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).
DESIGN A DONUT: Dunkin Donuts lets you create your very own virtual donut and share it with others. Students can describe what they made and explain why they made it that way.
COMPOSE LYRICS FOR A BEAVER ON A FIDDLE: You can compose lyrics to a song being played by a beaver that fiddles, and see them displayed as captions while the music plays. You can then post your creation on a student/teacher website or blog for all the world to see — lucky them….
MAKE A BABY TALK: etrade’s “Talking Baby” commercials during the Super Bowl are famous annual events. Now you and your students can create their own talking babies by either using the text-to-speech feature or recording their own voices. Their creations can be posted on a student/teacher website.
CREATE MORE MUSIC: The American Heart Association has unveiled a web application that lets you create a “hand symphony” and send the link of your creation to a friend or yourself. It can then be posted on a teacher website or blog. It’s designed to promote the Association’s new hands-only CPR, and the site also has a one minute video demonstrating it.
Pandas from The National Zoo and the Atlanta Zoo were sent back to China today. I thought it might be a good occasion for a quick “The Best…” list of sites about pandas that are accessible to English Language Learners.
Here are my choices for The Best Sites To Learn About Pandas:
To have a little fun, and to cultivate some interest — especially from my young male students — I thought a “The Best…” list on “cool” cars might be engaging.
I’m planning on having my English Language Learner students look through these accessible sites, identify which ones they found particularly intriguing, and explain why — in writing and verbally. In addition, they can design their own cars and describe them. The sites are listed in two separate sections — the photos, and the design sites.
It’s just a light exercise to do some day, probably after a day of taking standardized tests…
Here are my picks for The Best Sites For Learning About “Cool” Cars (& Designing Your Own!):
Create A Ride lets you design your own race car. Boys in particular will love it. You can save your design with a special number, but it doesn’t provide you with a unique url address. So to access it again you just have to go to the site and type in the the number. Students can learn some vocabulary and write about their car.
It’s not a car, but Create the Honda lets you design the motorcycle of your dreams. Be sure to click on “Europe” to get to the English version of the site
In a related application, users can create their own Race-Car Driver and have him/her “say” a message using the site’s text-to-speech feature.
I’ve seen a lot of movies over the years, and know a lot of good scenes that will work with English Language Learners. However, I don’t have an infallible memory, and I haven’t seen all the movies ever made. So I figured that there must quite a few other lists out there of movie scenes that would work well with ELL’s, and, after some “googling,” I discovered that I was right.
My favorite way of using them is a technique called “Back To The Screen” that I adapted from Zero Prep: Ready To Go Activities For The Language Classroom by Laurel Pollard and Natalie Hess. I pick a clip from a movie (the highway chase scene from one of the Matrix movies, for example). I then divide the class into pairs with one group facing the TV and the other with their back to it. Then, after turning off the sound, I begin playing the movie. The person who can see the screen tells the other person what is happening. Then, after awhile, I switch the groups around. Afterwards, the pairs need to write a chronological sequence of what happened, which we share in class. Finally, everyone watches the clip, with sound, together. Students really enjoy this activity.
The movie scenes I share here are ideal for this kind of activity. Some of them include video clips of the actual scenes from YouTube. If you want to use those videos, but YouTube is blocked at your school, you might want to read The Best Ways To Access Educational YouTube Videos At School.
Of course, there are many other ways to use a video clip as a language-development activity. James Keddie has created a great site called TEFL Clips that shares video clips and different English exercises that can be used with them. Many of his ideas can be adapted for these video scenes, too.
If the scenes on this list can’t be found on YouTube, I just rent a DVD and show the scene.
Some of the video clips on these sites are not appropriate for classroom use, though they are a very small percentage. So this post is for teacher, not student, consumption.
Here are my picks for The Best Movie Scenes To Use For English-Language Development:
AMC’s Filmsite has an incredible list of different types of “The Best” scenes — best scary scenes, best disaster scenes, etc. It doesn’t include clips, but that’s what Netflix is for.
Movieclips has immediately become an indispensable website in my “teachers’ repertoire” of links. It has thousands of short video clips from movies and they’re not blocked by our content filter! And they’re available without registering — except for clips that have “mature” content. That in itself makes it a wonderful resource. But that’s only part of why I like this new site so much. What makes it a real winner is that that clips are categorized by theme, character, setting, mood, and more. They’re incredibly detailed.
