Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Whack Attack is a game from the BBC that tests knowledge on Math, English or Science. It’s probably accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

The questions are good, though the game is a little weird. You’re given three answer choices. Each answer is color-coded, and in order to choose an answer, you have to “whack” the correctly-colored figure that keeps popping up.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has what best can be described as an I Spy Game with artwork. You’re provided several pieces of art, and lists of objects to find within each one of them.

These kinds of games, which I’ve written a lot about and have posted on my website, are good, fun ways for Beginning English Language Learners to begin to build vocabulary.

I’ve posted the link on my website under Music and Art.

By the way, once you’ve found all the objects in this particular game, there are some other activities you can also do that might be worth exploring.

Halloween – 10 activities for the computer room, connected classroom and classroom is a not-to-be-missed post by Kyle Mawer.

I’m certainly adding it to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween.

The Fantastic Food Challenge is from Michigan State University and is comprised of four engaging online games designed to teach various aspects of food health and nutrition.

They’re probably accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Health.

Creative Kids Central has a number of very engaging online activities related to classical music. I particularly like its “talking” and musical story on the 1001 Arabian Nights and its online video game on the composer Brahms.

Both are accessible to English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the direct links on several sections on my website.

Thanks to Phyllis’ Favorites for the tip.

The Scruffs is an online “hidden object” game — basically an “I Spy” kind of activity. You’re shown a list of items, and have to find them within the picture.

It’s a fun way for English Language Learners to develop vocabulary.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games. If you want to find other similar ones, though, including several from Scholastic, look under Reading.

Several Journeys of Reemus — Chapter Two is another online video game with a lot of potential for English-language development. Its Walkthrough (the instructions for winning) is also available.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games, right below Chapter One of the popular game.

Dictionary.com has had an ongoing contest inviting online game developers to design and submit new “word games.”

They just announced the five winners.

Check them out and, if you feel like it, leave a comment here saying which — if any– you think would be most appropriate for English Language Learners.

The Canadian Museum of Nature has several of what they call Gallery Interactives — very accessible online activities and games designed to teach about….nature.

I’ve placed the link on my Science page.

Take On The Teacher! is a spelling game from Scholastic in the United Kingdom. You’re shown two words and have to pick the one that is spelled correctly.

It’s a fun little game, though if you’re in the United States there might be a few trick British ways the British spell their words. Unfortunately, the words are not actually pronounced, which limits its use with English Language Learners. There are, however, cute sound effects when you choose the correct word.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Spelling.

Here’s another online video game that can be used for fun and for English-language development. In this one, you have to escape from a hotel room. It also has a lengthy walkthrough.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games.

Big Escape 3 is one of those online video games I post about here that I use with English Language Learners. However, the big difference between this one and most of the others is that Big Escape 3 was developed specifically as an educational game to benefit early readers.

The graphics are good, the tasks are sufficiently engaging, and the reading is accessible. Instead of having to collect a bunch of objects to use in your “escape” — like you do in other “room escape” like games — here you have to collect words.

I’ve posted previously about other games in this series.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games.

This is the third edition in this particular series of “The Best…” lists.  The first two were:

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

The Best Fun Sites You Can Use For Learning, Too — 2008

To introduce this list, I’m just going to quote from the first one:

These are websites that were not designed with education in mind, but which can easily be used for learning purposes — particularly, though not exclusively, for English language development. I only hope that creators of “educational” content can learn from the qualities that make these sites so engaging.

I’m not listing these sites in any order of preference.

Here are my picks for The Best “Fun” Sites You Can Use For Learning, Too — 2009:

DANCING:

Eternal Moonwalk is a Michael Jackson tribute site where people upload short videos of them doing a moonwalk…that connects to all the other moonwalks people have uploaded. It’s almost impossible to stop watching.  You could certainly have students use English to plan their dance and then describe it. I know it’s a stretch but, as I said earlier, it’s so much fun!

OPTICAL ILLUSIONS:

In my classes I help students learn academic vocabulary. One new word has been “interpretation” and its various forms. I usually show students several optical illusions that can be found at various sites. Then, they have short conversations with other students about what they see:

“What is your interpretation of what’s in the picture?”

