Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

If I’m teaching a Geography class to English Language Learners, or a straight English class to Beginning or Intermediate English Language Learners, I will teach a series of units that begin with Planets and Space; then go to the Earth and its continents; next to our country; then to our state; next to our city; and then, finally, to our neighborhood.

The Essential Question that guides this series is “Where Do We Live?”

I thought readers of this blog might be interested in several “The Best” lists sharing the websites I use to support these studies, and so I’m starting off with The Best Sites For Learning About Planets & Space.

You’ll also be able to find all these sites, and many others that did not make this list, on my website under Planets and Space.

As in all my lists, the criteria for a site to be here include that it must be accessible to English Language Learners and providing engaging content: I haven’t listed these sites in any order of preference.

Here they are:

Solar System Song from the British Council

The Starchild site from NASA has several excellent pages that provide images, text, and audio support. They include ones on the Solar System, the Universe, what they call Space Stuff. and short biographies of space pioneers.

A neat interactive exercise where students can Design A Satellite.

The Language Guide page on Space-related words.

iPlanetarium has a nice interactive guide to the Solar System that gives basic information in an engaging way.

NASA’s multimedia presentation on the International Space Station provides excellent info.

Speaking of the International Space Station, this MSNBC video showing images of the recently-completed Station is pretty amazing. Lastly, The New York Times has a nice interactive timeline called “Assembling The International Space Station.” USA Today has a similar graphic.

Interactive Universe, from the History Channel, is a great place to learn more about the planets, the solar sytem, and, yes, the rest of the…Universe.

Space Walk, from “Life In Space,” lets you simulate being an astronaut repairing the International Space Station.

The BBC has a good series of videos reviewing NASA’s Fifty Years In Space.

The BBC also has a good Solar System Jigsaw Puzzle.

NASA has developed its own multimedia presentation celebrating its Fiftieth Anniversary. It’s quite engaging, and has closed captioning, but its navigation can be a little confusing.

National Geographic has an interactive slideshow/timeline called Fifty Highlights Of Space Travel.

The New York Times has an interactive graphic about the future of space travel, as well as a slideshow on the same subject.

Learn more about space travel at McDougal Littell’s Animated History of The Space Program. Be sure to click on the lower left hand corner to see the words that are spoken, and use the menu on the upper right to explore all the great activities.

How Stuff Works has a bunch of short videos on space travel.

Brainpop has a couple of excellent movies, but you have to pay for a subscription (usually) to view them. You can also get a free trial easily. The movies are on the Apollo Project and the International Space Station.

I’ve had students use Imagination Cubed to easily draw the solar system online and post their work on my website or their own blog.

I have to admit I’ve had students in my classes who I would occasionally like to send to Mars, but NASA has a neat activity where you really can send them there! As NASA’s site says “This is your chance to go to Mars! Fill in your information below and your name will be included with others on a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011!”  Students can then print-out the official certificate, and explore the site to learn more about the Mars Mission (thanks to iLearn Technology for the tip).

Enchanted Learning has a couple of decent astronaut clozes that have to be printed out (or, as I have students in my U.S. History class do, just copy and paste into their blog)  — one on  John Glenn and the other on  Sally Ride.

Here’s a good textbook exercise on the first Moon Landing.

NASA At Home & City is a terrific interactive where NASA shows the practical implications of how space travel has affected out lives.

U.S. Citizenship Podcast just wrote about an an excellent Voice of America Special English series on The History of The U.S. Space Program. These are great for English Language Learners — the language is simple and there’s audio support for the text.

Planet Quest is a pretty amazing multimedia timeline of space exploration that begins at 500 B.C. In addition, it provides audio support for the text. I’m tentatively adding it to this list. The reason I’m only doing so “tentatively” is because even though it’s a wonderful site, the vocabulary is a bit advanced — perhaps too advanced for many English Language Learners.

If you found this list helpful, you might want to see the other two hundred-plus ones, too.

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I’ve highlighted Imagination Cubed in several previous posts. It’s made a number of my “The Best…” lists.

Well, I think I’m going to have to add it to yet another “The Best…” list, this time to The Best Online Tools For Collaboration — Not In Real Time.

In my previous posts about the site, I completely overlooked the collaborative possibilities.  Unlike the Sketch Planet site I just posted about it, with Imagination Cubed students can actually collaborate on the drawing itself and pass that back and forth, along with adding text describing what they’re doing.  Now that would be an interesting collaboration project for international sister classes.

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

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

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

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

1. …be free.

2. …be accessible to English Language Learners.

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

4. … not require any downloads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zee Maps is another simple tool for collaborative map creation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please share reactions and other suggestions!

I 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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I guess I’m feeling energetic this week because I’ve come up with another list that joins my other Websites Of The Year. I expect to take a break after this one and put time into adapting these “Best of…” lists into a page on my website suitable for student self-access.

This list, The Best Art Websites For Learning English, is probably a little more arbitrary than my others. Here, not only are the rankings of which are best is pretty subjective, but the notion of what qualifies as art is, too.

I’ve also included links to examples of how my students have used a couple of these web applications.