This kind of organization makes it a gold mine for English Language Learners and their teachers. A ready-made video to teach vocabulary or an academic concept is at your finger-tips. Plus, they’re easily used for an activity like “Back To The Screen,” which I explain in The Best Popular Movies/TV Shows For ESL/EFL.
In addition, users can create questions about the clip that the site will host. That’s a nice feature, and an opportunity for students to write for an authentic audience. The only tricky part is that in order to do so you have to register for the site, which is easy enough. However, that also gives you access to the mature content clips, so you’d only want to have students use it under supervision.
Unfortunately, for now at least, Movieclips is only accessible in the United States and Canada, though they hope to open it up to other countries soon.
In previous “The Best…” lists, I’ve shared many of the places where I find the resources I share in this blog.
Today, I thought I’d share a short list of the “tech” blogs that I’ve found to be the best for sharing new web tools that are coming online. They obviously don’t look at them through the lens of an educator, but I find it pretty easy to figure out if and how these new tools can be applicable to schools.
You might want to consider subscribing to them yourself if you are not reading them already. They are sources of great information. Of course, they post a lot, and most of what they write about is not particularly useful for teachers. It’s very easy, though, to quickly glance at the posts to identify the ones that are.
Here are my picks for The Best “Tech” Blogs For Learning About New Web Applications:
February 1st is the fiftieth anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins. As a local television station describes it:
On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students at N.C. A&T sat down at the segregated lunch counter at the F.W. Woolworth store in downtown Greensboro and demanded service. The protest continued until July, when the counter was desegregated.
This pivotal moment in civil rights history is receiving the attention it deserves.
Here are my choices for The Best Sites To Learn About The Greensboro Sit-Ins:
The International Civil Rights Center and Museum doesn’t have a whole of resources, but it’s worth visiting for it’s impressive opening presentation and for the fact that it’s opening its doors next week — on the site of the Woolworth store where the sit-ins took place.
Today is Australia Day, which commemorates the first convict ships that brought immigrants to the continent to start the country. I thought I’d bring together a quick list of links about the country that would be accessible to English Language Learners.
I suspect that Australians might have some great suggestions to add to this list, so please include new links in the comments section of this post.
Here are my choices for The Best Sites To Learn About Australia (not in order of preference):
A Good Day To Be An Australian is a Wall Street Journal slideshow showing how today is being celebrated in that country.
PowerPoint presentations have certainly be abused in many contexts, and the classroom has been one of them. I really don’t use them much in my own teaching.
However, sometimes I’ve been able to find a good PowerPoint presentation that has already been created by another teacher; that’s related to a topic I’m teaching; and that’s accessible to an English Language Learner. I’ll sometimes then put a link to the presentation on one of our class blogs or my website for students to access.
I thought it might be useful to put together a “The Best…” list sharing sources of decent PowerPoint presentations that are free to use and are accessible to English Language Learners. All these sites cover most of the content areas.
Here are my picks for The Best Online Collections of PowerPoints For Teachers (Pete’s PowerPoint Station is clearly my number one pick, but the rest are not in any order of preference):
Here’s a list of 7 Search Engines for PowerPoint Presentations. I wasn’t too impressed with any of them, but if you can’t find what you’re looking for in any of the sites I listed in this post, you might want to try them out.
There have been a number of web tools that have “opened for business” in the past year related food nutrition and safety. I thought it might be useful to both my students and others to create a “The Best…” list related to the topic.
You can also find links to most of these sites — and more — on my website under Health.
Here are my picks — not in order of preference — for The Best Sites For Learning About Nutrition & Food Safety (and that are accessible to English Language Learners, of course):
Calorie King has a fairly accessible database on the nutritional content ofmany different kinds of food. It would require some pre-teaching on what nutrition labels mean, though.
Fatburgr provides basic nutritional information on menus from popular fast food restaurants in a very simple and accessible interface.
The University of California-Davis has developed some wonderfully entertaining, informative, and accessible music videos about food safety issues. They’re closed-captioned, and many, if not all, are not sung very fast.
Here’s a slideshow called How Many Calories In A Thanksgiving Dinner? Not only does it show the different foods that compose a typical Thanksgiving dinner, but it also shares the calorie content of each one.
