They are going to look through the online collections of various museums, but I had also found a site that shared one person’s view of “The Best” pieces of art ever created. I had shown students images from the site and asked them to share what kind of emotional reaction, if any, they provoked.

That turned-out to be a pretty good lesson, so I thought I’d develop a similar list of sites that provide images of famous pieces of art. Not only will this list help my Theory of Knowledge students, it might also be an intriguing way to help English Language Learners develop a great vocabulary related to feelings and emotions if they tried a similar lesson — plus create opportunities for both art vocabulary and art content knowledge.

In order to make it on this list, a site had to show a number of images or links on the same page of their selected artworks, and allow the ability to click on them to get an enlarged view.

Here are my choices for The Best Collections Of “The Best” Pieces Of Art Ever Created:

The Greatest Works of Art

Another site titled The Greatest Works of Art

Best Works of Art in the World

Famous Paintings

The World’s 50 Best Works of Art (and how to see them)

50 Most Famous Works posters (this is from a site that sells posters, but does provides nice images of famous pieces of art)

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

I also have a number of links on The Best Sites To Introduce Environmental Issues Into The Classroom, and won’t be duplicating them here. So you might want to check-out that list, too. You might also be interested in The Best Online Carbon Calculators.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites To Learn About Climate Change (not in any order of preference):

Countdown To Copenhagen is a Wall Street Journal interactive timeline displaying major events related to climate change over the past forty years.

Advancing Emissions is another interactive from the Wall Street Journal charting changes in greenhouse gas emissions over the past forty years.

Breathing Earth is an intriguing visual representation of the effect each country has on climate change.  You move the cursor to a nation on a world map, and then see the number of CO2 emissions that country makes each minute.  It also shows total population, and the birth and death rate of each country. With guidance, English Language Learners could certainly use this website to make some comparisons between countries and draw conclusions from the data.

Tides Of Change is a series of closed-captioned NASA videos related to climate change. NASA also has a site entirely devoted to climate change issues, including many interactives.

A Climate Map from the British newspaper The Guardian shows the impact rising temperatures will have on the world. It’s a little “busy-looking” but would be accessible with some teacher interpretation.

Here’s an infographic showing which countries have lived up to the Kyoto agreement on the environment and which have not.

The Guardian has another interactive titled How climate change will affect food resources.

Copenhagen Challenge is an online game on climate change. It provides audio support for the text, but seemed complicated to me. However, I’m continually surprised at how well my English Language Learner students can figure out how to play and win online games.

The Planet is accessible to advanced ELL’s, and provides a good overview of different environmental challenges facing our planet, including climate change.

The New York Times has an interactive graphic called Sea Ice in Retreat. It focuses on what is going on in the Arctic.

BBC Climate Change: Bloom is an animated, and accessible feature that lets the user view and choose many different actions that can be taken individually to reduce global climate change. It won a Webby Award this year.

National Public Radio has a series of reports on the effects of global warming around the world.

The Denver Post has an exceptional series of photos called Melting Ice: Glaciers and Ice Shelves. It very vividly shows the change in size of various glaciers because of global warming.

What Is Global Warming is a simple and accessible interactive graphic explaining…global warming.

Enhanced ‘greenhouse effect’ causes global warming is an interactive from USA Today.

National Geographic has an excellent map of Global Warming Effects around the world. The map, images, and language is very simple, and accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners. It’s part of a larger feature called The Greenhouse Effect.

The Discovery Channel has a Global Warming Interactive.  It’s pretty “jazzy” looking, with lots of point and click features showing the effects of global warming. It’s probably accessible to high Intermediate and advanced English Language Learners.

The Global Warming Facts and Our Future from the National Academy of Sciences is a very engaging and extensive site, and includes audio support for the text. The vocabulary may be pretty challenging for Intermediate English Language Learners, but it’s worth the attempt.

What Causes Global Warming? is simple series of pictures demonstrating various activities that contribute to global warming.  When you put your cursor on each picture, a short explanation appears.

