Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

It’s time for another year-end “The Best…” list. This one will be sharing my choices for the best eighteen sites to use with English Language Learner students.

Some of these sites may have been around prior to this year, but since I didn’t discover them until now, I’m including them on the list.

Please vote in the poll at the bottom of this post and pick your top five. I’m having my students participate in the voting too, so you might want to consider using it as a lesson with your own students.

Here are my choices for The Best Websites For English Language Learner Students – 2009:

Number eighteen: Town Me is a brand-new “Yelp”-like site where users can write reviews of restaurants, stores, tourist attractions, etc.  I’m adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”.  You can read more about the site at TechCrunch.

Number seventeen:  Bluewalks lets you easily create a “walking tour” with text you write and images you can grab off the web.  It’s another addition to the “authentic audience” list.

Number sixteen:  BBC Memoryshare is a “place to share and explore memories.” The site has a cool-looking timeline where you can access memories that people have written — on just about anything. In addition, and most importantly for this post, you can contribute a memory (after quickly registering at the BBC). Each memory is accessible through the timeline, through a keyword, or through an individual url address.

Number fifteen:  Google expanded their Google Translator Toolkit. It builds on their great Google Translate tool, which is on The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners — 2008 list.  I’d encourage you to read the post at The English Blog, which gives an excellent explanation of the new application.

Number fourteen: Grapevine is an audio “chatboard” that I’m adding to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English. 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.  I love its simplicity and ease of use.

Number thirteen: I’ve posted in the past about how the ability to make easy screencasts — with audio– could be an excellent learning opportunity for English Language Learners (you might want to take a look at that post).  There’s now a great tool called Screentoaster that couldn’t be more simple to use, and they’ve just added both the ability to record audio and add subtitles. All you do after you log-in is click on a button, open up the window on your screen that you want to record, and it starts recording your screen.  After that’s been recorded, you can provide audio or subtitles.  And it’s free.

Number twelve:  Users can create online animations at DoInk. I especially like what sounds like a strict and pro-active policy at ensure classroom appropriate content on the site.

Number eleven: Google also expanded its Google Books service. You can read about all the new additions at TechCrunch. The one that I really like is the feature that lets you embed previews of books into your own blog or website. I’m hoping to use this with students this year. We’re going to be doing some work with other classes, and I can see them writing about their books, embedding the preview, and then having other students respond not only to their writing, but to the preview of the book that they will be able to read.

Number ten:  English teacher Renee Manfroid has created many excellent activities for Beginning English Language Learners, including Colors In English. You can see all of her interactives on her main site.

Number nine: English Raven, a site begun by Jason Renshaw, has just gotten even better with a new feature called World News For Kids. Several stories with images and accessible audio are shown each week, and students can participate in an audio forum, too. All that is free. If you are an English Raven member (and it’s one of only a very few sites on The Best Educational Web Resources Worth Paying For… list — it only costs $20 per year, but also has a ton of materials that are available without paying), additional great materials are provided.

Number eight: Shahi is a dictionary that combines simple definitions with quite a few Flickr photos. The combination of the two makes it pretty accessible to English Language Learners.

Number seven: Nearly two years ago I posted about an excellent site for Beginning English Language Learners called Kindersay. Then it went off-line. It recently came back online again, so I’m including it in this year’s list.

Number six:  Many English Language Learner teachers and students are familiar with Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab. It’s provided high-quality listening exercises on the web for a longtime. It’s now gotten even better with the addition of videos. Video Snapshots for ESL/EFL Students show short video clips along with comprehension quizzes for students to take.

Number five: Pinky Dinky Doo is a new site with a bunch of resources.  I’d encourage you to read a post by Kevin Jarrett that gives a good overview of what it offers.  I’d like to highlight one area of the site that I’m adding to The Best Websites For K-12 Writing Instruction/Reinforcement. It’s called Your Story Box, and is basically a simple cloze (gap-fill) activity where users fill-in the blanks with images that are converted into words. Audio support is also provided to the text.

Number four: Speakaboos provides excellent quality “talking stories” on video with closed-captioning — often read by “celebrities.”   They say they are also going to add the ability to record stories, as well as offering other online activities.  You can watch the stories without registering, though it appears like you will have to sign-up (for free) in order to record stories.

Number three: Welcome To The Web is really quite an exceptional site that acts as a guide for students to learn how to use the Internet. Audio support is provided for the text and users can save their progress in the tutorial. It’s super-accessible.

Number two: BITS Interactive Resources is another one of those sites that was around, then disappeared, and then returned.  It has nineteen “sets” of five different excellent reading activities focusing on “signs, details, matching, gist, and gap.”  It’s also on The Best Websites For Intermediate Readers.

And now, the number one website for ELL’s this year is…a tie between two new applications.

One is Vocabsushi. It’s s a neat new — and free — vocabulary learning site. It includes assessments, audio, learning words in context, and games. The only thing it’s missing are photos and/or videos, but I guess you can’t always have everything. Joyce Valenza has written a post that describes the site in much greater detail. I’d encourage you to read that, and then try out Vocabsushi…

The other number one site is called English Central. David Deubelbeiss has posted a very thorough post about the site titled English Central – Bringing “voice” and output to learning English. I’d strongly encourage you to read it — I don’t feel any need to “reinvent the wheel.” A quick description is that it’s a free video site for English Language Learners, lets users listen to parts of the video, then lets them repeat what the characters says and compares it to the original. You get graded on how well you do. It has even more features, but you can read David’s post or check out the site directly. The other great thing about it is that the videos are all appropriate for the classroom, unlike several other ESL video sites that have come online recently.

Below you’ll see the poll. Remember, people can only vote once, and I’m asking that you vote for no more than five of them. English Central is a late-comer to the list, so even though it’s tied for first, you’ll find it last on the actual poll.

Feel free to leave a comment about other sites you think should have been included on this list.

You might also want to look at the other three hundred plus “The Best…” lists.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

(Cross-posted at TechLearning)

Many years ago I helped operate a soup kitchen on San Jose’s (CA) Skid Row. We were well-meaning, but not the most responsible neighbors. On day I was sweeping around the passed-out men and women on our front porch when a police car drove-up. An officer got out and started yelling me, saying that we couldn’t control thing and they received many complaints about us. As the officer continued, one of the men on the porch pulled himself up on the railing and yelled out, “Officer, Larry tries. He tries hard. We just don’t listen to him!”

I’ve often thought about that incident during my nineteen year career as a community organizer and six years as a public school teacher. I’ve framed the lesson I learned that day as a question, “Do I want to be right? Or do I want to be effective?”

The issue of educational technology is, I believe, no different. Judgmental, frustrated, and angry comments can often be found in the education “blogosphere” as people share their often unsuccessful efforts at integrating ed tech into the learning and teaching culture of their schools.

In my community organizing career, I learned that a key to engaging people to move beyond their comfort zone is to first build a relationship — a reciprocal one. A relationship entails eliciting from others their hopes and dreams, along with sharing your own. It involves finding learning the frustrations and challenges that people are experiencing. It involves looking for ways to help the other person realize those hopes and dreams and get beyond those challenges. And, if educational technology can genuinely help in those ways, then building a relationship means framing the invitation to try it in a way that speaks to what the other person wants, which may not be the way you would prefer to frame it. It is the difference between “being right” and “being effective.”

Based on the conversations I’ve had with many teachers, here are some of the simple ways I’ve introduced using educational technology as tool reluctant colleagues might want to consider — after I’ve developed or deepened relationships with them.  I’ve framed the invitations based on what they’ve said they wanted, which might or might not be similar to what you learn.  Even if they are different, these “A Few Simple Ways To Introduce Reluctant Colleagues To Technology” might provide a useful template for you to develop others.

When talking about using ed tech, I’ve found it important to stress two points — how it helps meet the immediate and direct self-interest of the individual teacher by making things easy and simple, and how it provides added value to the students’ learning experience.  I’ll discuss each of these “Few Ways” in that context.