“It seems to me that there’s a ……”

Here are two new resources for illusions that can be used in this way:

83 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena

Incredible Illusions

PHOTOS:

Students can pick some of these photos to write about or describe, or they can be used in class as part of the  Picture Word Inductive Model teaching strategy:

Off the wall: The astonishing 3D murals painted on the sides of buildings by a trompe l’oeil artist

20 Awesome 3D Pavement Illusions

The World’s Ugliest Dog Show

Extreme Ironing: shirt-ironing the hard way

Here’s a TIME Magazine slideshow on wild human-powered flying machines.

There, I Fixed It

VIDEOS:

Fun videos are always useful.  If you have a computer projector, students can watch them using the “Back-To-The-Screen” activity (read how to do it at The Best Popular Movies/TV Shows For ESL/EFL).  Or, if you don’t have a projector, you can do a similar activity if you’re at a computer lab.  Or you can just have everybody watch the same video and write about it as a class.

Most of these videos are from YouTube (which is likely blocked by school content filters), but some of them are worth using a converter to download into your laptop or a service like EdublogsTV or Watch Now to show to students. They’re great for English Language Learners – short, engaging videos that students can then write about and discuss.

Here are my video suggestions:

Inspired Bicycles – Danny MacAskill April 2009 shows some amazing bicycle acrobatics, though one hopes it wouldn’t give students any ideas…

The PEN Story is an incredible “stop motion” movie using thousands of photos to show a man’s life story — in three minutes.

You can also pick from 21 Stunning Examples Of Creatively Done Stop Motion Animations.

The Top Ten Odd-Looking Pets from Animal Planet are always winners with students.

Here’s a video of the most fun wedding entrance — ever!

Here are two videos — one of two “talking” cats making their actual sounds, and another of them with dubbed-in conversation. After showing students both, a fun lesson would to have ELL’s develop their own version of the dialogue.

The Flawless – Dance Act – Britains Got Talent 2009 is pretty amazing to watch.

This video of a surprise musical performance in a train station is a fun one.

This next one wouldn’t work for ELL’s because of the fast dialogue, but it would be good for advanced or native speakers. It’s called The Figurative Language Bomb, and it would be a fun introduction to…figurative language.

ART:

This strange tool lets you create a painting with your voice.  Your mouse is the brush and your voice the ink when you create an online painting.  Then send it to the site’s gallery to get a unique url address to post on a student or teacher website/blog,  and then give a description.

Just click and start making a drawing with virtual sand, then save your creation to the gallery.  Again, students can post it and then provide an oral or text description.

Create a star constellation that moves with Rule The Stars.  Then email and post the url to your creation, along with a description.

Make a snowflake, describe it, and post the link on a student/teacher blog or website.

At Connect The Dots, you can upload any photo and easily turn it into a “connect the dot” puzzle that can be shared and solved by others.  It seems to me it has extremely limited educational value — I guess Beginning English Language Learners could use it as a fun vocabulary-building activity since you have to type in the category your photo fits in.  But — educational or not — it’s a pretty neat web tool!

VIRAL MARKETING:

I’ve written how I use viral marketing tools with my English Language Learner students. Here are some of the ones that students have enjoyed the most:

You can 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.

You can turn into a talking potato With Spud Yourself! Take your own image 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.

Made For Each Other is yet another weird example of viral marketing that can be used as a fun and useful language-learning tool (you can read about how I use these applications here).  I guess it’s connected to advertising to Frito-Lay in some way (though it’s hard to tell how). It’s too strange to explain, other than to say you connect two creatures to one another and then write a love note for one of them to give to the other. You are then given the link to that note that can be posted on a student or teacher website.  If you have a few minutes left to kill in the computer lab, and you want to give your ELL students a short and engaging writing task, this would certainly be an option.