Eat, Drink, and Be Wary is the name of an interactive from the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Florida. It shows images and descriptions of various holiday foods. If you click on them, you’ll then see how much exercise you have to do in order to “work off” each food’s calories.
Food Fury is a fun game where players have to select which foods are important to eat every day and which ones should not. It’s good for nutrition education and vocabulary acquisition. It’s definitely accessible to English Language Learners of all levels. The same site also has another healthy food game called Juice Jumble.
Stadium Nutrition from Aetna is an interactive exercise where you create a meal you’d eat at a baseball stadium and you’re then told its nutritional content.
Make Your Calories Count is a good tutorial from the Food and Drug Administration. It demonstrates how to read nutrition labels on food products. It’s probably accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners.
The Lunch-o-Matic game from PBS has players pick foods that help provide a healthy lunch. It uses both text and audio.
The great Learning Edge computer-based “paper” has an audio and text article on “Men Don’t Eat Vegetables.” The Learning Edge has another one called Eat Less Meat.
The Food Pyramid is a good animated movie from Brainpop, Jr., though you have to subscribe in order to view it.
Good Guide, which I’ve posted about previously, rates products on health, environmental and social performance. They’ve recently added food items to the items they review (you can read more about it at this Webware post). Their ratings are a little different from the other sites on this list, and might be worth a look.
Still Tasty tells you how long different foods will stay safe to eat and what’s the best way to store them. It’s more appropriate for Intermediate ELL’s.
Mission Nutrition is yet another healthy food game. This one is from Kids Health.
Buy Better Groceries is an interactive graphic from the Washington Post. It lets you choose from a variety of grocery sections. Then, you choose brand names from that product category. You’re then shown the different nutritional values of your choice, and you can compare that with other options. You can then fill-up a virtual grocery cart with your “purchases” and see a total nutritional information for everything you’ve “bought.”
The My Pyramid Blast-Off Game is a fun way for students to learn about the Food Pyramid. It’s accessible to Intermediate ELL’s.
Two Foods lets you easily compare the nutritional content of…any two foods. My Foodapedia is a similar site.
Why Americans Are Fat is an infographic that explains why knowing about nutrition is critical for our students.
Fizzy’s Lunch Lab is from PBS, and is designed to help kids learn healthy food habits. Most of the text on the site is provided with audio support.
The Nutrition Cafe at the Pacific Science Center has some neat activities.
Dole’s Superkids also has a bunch of neat activities and games. You might need to click on the “low-bandwidth version,” and that seemed fine to me.
Food Champs has a lot different leveled activities related to food vocabulary and nutrition. Most, if not all, of the site is accessible to English Language Learners.
I recently received an email from Jay Sugerman, a fourth-grade teacher in Massachusetts, asking me if I knew of any places that had video clips of teachers portrayed on television or in the movies.
I thought it was a good question, and so decided to make a quick “The Best…” list.
I’d also be interested in hearing readers share which TV or movie teachers you feel are the best — and worst — role models out there. Please leave a comment if you have an idea. Also, please share if you have other suggestions of where to find similar clip collections.
Here are my choices for The Best Places To Learn About (And View Video Clips Of) Teachers In the Movies (I generally only included sites that also had video clips, though I’ve also included several good commentaries, too):
The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…
Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:
* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.
* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.
* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.
* provide some language-learning opportunity (for example, students can write about their creations).
MAKE A STORY COLLAGE: The Library of Congress has a neat Storybook activity. First, users have to answer some simple questions from The Wizard Of Oz, The Mermaid, and Aladdin (book excerpts are provided) and then you can make a collage out of the book’s characters that you can email and post on a teacher website or blog.
Well, now it’s created sister sites where you can do the same with clips from old TV programs and from soccer games. They’re called Bombay TV 2, Futebol TV and Classik TV.
SEND AN eCARD WITH AN ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE: The National Building Museum lets you send some very informative Green Community E-Cards, which can then be posted on a teacher/student website or blog.
MAKE A SNOWFLAKE WITH A MESSAGE:Flurrious lets you design a snowflake, write a message that goes along with it, and then send it to yourself or a friend so you can get its url address to post on a student/teacher blog or website. The site says it will donate $1 to UNICEF for every snowflake sent, but I can’t really tell who’s behind the site to confirm that claim.