1) Using a Computer Projector. One simple benefit for teachers is being able to easily show video clips without having to deal a VCR/DVD Projector, or the small size of a TV screen. It vastly increases the number of easily accessible video clips for all subject areas, even if you eliminate YouTube because it’s blocked by most school content filters. Yes, there are ways to access even those, but this post is about the easiest ways to introduce people to tech who might not be comfortable with it.

2) Using a Document Camera. Eliminating the need to make transparencies is every teachers’ dream if they’ve been using an overhead projector, and a document camera does the trick. Being able to have students bring their work up to easily show the class models is a great teaching tool.

3) Easily Creating A More Authentic Audience For Student Work. Students can be much more engaged in, and committed to, what they’re writing/creating for class if they know the audience is for more than just one person — the teacher. Here are some easy ways to make this happen:

To Make It Easily Viewable By Other Classmates:

Any document, including one in Microsoft Word, can be quickly uploaded to the Internet with File2.ws. All you do is click on your file and seconds letter you’re given an url address for it. Once you have that, though, what do you do with it to make it accessible?

There are two options, I think, that make it most feasible to a “reluctant” colleague.

One is by simply creating a free blog from Edublogs (since that is the blog host that is least likely to be blocked by school content filters) and having students past the url addresses of their own creations to the blog as a comment. Other students can leave comments in the same area making observations about their classmate’s posts. Or they can just write them on a piece of paper to share.

Another way is by having each student email their creation’s url address to the teacher. The teacher can then easily copy and paste them to something like Dinky Page, a super-easy website creation tool that doesn’t even require registration. Another option is using sites like Posterous or Moomeo, which both allow you to email what you want to appear on your website without even having to go set it up.

To Make It Easily Viewable By Others Beyond The Classroom:

There are plenty of places where students can easily copy and paste what they’ve created for class so that others throughout the world can read it.  They can also get the url addresses of what they create and post it in one of the ways just mentioned so that classmates, and the teacher, can easily see it. Students can be pretty excited at the possibility, and their level of commitment can increase.  Potential places for students to place what they write (with no added work required from the teacher) include:

Timelines is a neat tool that lets users contribute towards making “timelines” of historical events with text, photos, and videos. People can then vote on which ones they like best, though everyone’s contributions appear to remain displayed.  It’s extremely easy to contribute — much, much easier than to something like Wikipedia. Google’s Knol is also another easy place to use for the same purpose.

Students can write book reviews at Shelfari, Library Thing, and Book Army.

They can decide a question they want to learn the answer to, post it (or have another classmate post it) on one of numerous question/answer sites) and reearch and write the answer.  Good sites for this activity include Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, and Wikianswers (yes, the last two are indeed different sites).

They can create their own online books at Tikatok or Tar Heel Reader.

There are numerous other options, but these are the best ones.  Readers can find more at The Best Places Where Students Can Create Online Learning/Teaching Objects For An “Authentic Audience” and at The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience.”

Yes, these are all small steps. In fact, community organizers call these kinds of things “fixed-fights.” These are the small actions that have an extremely high probability of success that serve as confidence boosters to people trying something new.

The next time you’re feeling frustrated at a colleague who might be resistant to some educational technology you’re trying to introduce him/her to, why not try some relationship-building and simple confidence-boosters instead?

The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…

Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:

* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.

* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.

* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.

* provide some language-learning opportunity (for example, students can write about their creations).

* not require any registration.

You can find previous installments of this series with the rest of my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year. Several hundred sites have been highlighted in these past lists. You might also want to take a look at the first list I posted in this series — The Best Ways For Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly, and Painlessly.

You might also want to look at The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009.

Here are the newest additions:

CREATE A GAME OF HANGMAN: With the Flash Hangman Challenge, you can easily write a phrase, email it to a friend, and it will automatically be turned into a Hangman game that can also be posted on a teacher/student website or blog. No registration is required. I’m also adding it to The Best Sites For Making Crossword Puzzles & Hangman Games.

TALK LIKE AN ELF: K-Mart has just created a “Talk Like An Elf” application. Go to the site, click on Elfspeak, and then record your message or use the text-to-speech option. Your message, which has a pitch that they must figure an elf might sound like, can then be emailed to a friend and the url can be posted on a student/teacher website or blog. You can also embed it, or send it directly to Facebook. It’s a brand new app, and, when I used it a few times, it was a bit temperamental. But I’m sure they’re working the bugs out as I write this.

DESIGN A WEIRD FLOWER: The musical group Black Eyed Peas has created a site called Planting My Ideas. You can use music, images, and words to create your own flower, which would then be posted in the site’s gallery. You can also post the link on a student or teacher’s website/blog, and have students write about it as a language development activity. It’s supposed to inspire creativity.  It’s interesting, fun, and a bit weird.

MAKE A BOOK: With Picture Book Maker, you can easily create a…picture book (including text). It can be saved online or printed out. It’s super-easy to use, plus no registration is required. The url of your creation can be posted on a student/teacher blog or website.

It’s a short list this time, but the next one I’m sure will be filled with a ton of Christmas-related activities.

This is a new annual “The Best…” list. In the past, I’ve posted:

The Best Internet sites for English Language Learners 2007

The Best Web 2.0 Applications for ESL/EFL Learners — 2007

The Best Internet Sites For English Language Learners — 2008

This year, though, I’m going to be posting two separate lists specifically related to English Language Learners. The first is this one, which shares my choices for the best resources made available this year for teaching ELL’s. In a month or so, I’ll be posting a second list that will share sites specifically for students.

That second list will be ranked, and will include a readers’ poll. This one is not ranked, and I have not included a way to vote.

However, if you feel like voting, the polls are still open in two other lists:

The Best Online Learning Games — 2009

The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009

Here are my picks for The Best Sites For Teachers of English Language Learners — 2009 (not in order of preference):

Complete United States History Curriculum Available Online: As regular readers know, during the last school year I taught two U.S. History classes to English Language Learners — one in a regular classroom and the other in the computer lab. You can read more about the results of this research experiment at Results From My Year-Long U.S. History Tech Experiment.  I used a blog during the computer lab class. You can access the United States History Class blog and see an entire year’s of lessons designed for student self-access. You can also see links to the students blogs used during the course. The lessons include quite a bit of original material I developed for use in both of the classes, and they are available for download (during the year students would open up the documents and cut-and-paste the exercises into their own blogs).  You’re obviously welcome to use the resources there with your students. I just ask that you not publish or reprint any of my original materials for use other than by your students.

The “Wizard English Grid”: Jason Renshaw was generous enough to share on his blog about a nifty tool he’s come-up with called The Wizard English Grid.That link will take you to the direct PDF download. You’ll see it’s a simple sheet laid out in a grid. You might be thinking, “Big deal!”  Don’t stop there, though. Go to Jason’s blog post Wizard English Grids for “Finding Out” to learn how he uses it. After reading it, I immediately printed out the Wizard English Grid for use in my own English Language Learner classroom.  Jason also continues to write about more ways he uses the grid and keeps all of his “Wizard” ideas in one place on his blog.

Help For Lesson Planning: Tools For ESL Lesson Planning: A Book of Techniques, Lesson Plans, Activities and Resources For Teaching ESL is the name of a free downloadable book in PDF form. It was compiled by the ESL and Citizenship Programs of the Los Angeles Unified School District. It looks pretty good.

Listening Activities: David Deubelbeiss has posted a very good document for ESL/EFL teachers sharing ideas for listening activities to do in the classroom.