Purina has created a fun little online tool where users can learn to speak…dog.  You type in words to finish the sentence “Learn how to say ‘I’m _________________’ in dog.” Then, a dog does an action showing how they communicate that feeling.  It would be a fun way for English Language Learners to practice some vocabulary if you have a few minutes left to “kill” in the computer lab.

ONLINE VIDEO GAMES:

I’ve written about how I use online video games as language-development activities with my students.

Here are a couple of particularly good ones that came out this year:

Griswold The Goblin includes audio supported text and a lot of fun. Here’s the Walkthrough.

The Ballad of Ketinetto is an online video game excellent for English Language development. Here’s the Walkthrough.

The same creators of the last game also have an excellent seventeen part series of games called Esklavos, several which have come out in the past year.   You can find the Walkthroughs to the series here.  That same Walkthrough page also has links to all the games, but because I think it’s more likely that the site featuring the walkthroughs will be blocked by school content filters, I’m going to list direct links to all the games here (except for the first one, which is in Spanish only):

• Chapter 2: Following the Rapids
• Chapter 3: Separated Destinies
• Chapter 4: Depths of the Mountain
• Chapter 5: Ungo Recovers
• Interlude: Floda and Ekel
• Chapter 6: Tracing Breda’s Footsteps
• Chapter 7: The Banquet
• Chapter 8: Crossing the River
• Chapter 9: The Root of Akea
• Chapter 10: The Dark Day
• Chapter 11: Ekalion Returns
• Chapter 12: Virop’s Worries
• Chapter 13: The Ambush of Eredren
• Chapter 14: The Great Aisil
• Chapter 15: Heart of the Fortress
• Chapter 16: Marching for Freedom
• Chapter 17: Liberation of Akea

Feedback, of course, is always 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.

Game Classroom contains a nice collection of Math and language arts learning games. You can read more about it at The Book Chook blog.

I don’t think it’s quite good enough to add to The Best Collections Of Online Educational Games, but it’s close.  Let me know if you think I should include it there.

I’ve written a lot about how I use online video games with my English Language Learner students. I was originally inspired along this line by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer.

They’ve just begun a blog on this topic called Digital Play. They’ve just begun it, but I’m sure it will be great, and I’ve already added it to The Best ESL/EFL Blogs.

Darwin’s Footsteps is a very simple and interactive game about Charles Darwin and his discoveries. It’s accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’m adding it to the Science page on my website.

Chemistry Lab Escape is an online video game of the “Escape the Room” genre. Here’s its Walkthrough.

In a weird sort of way, English Language Learners will develop some science vocabulary in playing the game.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games.

I’m going to be listing my choices for The Best Online Learning Games — 2009 within this post, starting from the eleventh-ranked one and ending with my number-one choice. You’ll find a poll at the end, though the games are listed in the opposite order in the poll.  I’m asking that people vote for no more than three of the listed games.

Voting will end on December 1st. I thought it would be interesting to see how reader’s choices compare to my own. And, in fact, I’m going to be having my students vote on them as well, and would encourage you to do the same if you think it would be a productive educational activity.

People will be blocked (or, at least, are supposed to be blocked) from voting more than once. I’m asking that people vote for three games or less.

You can find links to these games, and thousands more on my website.

In order to make it on this list, games had to:

* be accessible to English Language Learners.

* provide exceptionally engaging content.

* not provide access to other non-educational games on their site, though there is one on this list that doesn’t quite meet this particular criteria.

* be seen by me during 2009. So they might have been around prior to this time, but I’m still counting them in this year’s list.

You might also be interested in my other “The Best…” lists related to games:

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

Here are my choices for The Best Online Learning Games — 2009:

Number eleven is: The Race Against Global Poverty is a virtual board game. You advance if you answer the questions about…global poverty correctly.  Some are specifically British-related, but most will be fine for students anywhere.

Number ten is: Rain Words is a fascinating twist on a crossword puzzle. It’s hard for me to explain, but, basically, images of objects fall from the top and then the player has to move them to any number of places on the puzzle that have the correct number of places.

Number nine is: Tales Of Twentieth Century London lets the user play the role of a child in….twentieth century London. It’s sort of a “choose your own adventure” interactive, and is quite engaging and well-designed, not to mention accessible to English Language Learners.