There are a ton of art-related sites on the Web. However, I only think ten are excellent tools for language-development and worthy of being on this list. Four are very, very similar, so I couldn’t really distinguish among them. So, for the first time, there’s a four-way tie for first place.

Here are my choices:

Number seven is the Language Guide Art Page. As in The Best Music Websites For Learning English, it’s pretty important for English Language Learners to learn basic art-related vocabulary.

Number six is the fabulous Imagination Cubed. Students can use this site to create and label pretty much any kind of art they want, and then email the url to a teacher or themselves for posting on their own website or blog. Though it’s not exactly art, you can see how my students used this site to create models of the solar system here.

Artpad is number five. It’s sort of like a “revved-up” Imagination Cubed. You can see how my students used it to illustrate some collaborative stories they wrote here. After each sentence you’ll that their name is highlighted as a link. Click on it, and you’ll see their illustration for the sentence they wrote.

Number four is the Historic Tale Construction Kit. Students can have fun creating a medieval tapestry that tells a story.

The Artist’s Toolkit is number three. It provides image, audio and text support for students to learn basic art concepts and experiment with them online.

Number two is MOMA’s Destination Modern Art. It has a series of activities where students can learn about and experiment with looking at specific pieces of art. There’s audio and image support for the simple text.

Before I share the four sites that tied for first, let me give a little background. Lots of art museums have created online applications where users can make their own online exhibitions of their favorite pieces of art and save them. It’s a neat idea.

However, most of them just allow you to pick the paintings and write a short description of the whole personalized collection. The four museums that have tied for first all have the option of users writing notes about each individual painting they choose to include in their collections. These are clearly superior writing opportunities for English Language Learners.

Though all four are very, very similar, if anyone gets a slight edge, it’s the Seattle Art Museum My Art Gallery because users have to answer specific questions about each piece of art they choose. In the others they write whatever they want. But the advantage is not significant enough to warrant ranking the Seattle Museum as number one on its own.

The other three museum sites that are tied with Seattle are the Art Institute of Chicago’s Art Explorer; Collection X from the Virtual Museum of Canada; and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Learning@Whitney.

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

Harcourt has an excellent Multimedia Art Glossary that provides audio support for the text in addition to visual images.

I’ve just added CoSketch to both The Best Online Tools For Real-Time Collaboration and The Best Art Websites For Learning English.

It’s an easy way for English Language Learners and anyone else to collaboratively draw a picture.  There’s no real registration necessary, either.  You just go to the site, are given a private “virtual room” in which to begin drawing, and then you email the link to whoever else you want to participate.  While you’re drawing there’s also a text chat feature to communicate.  You can then save the image and either link to it or embed it in a student/teacher blog or website. You can also upload a photo for sharing and discussing.

Doodle Wall is a similar web tool that lets you easily…doodle. You can draw on your own and keep it completely private, or provide the password to others to draw collaboratively. It also has a chat feature. It worked pretty easily for me, though once I saved the picture and went back to see it, it kept on moving around when I moved my mouse. I’m sure there’s an easy solution to this, though.

Students can develop their English skills by communicating via the chat room (for example, mine could do this project with other students in our International Sister Classes Project) and/or posting their image with a description.

The Broth is a similar application. The advantage with The Broth is that the chat messages remain permanently, while it appears with CoSketch that they disappear after you’re done. With CoSketch, though, since you don’t have to register it’s easier to use.

As always, I’m open to suggestions and critique.

These sites, and others, can also be found among the 8,000 categorized links on my website.

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As I promised in  my previous post on the Best Web 2.0 Applications for Education — 2007, here’s my next “Best of..” list — the Web 2.0 applications that I think are most helpful to English Language Learners.  I only considered sites that could be easily used by a Beginning English Language Learner or by a teacher who only knew how to email and copy and paste.  These sites could also be helpful to younger native-English speakers.

Over half of the list contains the same sites as the ones in the overall education list, but not in the same order.

And, as in my previous list, some of these applications were around prior to 2007.  However, since I didn’t start blogging until ten months ago, I’m still considering them eligible for my 2007 list.

The next item on my agenda is compiling one for the best online learning games of this year.

And now, for the top fifteen (again, another strange number):

Number fifteen is one that was on my previous list.  They are really two sites that are connected — SMILE and CLEAR.  They’re both from Michigan State University, and allow teachers (and students) to easily create clozes, drag-and-drop exercises,  and sequencing activities.  They also allow you to use audio and video with the activities, and will host them as well.

The fourteenth site on my list is Community Walk.  Students can put many sites on a map with descriptions and images (which can be easily grabbed off the web).  Students can use this to describe field trips, report on historical events, and do other mapping applications.  There are a lot of these kinds of sites, but I’ve found Community Walk to be the easiest to use. This also appeared on the other “Best of…” list.

The site occupying the thirteen slot is a new one called Blabberize.  It allows you to upload a picture of a person or animal and easily record a message that the picture speaks.  The lips on the image move in an exaggerated way as your message is being played.  It’s a fun way for English Language Learners to practice speaking and hear what they say.  Once the site creators add the feature (which they say they will) of being able to grab an image off the Internet and not just upload one from your computer, I’ll move this site up the ranking.