(NOTE: With a few exceptions, I’ll probably stop adding many new specific sites to this post since many of the links lead to special pages set up by news organizations that continually add new photos, graphics, and video resources.
I’ve got to say that among all the news organizations, I have been finding that the New York Times photo blog “The Lede” has had the best quality material, along with the most up-to-date. It has excellent multimedia resources along with short text information, and is doing a great job of scouring the web for great stuff.
I wouldn’t say it’s the best place for English Language Learners to go because the lay-out isn’t very attractive (CNN works best for student self-access), but I’d suggest teachers keep on checking The Lede for specific photo galleries and videos that they might want to show in class or specifically ask their students to view.)
I’ve just heard about the earthquake in Haiti, and it sounds terrible. I thought I’d pull together a quick list of related-sites that are accessible to English Language Learners.
I’ll be adding to it but, for now, I’ve divided it into three sections — ones on the earthquake itself, ones that provide general information on the country of Haiti, and a few that provide information on how earthquakes work.
The other is from GOOD Magazine and looks far cooler, but the information is not particularly accessible (at least to me).Stephen Downes also points out that Canada’s sizable contribution is not included in it.
Major Earthquake Hits Haiti is a collection of all Washington Post photos on the disaster. The Post also has a special page on the quake that’s regularly updated.
The Atlantic shares several articles (Should We Call It ‘Looting’?) wondering if racism is involved in the use of the word “looting” in Haiti.Several of the pieces they share are quite good, though would have to be modified for English Language Learners. I particularly liked a short post from the Chicago Tribune, titled Are the ‘looters’ in Haiti really that much different from you and me? The writer asks:
What wouldn’t you do if members of your family were dying? If you thought you could save them with a little humanitarian freelance redistribution of resources?
As several of the writers mention, this brings back memories of Katrina. In fact, in our ninth-grade mainstream English classes, we give students the assignment to respond to the famous two pictures of an African-American man “looting” a grocery store, and a white couple “finding” food in a grocery store..
Just about everything in the media is highlighting the horror of the earthquake, and the misery of Haiti’s past. Here are two sites where teachers can find important and positive aspects of the Haitian tradition that can help students understand it’s important past:
Honoring Haiti After going ashore in New Orleans following an injury at sea, Haitian sailor Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable made his way north to avoid being captured as a slave. He established himself as an accomplished trader, and then built the first permanent home in an area around Lake Michigan called Eschikagou. This trading post was later renamed Chicago. In 1968 Du Sable was officially declared the Founder of Chicago and a stamp with his image was issued for the 150th birthday of the city. As Haiti recovers from the devastating losses caused by the earthquake, we hope you will take a moment to realize the impact this small island nation has had in so many places around the world.
Haiti’s Hidden Treasures is a video from The Wall Street Journal showing clips taken in Haiti eighty years ago of musicians in that country (when the U.S. was an occupying force).
Over the past few years, I’ve been accumulating links to — and experimenting with — various online photo editors and sites for photo effects. There are certainly a zillion of them out there.
I finally decided it was time to narrow all the links down into some kind of “The Best…” list, and have divided this post into two sections. The first part lists sites where you can upload your own images and, with no registration required (or, perhaps, in one or two instances, an extremely minimal registration process) easily edit the photo or add effects. The second section lists sites that I’ve specifically used with my English Language Learner students. These sites let you easily grab an image off the web, lets you add add a speech bubble to it, and then gives you a more or less permanent url address for your creation that you can post on a student or teacher website/blog.
I’m sure I will have missed some applications out there, so feel free to share your suggestions in the comments section. I suspect there are also additional “categories” photo apps out there besides the two I’m using.
Using my categories and criteria, here are my choices for The Best Sites For Online Photo-Editing & Photo Effects (they tend to be fairly similar — with a few exceptions that are primarily “resizers” — so I’m just going to list the links and not describe each one):
Weird-looking critters always generate high-interest from students — English Language Learners and mainstream alike. Reading, writing, and talking about them are excellent language-development activities, and I’ve listed some good accessible sites on this list.
In the second part of this post, I share some sites that — believe it or not — let students also easily create their own weird-looking animals. First designing, then describing (along with talking and listening) them also provide good language-learning opportunities.
Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Learning About Weird-Looking Creatures And For Making Your Own!):
With Animal Mix-Up you can create a bizarre creature, email the link and post it. English Language Learners can not only use it as an opportunity to describe their creation, but the design process itself provides an excellent opportunity for vocabulary development. There are a lot of choices for creature modifications, and their accompanied with visual and text descriptions.
