercial purposes. One of the neat features it has is allowing any photo to easily be made into an E-Card.

The Zero Footprint Kids Calculator is eighth on the list. It would be difficult to develop a more accessible web tool for people to figure out their own ecological footprint.

Number seven is The Traveler IQ Challenge. This series of geography games is the hardest on my list, and the best.

The next site on my list is designed for use by realtors and people looking to purchase or rent an apartment/house. It’s also a great research tool for students. HotPads is number six. It allows you to identify cities and neighborhoods on a map, and then lets you choose key demographic data. It then shows the data visually on a shaded map, along with a map key.

Number five is The Greatest Race On Earth. It’s another very well-designed and thought-out sight that details the specific environmental consequences of many work, transportation, home, and leisure activities.

Learn About Congress is a site sponsored by Indiana University and is ranked fourth on my list. It has several videos and animations designed to show how the United States Congress works (or,at least, how it’s supposed to work).

Number three is an extraordinary research site called ZIPskinny. All you have to do is type in a zip code for anywhere in the United States, and you immediately get information from the 2000 Census, along with a map of the area. Not only that, you can also compare the data with neighboring zip codes.

The second-ranked site is Awesome Stories. Awesome Stories has been a great source of information, particularly about history, for students since it began in 1999. It has thousands of very accessible stories about countless subjects. It’s also made it on this year’s list because it’s just started to provide audio narration to its content.

And, now, for the two sites that tied for the number one ranking this year:

One is HippoCampus. It has great (and complete) online and accessible textbooks for many subjects, including History and Government. Their resources include extraordinary multimedia presentations.

HippoCampus tied for first place with The Virtual Smithsonian. It’s a fantastic multimedia window into the artifacts, and their stories, held by the Smithsonian Institution. (There now appears to be a problem with this site and link — it’s not working now).

I might still have one or two more lists “up my sleeve,” so keep checking-back.

Links to these sites, and more, can also be found at the Geography & United States History page, and the World History page, on my website.

I learned about Nations Illustrated through a recent post on About.com called Thirty Free Image Resources on the Web.

Nations Illustrated has over 7,000 photos from all over the world.  They’re categorized by country, and they’re free to use for non-commercial purposes.

One of the neat features it has is allowing any photo to easily be made into an E-Card.  Students can write postcards “from” different countries, and then post the urls in blogs or online journals.

I’ve placed the link on several pages on my website, including on the Teacher’s Page, on the Geography page, and on the lengthy list of E-Card possibilities.