Teaching Recipes: EFL Teaching Recipes is a brand new site that immediately joins The Best Resource Sites For ESL/EFL Teachers.  It’s an extremely accessible site where ESL/EFL teachers can share their lessons, including video and images.  It’s just beginning, and I’m sure it’ll be filled-up with with ideas quickly. Go over and contribute some, as well as read the excellent ones that are already there!  Of course, it’s not unexpected that EFL Teaching Recipes would be so good after you learn who’s behind it — David Deubelbeiss, who’s blog is on The Best ESL/EFL Blogs list and who began and continues to guide EFL Classroom 2.0, which is on a ton of “The Best…” lists.

Teaching About The Environment: The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a free 133 page downloadable curriculum that connects English language-learning with environmental issues.  It’s called Teach English, Teach About The Environment, and looks pretty good to me.

Classroom Starters: A  nice short PDF called “Fifty Stimulating Classroom Starters” shares ideas specifically for ESL/EFL classes. It was put together by Jack Bailey and Marit ter Mate-Martinsen.

News Lessons: Sean Banville is the creator of several excellent websites for English Language Learners and their teachers. Most of them are on various “The Best…” lists, including Famous People Lessons.com (which is on The Best Resources For Researching & Writing Biographies), ESL Holiday Lessons.com (lessons from that site are on many of my holiday lists), and Breaking New English (which is on The Best news/current events websites for English Language Learners).Sean has begun another site called News English Lessons. He describes it this way: “FREE Handouts, Listening & Quizzes in Simple English – Read About the Latest News and Learn English – It’s Easy.” It appears to me that it has current news materials that are even more accessible to English Language Learners than on his Breaking News site.

Two hours before I was going to post this list, Sean let me know that he has just started yet another excellent site called Listen A Minute. It has short audio pieces with supporting materials and online quizzes. It looks like another great resource.

Ideas For Student Activities: Pilgrims is a UK-based EFL/ESL teacher-training organization that — among other things — publishes one of my favorite online journals, “Humanising Language Teaching.”   Their main site, where you can access past (as well as current) issues, is on The Best Resource Sites For ESL/EFL Teachers list. Ozge Karaoglu, whose blog is on The Best ESL/EFL Blogs list, attended a Pilgrims training and wrote two great posts sharing lots of ideas she learned about student activities.  You probably already know many of them, but there certainly were some new ones to me.

Blogging Advice For ESL/EFL Teachers: Karenne Sylvester put together an incredible collection of ESL/EFL bloggers responding to the question What advice would you give to another TEFL teacher interested in becoming a blogger? Thirty-one teachers of English Language Learners responded. Trust me, you don’t want to miss this post.  For what it’s worth, you can read my contribution here.

ESL/EFL Teachers On Twitter: Burcu Akyol has put together an excellent list of ESL/EFL teachers you can follow on Twitter and Shelly Terrell has done the same.

ESL/EFL Blogs: I posted my choices for The Best ESL/EFL Blogs.

Teaching English With Music: I did an interview about this topic with a music education site that people might find helpful.

Writing Activities: David Deubelbeiss has written a nice post sharing quite a few good writing activities to use in class.

Finding New Websites: I’ve written many times about the great site Ressources Pour Le College. It has a ton of great resources for English Language Learners. Michelle Henry, who has been the primary person responsible for locating and organizing all of these resources, is no longer updating that site. Instead, she has created a new site that should be bookmarked by all ESL/EFL teachers.

Getting A Laugh: If you teach English, and if you have a sense of humor, you must go to David Deubelbeiss’ post Funniest videos about teaching / learning English and watch the videos.

You might also be particularly interested in two other lists I posted this year:

The Best Sites For K-12 Beginning English Language Learners

The Best Sites For K-12 Intermediate English Language Learners

Feel free to contribute additional suggestions in the comments section.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore over 300 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

I regularly share my picks for the most useful posts of each month. I also publish a list of the month’s most popular posts, based on the number of times they are “clicked-on.”

I also share a list of Post Rank’s analysis of each month’s top posts. Post Rank uses a variety of ways to measure level of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts. I have a constantly updated “widget” on my blog’s sidebar that lists these posts, but I thought a monthly post would be helpful/interesting to subscribers who don’t regularly visit the blog itself.

Here are their rankings for the month of October:

The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2009

“I Like This Lesson Because It Make Me Have a Longer Temper” (Part One)

Do Your Presentation Slides Pass The “Glance Test?”

“I Made My Agreement With Mr. Ferlazzo And Kept It…”

“I Was Disappointed With What Happened Yesterday…”

Getting Our Students & Their Families Thinking About College

The Best Sites For Students To Create & Participate In Online Debates

“Building A Professional Learning Community At Work”

The Best Sites To Learn About Robots

When Are Teenagers In The “Flow”?

Part Forty Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly

The Best Online Personality, Career, Political & Just Plain Fun Quizzes

The Best Sites For Images Of Fall Foliage (& For Teaching About The Season)

October’s “The Best…” Lists

“How Rewards Can Backfire and Reduce Motivation”

The Best Resources To Learn About The Loma Prieta Earthquake

What Does The Wall Street Journal’s “Perfect Panel” On Changing Schools Have To Say?

October’s Best “Tweets”

The Best Ways To Back-Up Your Computer & Online Work

Here’s my monthly round-up of “The Best…” lists I’ve posted in October (of course, you can find all 340 or so of them here):

The Best Websites For Learning About Multiple Holidays & Anniversaries — October, 2009

The Best Resources To Learn About World Teachers Day — October, 2009

The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2009 — October, 2009

The Best Online Resources For Drivers Education & Car Information — October, 2009

The Best Websites To Learn About The Hmong — October, 2009

The Best Resources For Using Puppets In Class — October, 2009

The Best Sites To Learn About The Nobel Peace Prize — October, 2009

The Best Sites For Images Of Fall Foliage (& For Teaching About The Season) — October, 2009

The Best Sites To Learn About World Food Day — October, 2009

The Best Resources To Learn About The Loma Prieta Earthquake — October, 2009

The Best Online Personality, Career, Political & Just Plain Fun Quizzes — October, 2009

The Best Sites To Learn About Robots — October, 2009

The Best Sites For Learning About Diwali — October, 2009

The Best Sites For Students To Create & Participate In Online Debates — October, 2009

The Best Ways To Back-Up Your Computer & Online Work — October, 2009

Part Forty Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — October, 2009

The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…

Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:

* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.

* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.

* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.

* provide some language-learning opportunity (for example, students can write about their creations).

* not require any registration.

You can find previous installments of this series with the rest of my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year. Several hundred sites have been highlighted in these past lists. You might also want to take a look at the first list I posted in this series — The Best Ways For Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly, and Painlessly.

You might also want to look at The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009.

Here are the newest additions:

SING “LOLLIPOP, LOLLIPOP”: One way to easily teach some vocabulary and practice speaking skills is by having students contribute singing a chorus of the great song “Lollipop, Lollipop” to the world’s biggest online choir.

DESIGN YOUR OWN CONSTELLATION: Create a constellation and post it on a student/teacher blog or website.

WRITE A STORY ABOUT A DOG: At The Dog’s Best Friend Gallery at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you can pick a piece of dog-related artwork, write a story about it, and then post its url address on a student/teacher website or blog.

SEND A TATER TAUNT: In another weird example of viral marketing, you can use a text-to-speech feature to send your personally designed football “taunt.” I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that you have students use it for that purpose, but they could have some fun coming up with some kind of sports-related message that could be posted on their blog.

BE A STAR IN A HALF-TIME SHOW: Keeping with a bit of a football theme, you can search Flickr for a picture of anybody and make them a star in a college football half-time show, then post its link on a blog or website and write about it.

CREATE A MULTIMEDIA SHOW: Oamos is sure one wild search engine! You can use it to create a multimedia show, and then embed it.

COMPOSE A SONG: INudge lets you quickly compose your own song, which can be played on an embeddable widget.  No registration is required.