Number twelve is also a new one — Jottit.  I’d be surprised if someone could come up with an easier way for people to create a website.  Students can easily post links to many of their own online creations here so a teacher doesn’t have to spend time posting them.

The eleventh best is another repeat from my other list –CircaVie.  I think it’s the easiest online application for creating timelines and incorporating images.  It can be used in any number of lessons. (unfortunately, it appears like this web tool is shutting down).

ESL Video is the tenth best and, again, appeared on my other list.  It’s super-easy to take pretty much any video off-the-net and create a quiz to it.

Number nine is a new one called Sims On Stage.  I had originally posted about it when it was called “Singshot” and only featured karaoke.  It now includes other activites users can do, but I’m still most impressed by its karaoke capability.  Instead of going into detail here about how it works, you might want to read my original post about it.

Number eight is yet another repeat –  One True Media.  It’s a very easy way to create slideshows on the Web, and add text, music and images.

Number seven is a new one.  It’s called Dvolver MovieMaker.  Students can easily and quickly make short animated films and write dialogue for their characters.

Imagination Cubed from General Electric is the sixth-ranked site on my list.  Students can use it for so many things — draw and label solar systems, write and send E-Cards, etc. — it’s a “must” for ESL/EFL teachers.  It’s a little hard to describe, so you might want to check it out for yourself.

Number five is called Show Beyond.  This is similar to VoiceThread in allowing audio narration of slideshows,  but doesn’t allow audio comments like VoiceThread.  You can also add music and text. It’s particularly good in District’s, like ours, that block streaming media (like VoiceThread).

Scribd is number four.  This site allows students to type a document with illustrations on their computer, easily upload it to Scribd in seconds, and then the site immediately posts the document on the Internet with audio speaking the text. ( (Unfortunately, Scribd has eliminated this feature from its site, so I’m also removing it from this list)

Number three is Bookr.  It would be difficult to create an easier application to make slideshows with captions on the web.  The only drawback to it is you can only use images off Flickr, and not others on the Web, but that’s a small price to pay for such an accessible application.

The number two site on my list is Daft Doggy.  It allows you to create website tours — a series of websites where you also leave your own descriptive text or instructions on each page.  You can use it to create Internet scavenger hunts.   Visitors can also leave comments.  The site’s creator has a different part of his site where you can easily make voice recordings and email them, and plans to connect that ability up to the webtours soon so visitors can leave audio comments. Even without that ability to connect to the web tours,  that feature is the easiest place on the web for students to record themselves.

And now for my choice as the best Web 2.0 application for ESL/EFL students — VoiceThread.   You can upload pictures and create an audio narrative to go along with them.  In addition, audio comments can be left by visitors.  VoiceThread also provides a great deal to teachers by allowing them to get their premium services for free, including allowing them to create a zillion VoiceThreads for free.  Happily, they’ve finally incorporated the feature of allowing you to include images off the web just by inserting its url.  It’s that new feature that made me choose VoiceThread as number one.

Of course, there’s plenty of room for discussion with these kinds of lists.  Any feedback is welcome.

Links to these sites, and many others, can also be found on my Examples of Student Work webpage.

(Unfortunately, it appears that Sketchcast has closed down)

Geez, there are lots of new web applications being unveiled today that can be helpful to English Language Learners.  Luckily, we got back a little early from our great field trip to the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition and I have some time to post about them.

I learned about Sketchcast from Google Blogoscoped.  It’s like “drawing” a video (you can also type text) that can be replayed.  In some ways it’s similar to Imagination Cubed.  The big difference, however, is that in Sketchcast you can easily provide audio narration to your sketch.  Your completed work has a unique url, and visitors can leave comments.

So it works on several different levels for English Language Learners.

Sometime this week I’ll place the link on my Examples of Student Work page.  It’ll be in a new category called Student Sketches.

I have links to literally thousands of E-Cards on my Examples of Student Work page under Student E-Cards.  English Language Learners can send these E-Cards to their teacher, who can then post them on a class website, or students can post them on their online journals or blogs.

Of course, E-Cards are not particularly difficult to find on the Web.   However, many of them “expire” a  short time after they have been viewed.  I’ve tried to only place links to sites that will host the E-Cards either indefinitely or, at least, for a very long time. 

There are E-Cards for about every occassion and every theme one would teach in an ESL class, along with history and science classes.

Some have audio, all have pictures, some allow you to send virtual flowers.  You can draw one, or send one with music.  Send one with a picture from just about every American historical era.  The choices, while not exactly limitless, are pretty darn big.

Imagination Cubed is a drawing and design online tool made available by General Electric.  It’s been on my Examples of Student Work page for awhile.  In fact, it’s listed under several categories because it’s very versatile.  Students can make a ton of different creations and email them to their friend or a teacher.

Today I’d like to highlight how my students were able to use it to make the Solar System.  These examples aren’t new to people who’ve received my email newsletter in the past, but I think it’s neat enough to show again.