Build Your WIldself is from the New York Zoos and Aquarium. Instead of explaining it here, I’m just going to suggest you read a post from Kevin Jarrett which explains it in detail.
The Switch Zoo is another similar site. However, you can only print-out creation, not save it online.
The opening of the world’s tallest building in Dubai this week, I thought a “The Best…” list on the topic of the world’s tallest buildings might be timely.
Here are my picks for The Best Sites To Learn About The World’s Tallest Buildings (and are accessible to English Language Learners):
The Skyscraper Museum in New York has several features that would be accessible to English Language Learners. One is a digital representation of downtown Manhattan called Viva. Another is a similar presentation called Viva 2, which highlights the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. A third page compares the tallest buildings in the world. Lastly, there are a series of particularly accessible features called Cool Stuff.
Interactive Infographics are online representations of information or data that usually allow the user to “interact” with it and the data that is visualized. They’re generally created by newspapers for their websites, and often, though not always, are accessible to English Language Learners. In fact, they can be an exceptionally accessible way for ELL’s to learn complicated information that might ordinarily not be comprehensible.
I thought readers might find it useful to learn which sites I have found to be the best sources of good interactive infographics. In addition to listing them here, I’ll be adding a section on them to the Teacher’s Page of my website.
The links on this list will take you directly to the Interactive Infographics page of the named newspapers.
Here are my picks for The Best Sources For Interactive Infographics:
The Boston Globe
The Agence France Presse has great interactive graphics. However, they’re difficult to find on the web. I’ve recently discovered that MSN News hosts the most recent ones. However, they’re not permanent url addresses, and disappear after a few weeks.
Since many of our students, particularly my Spanish-speaking English Language Learners, visit Los Angeles frequently, I thought it might be useful to put together a quick list of accessible sites for leaning about L.A.
Here are my choices for The Best Sites To Learn About Los Angeles (and are accessible to ELL’s):
PopuLAtion is a video series from the L.A. Times featuring some of the more eccentric characters in the city. If you click on “Browse” you can access all of them.
FACT Monster has some relatively accessible text giving basic information about the city.
I’ve posted quite a few art and music-related sites over the past year — enough to warrant their own end-of-year list.
Before I identify individual sites, though, readers might find it helpful to review some “The Best…” lists I’ve also posted during the past twelve months (you can find related lists I posted in 2007 and 2008 at “The Best…” lists):
In order for a site to make it on any of my lists, it has to be free and accessible to English Language Learners. Finally, it has to provide a good language-development opportunity, too.
Here are my choices for The Best Art & Music Sites — 2009:
KissTunes is a great web tool that lets you make some music and lets you give it a name and describe it. Then, you get a url address for your creation where others can then leave comments. You don’t even need to register! I’m definitely adding KissTunes to The Best Online Sites For Creating Music.
Using Songs In The English Classroom by Hans Mol, a teacher in Australia, is a short article that was published in Humanising Language Teaching Magazine. It gives a very good overview of different language-development activities that can be done with music.
English Child Songs has a ton of ….children’s songs in English that are sung with animation, and also show the lyrics.
ART:
Harcourt has an excellent Multimedia Art Glossary that provides audio support for the text in addition to visual images.
Matisse For Kids is an online interactive from the Baltimore Museum of Art. It’s accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners and, even though it doesn’t have audio support, is a very engaging guide to artist Henri Matisse’s work and art in general.
The Art of Storytelling is a site from the Delaware Art Museum that allows you pick a painting, write a short story about it, record it with your computer microphone, and email the url address for posting on a student website or blog. It’s extraordinarily simple, and extraordinarily accessible to any level of English Language Learner. No registration is required.
You can virtually cut and design a snowflake, write a message on it, and email the link to a teacher or friend at Snow Days.
Flurrious lets you design a snowflake, write a message that goes along with it, and then send it to yourself or a friend so you can get its url address to post on a student/teacher blog or website.
The site says it will donate $1 to UNICEF for every snowflake sent, but I can’t really tell who’s behind the site to confirm that claim.
My book, "English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work," will be published by Linworth Publishing in April, 2010.
You can read an excerpt here and learn how to pre-order it.