WRITE ABOUT A SPECIAL MEMORY: Away We Go is a movie (it actually sounds pretty interesting). But the reason it’s included here is the neat online tool they have on their website. You type in any address or location you want that has some kind of special memory for you, and your brought to it. Then, you have an option to pick one of quite a few different musical tracks that might remind you of that significant moment, your write about it, and then the song and what you have written appears on the map. No registration is required.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore nearly 300 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

(Good news! They’re back online. Voting for The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009 closes in two weeks!)

As readers know, I have polls for people to vote on whether or not they agree with the way I rank various year-end polls, including:

The Best Online Learning Games — 2009

The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2009

The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009

However, the application I use to create the polls, “Poll Monkey,” is down at the moment so the polls don’t show-up. With luck, it’s just a temporary glitch on their part , but there’s no way of telling right now. I’ll let people know when, and if, Poll Monkey is back online and my polls return.

Of course, the list of sites, their descriptions, and my rankings are still available.

The two most popular posts that I’ve ever written in this blog have been The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2007 and The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2008, and now it’s time for this year’s edition.

The poll for this list — The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2009 — is located below this post, and closes on February 1, 2010. Please vote for no more than ten of the thirty-two sites listed. Please note that I’ll be listing these sites in my post from my pick from number thirty-two and ending at first place, but the poll is listed in the opposite order.

In order to make this list, a site had to be:

* accessible to English Language Learners and non-tech savvy users.

* free-of-charge.

* appropriate for classroom use.

* completely browser-based with no download required.

It’s possible that a few of these sites began in 2008, but, if so, I’m including them in this list because they were “new to me” in 2009.

You might also be interested in exploring the 300 other “The Best…” lists that I’ve posted over the past two years.

Here are my choices for The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2009:

Number thirty-two: Toobla is a brand new visual bookmarking site. I would actually rank it higher on this list, but didn’t learn about it until after I had completed this post and didn’t have it in me to reorder everything. It lets you very easily display thumbnail images of websites, photos, and videos. You can read in The Best Social Bookmarking Applications For English Language Learners & Other Students how I use these kinds of sites to promote higher-order thinking in students.

Number thirty-one: BookRix is a new site that lets you very easily upload a document which is then turned into an embeddable virtual book. It’s easy-to-use, and the final product has a neat interface that I think students would like. The site also seems to have a fairly strict code on content suitability.

Number thirty: Strutta is a really neat site that lets you very easily create contests (for free) where people can enter videos, images, or text. Multiple winners can be judged by popular vote or by the contest creators.  It has a ton of other “bells & whistles,” too.  Teachers can set-up these contests or, even better, students can create their own. With a little direction, English Language Learner students should be able to navigate the site.  I think there are a ton of ways this can be used in fun and engaging ways for language development.

Number twenty-nine: Embedr lets you easily make a playlist of videos from across the web, and then lets you embed them all with one embed code. This could come in handy if you want your students to watch a series of videos you embed into your own site.   Embedr certainly is compatable with a ton of video-hosting sites, including TeacherTube and Edublogs TV .

Number twenty-eight: WeToku is a neat online app that lets you interview someone via webcam, and records it for later viewing. You can read more about it at Nik Peachey’s blog. There are lot of things that can be done with this kind of tool, but using webcams is problematic at many schools.

Number twenty-seven:  Embedit.in lets you to upload any file or url address, and then create an embed code for it so it can be embedded in a blog or website. It’s made by the same company that created Backboard, which I’m very impressed with.  Webware wrote a post about it that’s worth reading. Embedit.in is very helpful. Students can embed many of their Web 2.0 projects that just allow them to create links right now, such as the ones on my Examples of Student Work page. Instead, they can upload the url addresses of their creations to, for example, websites they’ve made.

Number twenty-six: I’ve added Ediscio to my very tiny The Best Tools To Make Online Flashcards list.  You can create, and use, flashcards very quickly and easily, and grab images and videos off the Web to insert them in the virtual cards.

Number twenty-five: Quizlet is another new site on The Best Tools To Make Online Flashcards.  In addition to letting you create and study flashcards, it also lets you study the words in “game” forms.  Plus, it allows voice recording for some features.

Number twenty-four: Hipero bills itself as “The easiest Free Website Builder ever!”  I don’t know if that’s accurate, but it is, indeed, pretty easy to use.  I’ve added it it to The Best Ways For Students Or Teachers To Create A Website.

Number twenty-three: Doodle has been added to The Best Sites For Creating Online Polls & Surveys.  Registration isn’t required, and it’s extremely easy to create a poll that can be embedded in a blog or website or be accessed via its url address.  Participants can leave comments, too. It appears to have been set-up primarily to organize group events, but it can be used as a poll for just about anything.

Number twenty-two: Yarp is a new web tool that very,very easily lets you create a simple online invitation or survey. I’m particularly interested in the survey aspect, and I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Creating Online Polls & Surveys. It has a lot of benefits:  no registration is required; you can quickly type a question in and choosed various responses (a or b; true or false, yes or no); and those who respond can also write their own comments.  This is a stand-out application for English Language Learners who want to use a simple survey for an in-class project or, even better, with sister classes in other places.  It provides wonderful and accessible opportunities for reading and writing.

Number twenty-one:Flash Meeting looks like a very impressive free application for video conferencing. It’s designed specifically for school use, and you can participate even if you don’t have a microphone (you can text) or a webcam. I’m adding it to The Best Online Tools For Real-Time Collaboration.

Number twenty: PodOmatic is an extraordinarily easy way to create a podcast. Sign-up and your class has your own channel — all you need is a computer microphone. I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.  I’m also adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Create Online Learning/Teaching Objects For An “Authentic Audience”.

Number nineteen: MapBuzz is also a new addition to The Best Map-Making Sites On The Web.  As I describe on that list, using an easy mapmaking site like MapBuzz  can be an excellent learning activity for English Language Learners and all students. “Markers” or “push-pins” can indicate with text and images places visited and routes taken on a field trip; battles fought in a war; key milestones in the life of a student or a famous figure; highlighting key natural disasters around the world — and these are just a few examples.  MapBuzz lets your draw lines, insert images, write text — all in a very accessible way.

Number eighteen: I’ve known about DoInk for awhile, but when I first visited the site it seemed a little too complicated to me for creating an online animation. But I recently visited it again and liked what I saw. I would say it’s slightly more complicated than some of the other animation tools I’ve listed on The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Animations and The Best New Sites Students Should Use With Supervision, but English Language Learners should be able to make simple animations pretty easily. I especially like what sounds like a strict and pro-active policy at ensure classroom appropriate content on the site.

Number seventeen: PinDax is a new web tool that lets you “pin” virtual “Post It” notes on a virtual bulletin board.  It’s very, very similar to a tool I like a lot called Wallwisher.  It has a lot more “bells and whistles” than Wallwisher.  That additional complexity (and I have to admit, it doesn’t seem that much more complex — it just seems to have a lot more options) doesn’t necessarily make it more attractive for classroom use.

Number sixteen: Chirbit is also the newest addition to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.  After registering (which is very easy — I love sites that don’t require an email activation), you can very easily make a recording or use a text-to-speech feature to create audio.  You’re then given a unique url address for the recording.  It’s as simple as that.  It has other capabilities, too, including responding to the audio message.

Number fifteen: Rooh It! is a tool to annotate webpages.  Since the Make Use of blog has written a good post describing it, I’m going to encourage you to read their explanation.  I’d like to highlight a couple of great features, though. One, you don’t have to register for it. And, two, all you have to do is put “roohit.com/” before any web URL address and you can start highlighting and leaving notes about it.  The only negative I see is that it looks a little “busy” — English Language Learners could be a bit confused by all the initial options and text. But a short teacher explanation should take care of that.

Number fourteen: Grapevine is an audio “chatboard” that I’m adding to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English. t’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.