The Washington Post has a Global Emissions Interactive that shows the amount of carbon emissions from each country has changed over the years.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

I thought readers of both of my blogs might find it useful for me to develop a “The Best…” list of resources on this topic.

Here are my choices for My Best Posts About Building Parent Engagement In Schools — 2009 (not in any order of preference):

Parent Involvement or Parent Engagement? is a piece I wrote for Public School Insights, and gives a nice preview of our book.

Family Literacy, English Language Learners, and Parent Engagement is an article I wrote for Library Media Connection.

Press Conference On Parent Engagement shares a video of a press conference called by our district’s Superintendent that includes both Elisa Gonzalez, our school’s staffperson for parent engagement, and me speaking about our home computer project and our parent university.

Parents, Students & College includes links to what we’re doing at our school to promote college discussion and planning with parents, and a new book highlighting research around that issue.

What Americans Believe Is “The Number One Factor In Keeping Schools Moving On The Right Track” — Read it and find-out!

What Might Aesop’s Fables Say About Glitzy Media Parent Involvement Campaigns? is the title of a critical post I recently wrote.

More On Parent’s Unemployment Effect On Children and “The Critical Connection Between Student Health and Academic Achievement”
both share major studies highlighting the affect that poverty has on students. The results emphasize the importance of schools engaging parents to combat these problems.

Education World published a short article by me titled A Parent Engagement Model That Works.

Info From Anne Henderson includes a link that this well-known research into the parent connection with schools gave to Congress.

Engaging With Your Child’s School: Q&A with Larry Ferlazzo is an interview I did with “Smart Bean,” a parent portal on the Internet.

Parents & Schools In Los Angeles is my “take” on what the District there might be doing with parents and charter schools.

Some Of These “Parent Academies” Just Don’t Get It…. shares my perspective on the recent media infatuation with “parent academies.”

In September, Joyce Epstein and I were guests at Education Week’s “edchat” on engaging parents. If you’re interested, you can read the chat transcript.

I was interviewed on the Parents as Partners webcast a few weeks ago, and you can read about about the conversation at Irritate or agitate – what’s your parent engagement like? You can also listen to the webcast at the EdTechTalk site.

Conditional Cash Transfers, Parents, And Schools offers my critical perspective on a growing way on how schools and cities are trying to connect with parents.

Home Computer Project Expansion & Assessment Results provides an update to our internationally-recognized Family Literacy Project.

Teacher Magazine published an article I wroteabout teachers making home visits to parents.  You have to register (for free) to read the entire article, but it’s a quick process.

“Harlem Program Singled Out as Model” is a post I wrote about Harlem Children’s Zone, including some questions I have about it.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists — there are over 350 of them!

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:

MAKE CHOCOLATES DANCE: You can choreograph a dance for a piece of chocolate, choose the accompanying music, and write a message using this piece of viral marketing. The link can be posted a student/teacher blog or website.

SAY THANKS TO SOMEONE: Thanks For Being There is a simple and accessible web application from State Farm that lets you thank someone for “being there” for you. It’s easy to use, and students can post the url of their creation on a student blog or website.

MAKE DOGS SING: With the holiday season coming-up, you can send a Critter Carol — dogs singing a Christmas song, with a message you write included. Students can create on, and then post the url of their card on a website or blog.

CREATE A WEBSITE: Just Paste It and Axess are very, very simple ways to create websites. They’re ideal for teachers or students who are not very tech savvy, and just want a place to add links or, for example, if students have an assignment where they might need to collect images and then describe them. Axess has an advantage over Just Paste It because it appears that you can return to edit Axess but can’t do that for Just Paste It. No registration is required for either one.

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I’ve searched and searched, and I still I’ve only found four sites that consistently provide sources for quotes and have a decent searchable database. I do have to say, though, that one way I’ve recently discovered to get around this problem is by pasting the quote in the query box at Google Book Search. Often, that will bring me to the primary source.

This is an extremely short “The Best…” list.

My choices for The Best Places To Find Quotations On The Web are:

Quotations Book

Wikiquote

Lit Quotes

Quote Snack (This is a blog. It doesn’t seem to have a complete “search” system in place, but it does have a “tag cloud” you can use).