Number eight is: Don’t Gross Out The World is a game that challenges you to answer questions about dining customs in different parts of the world.

Number seven is: The History Channel has a neat series of timeline puzzles related to its Life After People television series. In the game, you have to put images from the series in the correct timeline order – what happens when – after humanity disappears from the planet. Each image also has a short and relatively accessible (to high Intermediate English Language Learners) explanation of it.

Number six is: Scholastic has a good environmental game called Virtual Forest Challenge. It’s very accessible to English Language Learners.  In the game, you are a virtual character going through a typical day. You regularly are faced with having to make choices between decisions that are ecologically helpful and ones that are not – you have to make the call.

Number five is: Mia Cadaver’s Tombstone Timeout is a BBC game that asks questions related to Math, Science and English, and you can choose which subject you want to use.  The Math and Science sections are divided into levels of difficulty.  That makes it more accessible to a larger number of students.   In “Mia Cadaver”  you can create a private “virtual room” where only your students compete against each other.  Everybody just types in the name you’ve given the room, and the questions begin.  After each question is answered the screen shows the overall ranking of everybody in the room.  Students love it!

Number four is:  In the Frontier Alaska game, you having a very hard time in a dog sled. It’s a “choose your own adventure” activity where you are regularly giving challenging scenarios and then have options on how to proceed.  It’s from the Discovery Channel and is very similar to their “Life or Death” games. They’re all very engaging and accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners. My students love playing them, and they’re great reading opportunities.

Number three is: National Geographic has put together a pretty sophisticated “I Spy” kind of game called Herod’s Lost Tomb Game. It combines archeology, geography, and vocabulary development – a great mix for English Language Learners.  They also have a n interactive map showing images, and their ruins, of structures built during that time.

Number two is: Audio Puzzler is a listening game where hear sections of a video, then have to type out correctly what you hear, and then put them in order.  It’s a pretty cool activity, and would be great for high Intermediate or Advanced English Language Learners.

And, now, the number one Online Learning Game for 2009 is…

Get The Pic? Sure! is a new online game that would be accessible, though a bit challenging, to Intermediate English Language Learners To play “Get The Pic? Sure!,” you first pick three letters. Those letters then appear, along with blanks showing missing letters for that word. You can “buy” (with “play” money) guesses for those letters, and also get a clue showing a sentence that uses that word. If you don’t guess the word in the allotted time, you lose that round and the answer appears. And then it starts all over again…

Below you’ll see the poll. Remember, people can only vote once, and I’m asking that you vote for no more than three of them.

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

The League of Scientists offers a number of science-related games whose difficulty level can be adjusted. In addition, you can start your own games and have up-to-eight people compete in “your” race. It’s not as simple as it is in other game sites to create games that only include your classmates, but if you set it up that the people you want to compete against all sign-in at the same time, it seems to me that you should be able to make that happen. Also, unlike in some of the sites, you have to log-in before you play (registration is simple, though).

Even with some of those drawbacks, I’m still adding The League of Scientists to The Best Online Games Students Can Play In Private Virtual “Rooms”.

Karooba is a neat site for learning games. It has a ton of them, plus you can easily create your own. You don’t have to register to play, but you do if you want to make games. You can play them and only compete against the computer, or you can compete against other people on the site. Unfortunately, though, there doesn’t seem to be a way to choose who you want to play with — it seems you get assigned randomly.

I’m adding the site to The Best Websites For Creating Online Learning Games and to The Best Collections Of Online Educational Games. Because of the inability to choose your opponents, I can’t add it to The Best Online Games Students Can Play In Private Virtual “Rooms”. If you use the site, let me know if there’s some way you can do that in case I missed it.

It’s Thursday morning (California time) and it appears the site might be overloaded with new people registering, so you might want to wait awhile before doing so. Just playing the games seems to be working fine, though.

Thanks to Skip Zalneraitis for the tip. If you use Twiiter, he’s definitely a person you want to “follow.”