Number thirteen: Gizmoz lets you pick from a variety of images, then choose a background, and then quickly speak a message or, using the text-to-speech feature, type one. Then, after signing-in (registering or signing-in just takes seconds) you can either email the link or post it yourself on a blog or website.  As an opportunity for speaking practice, it doesn’t get much easier, which is why I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English. The only tricky part is that you can access messages other users have created, too.  I didn’t see anything that was inappropriate for the classroom, but I just don’t know how much that’s monitored.

Number twelve: Google Voice is Google’s new phone tool.  In terms of teaching, I could see it as an easy way for English Language Learners, particularly those with no Internet access, to practice speaking “homework.” They can call my Google Voice number, leave a message, and I can then access both their audio and an automatically generated written transcript of what they said. I can then easily embed both on a classroom blog. I’m also adding it to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.

Number eleven: Fur.ly is a new tool that lets you combine multiple links into one.  It’s a little different from others I’ve posted about — they show you visual snapshots of each site that you can then click on one at a time. Fur.ly, on the other hand, shows you the first link in the collection and you can then click on arrows to go review each one.  I’m adding it to both The Best Places To Create (And Find) Internet Scavenger Hunts & Webquests and The Best Ways To Shorten URL Addresses.

Number ten: Sketchcast was on The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2007 list, and then was off-line for a very long time, is now back and operating. It was gone long enough to now qualify for this year’s list. For those of you who don’t remember what it is, It’s like “drawing” a video (you can also type text) that can be replayed.   In Sketchcast you can also easily provide audio narration to your sketch.  Your completed work has a unique url, and visitors can leave comments.  It works for English Language Learners on a number of levels.

Number nine:  Note Pub is a great way for students to share their work on the Web. before, but ignored it because it required downloading an application to upload photos. But a post in Technology Tidbits prompted me to take another look.  It’s extremely easy to register and, it’s very easy to write text. Plus, like Posterous, you can just copy and past images off the web. But it seems even easier than Posterous. Of course, it won’t look as pretty and it’s not really in a blog format. But I think if you’re working with students who have very little technology experience, and you just want them to have an easy place where they can paste their work (and where other students can view it, too, after the links to all student sites are posted on a teacher page), Note Pub might just be the web application to use. Obviously, they won’t be able to post comments, but that can all happen orally.

Number eight: Babelwith.me is the newest addition to both The Best Online Tools For Real-Time Collaboration and The Best Online Tools For Collaboration — NOT In Real Time.  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 (or any other students) communicating with sister classes in other countries.  Another great capability is that the chatrooms themselves appear to stay active indefinitely, so users can come back to them whenever they want to continue the conversation.

Number seven: MapTrot is the newest addition to The Best Map-Making Sites On The Web. No registration is required and it’s super-easy to use. You can write descriptions of the points you place on the map, and you can link to a Google search of images for that place, but you can’t choose a specific photo. (There seems to be a problem with this site — I don’t know if it’s temporary or not).

Number six: Blerp lets you annotate webpages and, I think, might be the best tool of its kind out there. Once you register (which is extraordinarily easy and doesn’t require activation by email), you type in a webpage address, click on “post” and you can type on a virtual post-it note and place it anywhere on the text of the page and you are then given the page’s url with the notes. It’s extremely user-friendly.

But that’s not all.

It also allows you to see what other readers of the same page have written. All those virtual post-it notes are listed on the side of the page. All you have to do is click on a note and it magically appears at the location on the page where it was placed.  I believe a lot of the things many web tools allow you to do are neat, but don’t necessarily provide much “value-added” benefit to doing the same task using non-tech tools. Even the other tools on the “website annotating” best list only let you do the exact same thing you can do with hard copy.

With Blerp, however, after students have completed demonstrating their reading strategies, they can then see what everybody else has written, too. Now, that’s what I’m talking about in terms of a way technology can enhance learning.

I think the ability to annotate webpages — the equivalent of making notes on a written text — is absolutely critical for students to develop their reading skills.  Using “post-it” notes on text to demonstrate the use of reading strategies is a key teaching and learning approach I use in the classroom.  I am always searching for web tools that will allow students to do the same on Internet pages, which is why I created the The Best Applications For Annotating Websites and, obviously, added Blerp to the list.

Number five: I’ve posted in the past about how the ability to make easy screencasts — with audio– could be an excellent learning opportunity for English Language Learners (you might want to take a look at that post). A screencasting tool called Screentoaster couldn’t be more simple to use, and they’ve just added both the ability to record audio and add subtitles. All you do after you log-in is click on a button, open up the window on your screen that you want to record, and it starts recording your screen.  After that’s been recorded, you can provide audio or subtitles.  And it’s free. I’ve also placed it on The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.

Number four: ProProfs, the exceptional multi-tool site that is already on The Best Ways To Create Online Tests and The Best Tools To Make Online Flashcards lists, now may be the number one tool on The Best Sites For Creating Online Polls & Surveys list. Their new poll-making feature has just about everything I’m looking for in a tool to create polls — very accessible, you can easily add images or videos, you can include links, they’re embeddable, there are no limits in the number of responses, you can restrict voting and….it’s free.

Number three: Wallwisher lets you, with very, very minimal registration, create a “wall” where you can place virtual sticky-notes. You can allow others to also place notes on the board, or keep it so that only you can do so (which is what I would recommend for students). The sticky-notes can include images you grab off the web, videos, or websites, and you can add text to them (you can also just include text without adding anything else). Each sticky has a 160 character limit for text.

Wallwisher appears to me to be one of the most useful Web 2.0 sites I’ve found in awhile. It can be a great place for students to use higher-order thinking by creating categories of images (and descriptions) or short texts they copy and paste (or write themselves). It can also be used as a site for social bookmarking of websites if you just right-click the website you put inside the sticky-note and then click on “open in a new window.”

I’ve explained in The Best Social Bookmarking Applications For English Language Learners & Other Students more details on how a site like Wallwisher can be used by English Language Learners for categorization and website bookmarking applications, and I’d encourage you to take a look.   The other sites listed there can be used for similar purposes, but Wallwisher appears to be the easiest and most user friendly of the bunch.

Number two: PhotoPeach is an excellent online slideshow creator that is very easy to use. You can upload your own images as well as grab them off the Web.  Plus, you can also now create quizzes within your slideshow. I’ve also added it to The Best Ways To Create Online Slideshows.

Number one: File2.ws lets you, without registering, quickly upload any document and turn it into a webpage.  This is an extraordinary tool.  You can see examples of how my students used it to create multilingual materials on swine-flu prevention. Students can create anything, for example, using Microsoft Word, and immediately turn it into a webpage.  This is an extraordinary way for people who are not familiar with creating online content to use a program that they’re familiar with — like Word — and develop something very useful that can be shared with everybody.

Don’t forget to vote in the poll that appears after this post.

As always, feedback is welcome.

Here’s my monthly round-up of “The Best…” lists I’ve posted in September (of course, you can find all 320 or so of them here):

The Best Online Carbon Calculators — September, 2009

The Best Sites To Learn About The September 2009 California Wildfires — September, 2009

The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis — September, 2009

The Best Sites Where Students Can Plan Virtual Trips — September, 2009

The Twenty Blogs I Read First… — September, 2009

The Best Resources For Learning About Homework Issues — September, 2009

The Best “Fun” Sites You Can Use For Learning, Too — 2009 — September, 2009

The Best Resources For Learning About Mexico’s Independence Day — September, 2009

The Best Sites To Learn About Georgia’s Floods — September, 2009

The Best Online Resources To Teach About Plagiarism — September, 2009

The Best Resources For Learning Research & Citation Skills — September, 2009

The Best Web Resources For Learning About HIV & AIDS — September, 2009

Part Thirty-Nine Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — September, 2009

The Best Sites To Learn About The Tsunami In American Samoa — September, 2009

I regularly share my picks for the most useful posts of each month. I also publish a list of the month’s most popular posts, based on the number of times they are “clicked-on.”