Another site that deserves an “honorable mention” is called Quotes.net. It doesn’t provide the sources for their quotes, but it does have two other neat capabilities that could be helpful to English Language Learners — it provides audio support for the text, so that users can hear the words; and it provides the option of translating the quotes into many different languages.

iWise is another site that doesn’t meet my criteria, but the fact it offers audio support for the text is a real plus.

Finally, even though the listed sites don’t meet my criteria, you might want to look at the exhaustive list of quote resources that Presentation Zen has at Where to get quotations for presentations? (the post is about three years old, though, so there might be a fair amount of dead links).

Tara Benwell lets me know that The English Club has a quotes section designed for English Language Learners. It’s in its beginning stages now, but will be expanding.

Any additional suggestions are welcome!

Many of these sites also offer lessons in other languages, including English.

Feel free to offer additional suggestions.

I personally have found that going to a language school in a Spanish-speaking country (I went to ones in Mexico and Guatemala) and living with a family to be by far the best way to learn Spanish, but these sites can provide good initial exposure and be helpful for later development and practice.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Learning Spanish Online (not in order of preference):

BBC Languages Mi Vida Loca

The BBC also has several other sites for learning Spanish.

Online Spanish Help

Visual Link Spanish

Live Mocha

Busuu

Vocabulix

Lingus TV

Panfu (a virtual world for kids where they can learn Spanish)

Study Spanish

Hello World Spanish

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Teaching About Latitude & Longitude (that are, of course, accessible to English Language Learners).  These are not listed in any order of preference:

The Saskatoon Public Schools Online Learning Center has a nice interactive on latitude and longitude.

The Calgary Academy has a great online interactive on the topic that provides audio support for the text. You first have to register for the site, though.  Just click “Start Activity.”

Here’s a free Brainpop movie on the topic.

Kids Geo has a fun latitude and longitude reinforcing game.

Try-out this Pearson “drag-and-drop” activity.

Here’s a game to test and practice understanding of the concept.

And here’s another simple game.

You can also find these links, and links to other map-reading activities, on my website under Introduction to Maps.

As always, feedback and additional suggestions are welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

Here are my choices for The Best Online Resources To Learn About Charles Darwin (and are accessible to English Language Learners);

150 years since “The Origin of Species” published is the title of an interactive from Agence France Presse.

The life and times of Charles Darwin is an audio slideshow from the British newspaper The Guardian.

Darwin’s Brave New World looks like a fabulous resource from The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Darwin’s Footsteps is an online game where you follow his travels around the world.

Here’s a neat game about Darwin’s theories.

Happy 200th Darwin Day! is a slideshow from TIME Magazine.

ESL Holiday Lessons has a lesson on Darwin.

Evolution of Life is a series of videos on Darwin and evolution.

The New York Times has an audio slideshow about the Galapagos Islands.

Living Galapagos is an audio slideshow about the islands today.

I’d certainly be interested in hearing other suggestions, so please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

It’s easy always been easy to find lyrics on the Internet, though often there are inaccuracies and so many lyrics sites have tons of annoying pop-up ads. I thought I’d create a “The Best…” list that shares places where there appear to be correct lyrics and no pop-ups.

You might also be interested in these other “The Best…” lists:

The Best Music Websites For Learning English
The Best Online Sites For Creating Music
The Best Online Karaoke Sites For English Language Learners

Here are my choices for The Best Places To Find Lyrics On The Web:

Lyrster is a search engine that appears to search only collections of lyrics to songs. Just type in a few words and your results show links to the complete lyrics.  It performed quite well in my tests. The sites it searches include some, but I don’t believe all, of the other sites on this list.

Lyrics Fly is one of the best sites out there for finding song lyrics. You can also use it to find music audio and videos, but I’m primarily interested in the lyrics. The Make Use Of blog calls it “lyric search on steroids.”

Lyrics On Call

Lyrics Mode

Just Lyrics

E Lyrics

I’d certainly be interested in hearing other suggestions, so please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

I’d certainly be interested in hearing other suggestions, so please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.