I also share a list of Post Rank’s analysis of each month’s top posts. Post Rank uses a variety of ways to measure level of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts. I have a constantly updated “widget” on my blog’s sidebar that lists these posts, but I thought a monthly post would be helpful/interesting to subscribers who don’t regularly visit the blog itself.

Here are their rankings for the month of September(actually, all of these posts tied for the highest rank — once a post reaches a “10″ in Post Rank, it can’t go any higher):

“10 Interesting Ways To Use A Wiki In The Classroom”

Reading Logs — Part Two (or “How Students Can Grow Their Brains”)

The Twenty Blogs I Read First…

Concerns About Book “Leveling”

The Best Part Of The President’s Speech & How I’ll Use It

The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis

Great New Website From The BBC For Math, English & Science

Part Thirty-Nine Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly

Finding The Most Popular “Search” Terms

The Best Resources For Learning Research & Citation Skills

“Now I Know My Brain Is Growing When I Read Every Night”

The Best Online Resources To Teach About Plagiarism

Helping Students Develop Self-Control

INudge lets you quickly compose your own song, which can be played on an embeddable widget.  No registration is required.

I don’t think it’s quite good enough to be added to The Best Online Sites For Creating Music, but it will make it onto the next addition of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly.

The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…

Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:

* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.

* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.

* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.

* provide some language-learning opportunity (for example, students can write about their creations).

* not require any registration.

You can find previous installments of this series with the rest of my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year. Several hundred sites have been highlighted in these past lists. You might also want to take a look at the first list I posted in this series — The Best Ways For Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly, and Painlessly.

You might also want to look at The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009.

Here are the newest additions:

SEND VIRTUAL FLOWERS: With Flowers 2 Mail, you can create a virtual bouquet and send a message with it. Both can be posted on a student or teacher website.

CREATE A VIRTUAL STUDENT’S BEDROOM OR DORM ROOM: Ikea’s Spacemaker is a very cool application that students will love. It’s very simple to use — much more so than some others that are out there.

RECORD AN AUDIO MESSAGE: Audio Pal is a new tool that lets you easily record a message — either by using a phone, computer mike, or text-to-speech — and then add the embed code to your blog or website. Students can update it as often as they want, and get as many different ones that they want. It’s pretty neat.

SEND NEAT PHOTO eCARDS: Onexposure provides very unique photos to send as eCards, which can then be posted on a student blog or website (Thanks to kdwashburn for the tip).

MAKE A FLIPBOOK: The Flipbook Maker lets you make a multilple page “flipbook” that creates the illusion of movement. Students can title it, write a description, and post it (Thanks to Diana Dell for the tip).

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore nearly 300 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

Here’s my monthly round-up of “The Best…” lists I’ve posted in August (of course, you can find all 300 or so of them here):

The Best Sources For Free & Accessible Printable Books

The Best Sites To Teach & Learn About Ramadan

The Best Sites For Learning Online Safety

The Best Resources For Learning About The Warsaw Uprising

The Best Resources For Learning About The Atomic Bombings Of Japan

The Best Resources To Learn About Copyright Issues

The Best Teacher Resources For Online Student Safety & Legal Issues

The Best Resources For Finding And Creating Virtual Field Trips

The Best Websites For Learning About Labor Day

The Best News/Current Events Websites For English Language Learners — 2009

The Best Sites For Students To Record Audio By Phone

Not “The Best,” But “A List” Of Ways To Convert PDF & Word Documents

Part Thirty-Eight Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly

The Best Online Learning Games — 2009

The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…

Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:

* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.

* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.

* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.

* provide some language-learning opportunity (for example, students can write about their creations).

* not require any registration.

You can find previous installments of this series with the rest of my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year. Several hundred sites have been highlighted in these past lists. You might also want to take a look at the first list I posted in this series — The Best Ways For Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly, and Painlessly.

You might also want to look at The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009.

Here are the newest additions:

REQUEST SOME “BLISS”: In yet another bizarre example of viral marketing, Jamba Juice has created a gimmick that can be very useful to English Language Learners (see my article titled Samuel L. Jackson, My ESL Students, and Me to learn more how I use these web tools for language-development).Jamba Juice lets you make a virtual Brown Bag Bliss Request. You choose a a face to put on a paperbag, type in a message of something you want in life, and then its text-to-speech feature has a person with that bag over their read speak the message. It can then be posted on your blog or website.

SEND AN eCard: eCards is a new site that lets you create and send a lot of different….eCards.  No registration is necessary, and the site also hosts what you send.  The link can be posted on a student blog or website.

SEND SOME “MIXED-UP FRUIT”: A fruit drink company lets you write a message and send a very weird animated card of bizarre fruit (Where do they come up with this stuff?)

PARTICIPATE IN A VIRTUAL MARCH AGAINST BREAST CANCER: Create a virtual “you” and march against breast cancer.  If you do, a company will make a contribution to fight the disease.

DANCE ON THE MOON: Upload a picture, or choose one of theirs, and NASA will have you dancing on the moon. Students can create one, and then describe what they’re doing.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore nearly 300 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

Some  (though certainly not all) people who advocate for progressive education issues or for increased use of educational technology in schools complain a lot about how difficult it is to get people to “agree” with their priorities. I‘ve shared a few of my thoughts on this issue reflecting my nineteen year career as a community organizer.

An opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today shares some similar perspectives. It’s titled “How Obama Can Build Influence” but the points can be applied to anybody who wants to make change.

The author refers to a popular business book called Influence: Science and Practice. In it, Robert Cialdini, the author, describes what he thinks are six key factors towards building influence: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.  I haven’t read the book, or even heard of it before today (I just ordered it), but it sounds like there is some similarity to community organizing principles.  Organizers, though, might say that building relationships and reciprocity are the two most important ways.

Check-out the column.  It gives ideas on effective things to do for those who now spend time whining and complaining about how people won’t listen to them even though they’re “right.”

I regularly share my picks for the most useful posts of each month. I also publish a list of the month’s most popular posts, based on the number of times they are “clicked-on.”

I also share a list of Post Rank’s analysis of each month’s top posts. Post Rank uses a variety of ways to measure level of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts.  I have a constantly updated “widget” on my blog’s sidebar that lists these posts, but I thought a monthly post would be helpful/interesting to subscribers who don’t regularly visit the blog itself.

Here are their rankings for the month of July (actually, all of these posts tied for the highest rank — once a post reaches a “10″ in Post Rank, it can’t go any higher).

The Best “Practical” Ed Tech Blogs

Google Voice & English Language Learners

What Do You Do On The First Day Of School?

The Best Sites Where ELL’s Can Learn Vocabulary

The Best Sites To Learn About The Apollo 11 Moon Landing

The Best (& Most Thoughtful) Blogs On “Big Picture” Education Issues

Yack All

The Best Sites To Help ELL’s Learn Idioms & Slang

The Best Sites To Learn About Advertising

The Best Twitterers For Sharing Resource Links

The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009

Earlier this month, I wrote an article titled Teaching Secrets: How to Use Leftover Class Time Wisely that was published by Teacher Magazine. It appeared a week ago as part of a series coordinated by the Teacher Leaders Network. That functions as a sort of “Part One” on this topic. In order to view the whole article, you have to register for the Education Week site. It’s free, though, and only takes less than a minute. You’ll see where it says “Free Registration” just below the beginning portion of the article that you can see.

I’d strongly encourage readers to check-out that piece, where I share a few of the ideas shared by readers of this blog in a previous post. I also share some of my own and frame them in a bit of a community organizing context.

In this “Part Two” post, I’d like to more completely share reader suggestions and also include some links to additional resources that you might find useful.

This is the latest post in my “What Do You Do?” series. Previous ones have included:

What Do You Do When You’re Having A Bad Day At School?
What Do You Do To Keep Students (And You!) Focused Near The End Of The Year?
What Do You Do On The Last Day Of Class (Part Two)?
What Do You Do When You Have A Few Minutes Left In Class? — Part

The next question I’ll be tackling is “What Do You Do On The First Day of Class?”

I’m eager to hear what readers do.  I’ll, of course, highlight your ideas (with credit) in the post.

Please share how you handle your first day of class each year.  You can leave a comment at my original call for contributions (the experiences that have already been shared are great, and you can see them there).   The “deadline” for comments will be August 15th.

Now, back to the primary topic of this post — What Do You Do When You Have A Few Minutes Left In Class?

I’d like to give a framework for this post by quoting what I wrote in the Teacher Magazine article:

“My thoughts … fall into seven categories: Review, Summarize, Relate, Reflect, Intellectually Challenge, Technologically Engage, and (a student favorite) Chill.”

In this post, though, I’m adding an eighth one — Read.

1) REVIEW:

A common plan is to use the extra time for review.

Angela Cunningham:

I teach Geography, so the last 5-10 minutes of class time is always well spent reviewing maps. We grab atlases and compete to see who can find a random country the fastest. The first one with their finger on the country and their hand in the air wins. It’s easy and requires no advanced preparation, but has long-lasting results.

R. Turneron

I teach 3 subjects, but this doesn’t matter because they all need the review. I like to review the day’s topic with real-world applications. When I taught Area the application was painting. If you want to paint the classroom three colors what are the colors and a close approximation of the amount paint you would need? Some are still trying to figure out the amount of paint!

Karenne Sylvester

I have several options (to keep things from getting stale

1. Vocabulary Review – students go back through their books- previous units or through my conversation control sheets and look for highlighted words and make example sentences.

2. Vocabulary Review – students take two words from their lessons today and tell me how they anticipate activating these new words in English conversations during the coming week.

3. Feedback – how are we doing? What have we learned so far/ in the lesson today / how can we apply this knowledge to our real lives?

Amyon

I love to play the Princeton Review Vocabulary Minute for my students. There are always 4-5 words that go with the theme of the song. Whether it is a greek/latin/french root, or a list of synonyms, the students like to sing along and try to remember the words and meanings at the end (for a small treat, usually… cap eraser or m&m). Sometimes, for the really good ones that we play over and over, I’ll catch the kids singing them on their own, or even asking me to play them.

Mister Teacher

I teach 3rd grade math, so on days when we have a few minutes left (rare), we play little math games that don’t require cards, pieces, or any kind of equipment. “Math around the World,” or a “Multiplication Bee” or something like that. The kids enjoy it because it’s a game, and it helps to drill their basic facts.

Paula Mc

As a third grade teacher teaching South Carolina History and ELA I use the last 5 min. for a review of South Carolina Facts. Each week my students have 10 SC social studies facts that they have to know by Friday. So each day I review. I also take that time to read to my student.

2) SUMMARIZE:

Summarizing the day’s lesson is another good activity.  I’d highly recommend Rick Wormeli’s book Summarization In Any Subject: 50 Techniques to Improve Student Learning,

3) RELATE:

Using the time to get to know students is another excellent idea.

Gladys Baya

I teach classes of over 30 teens and usually assign some homework, so if I finish everything I’d planned before the bell goes off, I usually encourage them to start working on their homework so that they don’t need to go about it at home. If they have tests on other subjects after my lesson, they usually request permission to use that time for reviewing, and I let them. While they do whatever they’ve chosen to do, I walk around and try and start some casual conversation with those of them I haven’t had much chance to interact during the lesson, especially if they seem not to be using their time in any fruitful way… it’s just light-hearted chat on any topic of their interest, not on the point of the lesson!

adventurelearning

Reminds me of 2 years ago when I was teaching biology.. In last few minutes, I ask my student about their activities in campus or home…also about their boy/girlfriend.. I make a last minutes as relax as possible cause I want to also be their friend..

4) REFLECT:

Taking time to think about what students are learning actually “means” to them and their lives is a good way to spend a few minutes, too.

Edna

One of the thinking routines from Project Zero http://tinyurl.com/dgr79f (highly recommended reading !)
eg Connect Extend Challenge. How does today’s learning connect to what you already knew? How did it extend your thinking further? What challenges/questions do you still have?

5) INTELLECTUALLY CHALLENGE:

Using short mysteries or “lateral thinking” puzzles was also mentioned (as well as a number of other ways to stimulate students’ minds). Here are two good sources for lateral thinking puzzles:

Realistic Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Lateral Thinking Problems

Kelly Hines:

I have a book of 5 minute mysteries. We read aloud and students use their inductive and deductive reasoning skills to try to solve the mystery.
I also have all of the review games that I’ve developed over the year for our interactive whiteboard. They are always readily on hand to open up and use to go back over previous units of study.
There are also some fun vanity license plates to decipher here (http://www-chaos.umd.edu/misc/). The kids love the challenge!

Lianne:

I play critical thinking games or read out brain teasers. I also have a student submitted (pre read) joke/riddle box.

Derek Smith

The kids love it when we get out the Brain Quest, or Trivial Pursuit Cards. Another good time filler we do is math facts around the world style.

P.ALES

I can always capture their interest with a SCIENCE DEMO of the DAY (related to the topic presented). Occasionally with 5-10 minutes left we close our books and brainstorm new vocabulary or even play a quick game of vocabulary challenge. Whatever I choose it keeps them going to the very end.

Here’s a teacher with a lot of options that cross all categories, but I’m putting all her ideas here:

Barb

I teach fifth grade. Here are some of the things I do when I have five minutes of class time:

1) Pick sticks (random selection) for one minute speeches for table points. Some of the topics include such things as, tell all the uses you can think of for chewing gum. They aren’t allowed to say what the topic is, the class has to guess. Another might be, convince the class that you would be a good president. I have over 100 topics on laminated papers prepared, so they never have the same topic in a year.

2) Spelling sparkle to review spelling words.

3)Watch a segment from http://www.thefutureschannel.com (all clips are five minutes or less) professionals showing their job and relating how math and science help them in their profession. (Free)

4) Watch a clip from Brainpop.com. My school purchased a membership for me, but you can have a trial with an email account for one week without purchasing. Excellent learning tool.

6) TECHNOLOGICALLY ENGAGE:

Technology can be a useful tool — inside the classroom or in the computer lab.  Some specific resources for these area can be found in these lists:

For Online Learning Games That Can Be Played Or Created Quickly please go to my “The Best” list and look under “Games” or look at these:

The Best online Learning Games– 2007
The Best Online Video Games For Learning Language & Content Knowledge
The Best “Fun” Sites You Can Use For Learning, Too
The Best Websites For Creating Online Learning Games
The Best Online Learning Games — 2008
The Best Sites For Making Crossword Puzzles & Hangman Games
The Best Fun Sites You Can Use For Learning, Too — 2008
The Best Online Games Students Can Play In Private Virtual “Rooms”
The Best “Cause-Related” Online Learning Games
The Best “I Spy” (Hidden Object) Games For Vocabulary Development
The Best Collections Of Online Educational Games
The Best Places To Read & Write “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories
The Best Places To Find Online Video Games For Language-Learning

For Examples Of Ways Students Can Create Online Content In Minutes:

The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2008

The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009

Here are some other ways teachers use technology during “leftover” time:

deyenbergon:

If I’m working with computers I get the students to “post” a highlight, lesson learned, or question on http://www.wallwisher.com/ In the classroom I love bubble basic facts practice on the Smartboard, throwing the koush(that’s definitely spelled wrong) at the circles to reveal the fact, and then the answer.

kirish43

I teach project based differentiated instruction so there are always diverse projects going on-but an idea I love to try and work in is using the classroom blog site.

This next teacher also has several different ideas she uses, but since the one she listed first related to computers, I’m placing her whole comment in this section:

Beth Diaz

We work on a quick Renaissance program called Math Facts in a Flash to practice math facts on computer. I read aloud math brainteasers and make up my own. I challenge students to come up with long “incredible Equations” for the number of the school day-How many days have we been in school? I read aloud from whatever read aloud chapter book we have going at the moment.  Or since I teach second grade all boys, we may take a one minute organize your desk or locker break.

7) “CHILL”

Just giving students a few minutes of free time to chat is something I do very occasionally, and others do, too.

Hadass

I teach high school, so if it is only 5-10 minutes, I let them chill. Everybody needs some downtime, and many schools have eliminated breaks during the morning and afternoon.

But it doesn’t just have to be a few minutes to chat — singing is another alternative..

TeacherC

I love to bring out instruments (if I have any) and sing songs. Sometimes the songs are related to content, other times, they are fun songs that we sing as a class.

erik

I teach 7th grade go and most of students get done at varying times, so on most days I send them to my free time page. It has tons of quasi education fun stuff for them to do. It keeps the fast workers occupied and allows the slower ones time to finish up.

8)READ:

Karen McMillan

I have a few things I might do if I have some extra time at the end of a class. My favorite is to read to them. Even seventh graders love to hear a story. On Friday, while we were waiting for the parents to arrive for our field trip, I started reading “The Phantom Tollbooth” to them. Within thirty seconds of starting, you could hear a pin drop in my classroom!

Of course, the fact that it’s so much fun for me to read out loud and do the voices and put on a little performance, has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Jenny

As a first grade teacher I’ve always got a book or two ready to read. Other options include various ways to practice math facts, playing spelling sparkle, or telling a story that we each add on one by one.

Thanks to everybody who contributed! And feel free to leave more ideas in the comment section of this post…

Here’s my monthly round-up of “The Best…” lists I’ve posted in July (of course, you can find all 300 or so of them here):

The Best Sites To Help ELL’s Learn Idioms & Slang

The Best Images Of Weird, Cool & Neat-Looking Buildings (& Ways To Design Your Own)

The Best (& Most Thoughtful) Blogs On “Big Picture” Education Issues

The Best Guides To ESL/EFL/ELL Terminology

The Best Sites To Learn About The Apollo 11 Moon Landing

The Best “Language Maps”

The Best Sites Where ELL’s Can Learn Vocabulary

The Best “Practical” Ed Tech Blogs

The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009

The Best Sites To Learn About Advertising

The Best Sites For Learning About Nelson Mandela

The Best Twitterers For Sharing Resource Links

The Best Sites For Learning How To Tell Time

This is the first of many year-end “The Best…” lists I’m writing. There’s a reader’s poll at the bottom of this post which will close on November 1st.

You might also want to read The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2008.

This list brings together what I think are this year’s seventeen best ways to create online content easily and quickly. These web tools are excellent ways for English Language Learners, and others who might not be very tech-savvy, to have a good experience working with technology.

In order to make it on this list, web tools must be:

* accessible to English Language Learners.

* available at no-cost.

* able to be used to easily create engaging online content within minutes.

* willing to host user-created work indefinitely on the website itself.

* appropriate for classroom use.

* accessible without requiring registration.

You can read here how I have students easily display their work online.

A very small number of the applications that have made it on this list are viral marketing tools. You can read this article about how I use these in the classroom.

I’d like people voting in the poll to select no more than ten of the seventeen tools on the list. Please note that voters will only be able to participate in the poll one time, and (at least theoretically) will be prevented from voting more than once.

If you’re reading this post in an RSS Reader, you’ll have to come directly to my blog in order to vote. For some reason, the poll isn’t included feeds from this blog.

Here are my choices for The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly:

Number seventeen is: BECOME A TALKING STAR TREK CHARACTER: Using the text-to-speech feature, choose a Star Trek character and have him/her speak, then post it on a student/teacher website.

Number sixteen is: DESIGN A WEIRD BACKYARD: Create a decorative backyard, write a message using the text-to-speech feature, and post the link to your Eddiegram on website or send it to a friend.

Number fifteen is: MAKE A QUILT ONLINE: The International Quilt Study Center & Museum lets users create their own quilt. They can then email the link to a friend and/or post the link on a teacher or student website or blog

Number fourteen is:CREATE A “PHOTROPISM”: At Phototropism you “create sculptures that react like plants to weather conditions.” You can then email the link for posting. It’s cool – in a very weird sort of way.

Number thirteen is: SEND A TALKING MESSAGE FROM A CHEETAH: Type in a message, and then have Chester Cheetah use a text-to-voice feature to say what you’ve written. Next, email your message so the link can be posted on a website or blog. Better yet, try using Embedit.in so you can embed – in your webpage – any student-created work that only provides a url address

Number twelve is:CREATE A DATA VISUALIZATION:The New York Times Visualization Lab looks like it’s going to be a fascinating place to visit periodically. It provides data the newspaper gathers (it looks like they are adding new information regularly) and then users can choose from a variety of different options to “visualize” it. You’re then provided a link and an embed code for your creation. Students could then post it on their own website and describe it. Not only can this be a neat place for English Language Learners to gain a better understanding and analysis of current events through the use of visuals, but it can also offer them higher-order thinking opportunities to try and identify which form of visualization portrays a more accurate perspective

Number eleven is:MAKE A “BEAUTIFUL CONNECTON”: Nokia lets you choose an artistic creation, type a message that goes with it, and then make an audio recording. You can then email and post the url of the final result on a website.

Number ten is: PUT A CAPTION BUBBLE ON AN IMAGE: Caption Bubble lets you very easily find an image on the web and add a text caption bubble. The link can then be emailed and/or posted on a student or teacher blog. I’ve posted about this site before, but it appears to have gotten even better. You can find many other similar tools on my website at Student Photos.

Number nine is: WRITE A FORTUNE FOR A FORTUNE COOKIE: Unfortunate lets you do just that. There are other similar web applications out there, but those seemed to have example fortunes that were inappropriate for the classroom.

Number eight is: DRAW A PICTURE (& TYPE TEXT): Any Canvas lets you draw something, and includes a lot of “bells and whistles.” You can type in text as well, and post the link to your creation on a blog or website.

Number seven is: BECOME A TALKING POTATO: With Spud Yourself! you can turn your image into a talking potato (or use one of the site’s pictures). By using the text-to-speech feature, English Language Learners can develop their language skills in a fun way through writing and listening. You can post the link to your talking potato on a teacher or student blog/website.

Number six is: SEND A HEALTHY E-CARD: The Centers For Disease Control have a huge collection of E-Cards related to health.  You can add your own message, email it to a friend/teacher, and then post the url on a website or blog.

Number five is: CREATE A NEAT-LOOKING ESSAY OUTLINE: aMaps let you create a visualization of a basic essay form – state your position and provide reasons, along with examples. After completing a scaffolded outline, you’re provided with a pretty neat looking visual picture of what you’ve developed, along with the embed code. You can also email the link to a friend or teacher for posting on a blog or website, and then people can respond to what you wrote.

Number four: CREATE AN INFORMATIONAL MAP: Show/World & Show/USA (which are on The Best Map-Making Sites On The Web list ) lets you create visual representations of information using maps. Students can then embed their creations on their blog/website and describe what they’ve done.

Number three is: CREATE A TALKING ANIMAL: Talking Pets lets you do it.  You can choose a pet picture, or upload your own. Then, using the text-to-speech feature, you can have it say a short message, then email the link for posting on a blog or website.

Number two is: WRITE A PICTURE STORY: 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.

And, now, the Number one tool to create online content easily and quickly is: POST ANYTHING ONLINE IN SECONDS: File2.ws lets you, without registering, quickly upload any document and turn it into a webpage.  This is an extraordinary tool.  You can see examples of how my students used it to create multilingual materials on swine-flu prevention. Students can create anything, for example, using Microsoft Word, and immediately turn it into a webpage

Below you’ll see the poll. Remember, people can only vote once.  The sites are listed in the reverse order that you’ll find within this post — my choice for number one is the first one listed in the poll widget.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore nearly 300 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.