Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

The Minnesota Adult Basic Education Online Activity List has a wealth of leveled resources for English Language Learners.

You’ll periodically find some dead links, but you’ll also find many excellent categorized ones.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Favorite Sites.

CyberChase from PBS has a great online talking calculator.

It’s a perfect way for English Language Learners to do their math and, through listening skills, developing their language abilities.

I’ll be adding it to the Math page on my website.

Thanks to Casey Mayfield for the tip.

My Intermediate English class just completed their first assignment to create user-generated content by using a great text-to-speech site and create their own talking animals.

After they all signed-up for email accounts, it was a fun little exercise to get them feeling competent and confident with the computers. On our class blog, you’ll be able to see subsequent scaffolded online activities.

We’re in the computer lab twice-a-week for one hour on each of those two days. Our other Intermediate English class will be doing the same — they will be making their own talking animals tomorrow for posting there.

Brainpop ESL launches today, and it’s free for now. They have one complete module available — for beginners, with a promise of more to come.

I like Brainpop a lot, and believe that it’s well worth the money for teachers of World History and United States History. Since they added closed-captioning to their animations last year, their movies became especially accessible to English Language Learners. I’ve included them on a number of “The Best…” lists. In fact, I’ve defended Brainpop from attacks in Is Brainpop Bad For Students?

I’m not teaching any Social Studies classes this year, and I felt I couldn’t make the case for our school to renew its  subscription. In my mind, at least, their movies covering other subjects just didn’t feel like they brought enough added-value to student understanding to be worth the cost (however, I could possibly see science teachers feeling differently).  My students and I liked them, but there just seemed to be enough other free or lower-cost alternatives out there.

I have to say I feel the same way about their new ESL animations.  I’ve got a number of critiques about it,  including the lack of ability for users to record their voices and compare it to how it’s pronounced correctly.   I’ll have my ESL students check them out since they’re free for now, but I believe there are plenty of lower-cost or free alternatives that bring equal — and in many cases, greater — interactive language learning opportunities.

For alternatives, check-out U.S.A Learns, the number one ranked site on both The Best Sites For K-12 Beginning English Language Learners and The Best Sites For K-12 Intermediate English Language Learners list, all the other sites on those lists.  You might also want to read The Best Sites Where Students Can Work Independently & Let Teachers Check On Progress.

As always, though, I’m open to hearing alternative points of view.

BT Better World has many online activities accessible to Beginning English Language Learners. They include literacy and listening games and exercises.

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

Read The Words which is on The Best Listening Sites For English Language Learners list, just announced a big upgrade of their site, and it looks good.

Read The Words lets you convert any text – from a document, blog, or website – into audio with your choice from a variety of voices. You can then embed the voice player into your site. Unfortunately, it only lets you record something for no longer than 30 seconds for free — you have to be a paid member for anything longer.

State Of Debate is another excellent learning game from the BBC. It’s accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners, and, as strange as it sounds, it’s basically an online video game where you have explain why you’re not wearing a “hoodie.”

Don’t worry about the description — it’s an excellent listening and reading game.

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

Big Art Alphabet is from the Liverpool Museums in the UK, and provide an artistic way for Beginning English Language Learners to study the alphabet. Audio support is provided for the letters, and words are used in sentences (supported by both images and audio) as well.

I’ve placed the link on my website along with a ton of other alphabet activities under Alphabet (ABC’s).

Obviously, talking with a “chatbot” using artificial intelligence is a poor substitute for conversation practice with a real human.  In fact, at the level these bots function right now, I don’t think they’re particularly useful for anything than an occasional fun practice opportunity in the computer lab — except for one that I’m aware of, and I’ll share it at the end of this “The Best…” post.

As always, though, I’m happy to be shown a different perspective.

This list shares what I think are the best chatbots out there. I’m going to have my students try them all out later this month, and will report their assessments. The main difference that I can see is that, though most are text-only, the first two provide audio for the “bot side” of the conversation.

Here are my picks for The Best Online “Chatbots” For Practicing English (the first and the last ones are my favorites):

Why not try talking to Dave at EFL Classroom 2.0. The bot speaks and shows the text from the “bot side,” and the computer voice is pretty decent.

My Bot asks questions and answers them by showing text and providing audio through a computer-generated voice that isn’t that great.

During Christmas time, you can talk (text-only) to Santa Bot.

(By the way, I learned about these first two from Özge Karaoğlu, an EFL teacher in Turkey)

You can talk to a virtual Bear Bot

You can talk to a — I kid you not — “Socratic Zen Conversationalist.”

Pasadena City College has developed the ESL Robots Project.  Students first listen and read dialogues related to shopping,  getting an apartment, and dealing with a hotel clerk.  Then, students use the information they learned to “chat” with virtual staff in each of the three settings.  It’s quite an innovative exercise.

George is a “chatbot” recommended by Alicia Rey. One feature that I neglected to mention in that post is that you can email a record of your conversation with the “bot.” It doesn’t actually have its own url (you’d have to copy and paste it on a blog or online journal from the body of the email), but it could be a very useful asset for English Language Learners and their teacher.

Now for the site that I believe brings some added value –Virsona. It’s a relatively new tool that lets you re-create and interact with historical figures. I think it’s a brilliant idea. Users decide on a historical or fictional figure, and program a “talking bot” that visitors can chat with using text. The site is still in the experimental stage, and the bots that were available were very limited in their ability to communicate. However, if and when the site develops and more people participate, this part of the site would certainly be accessible to English Language Learners. Creating your own talking bot would take a student’s learning to an entirely different level.   The process seems fairly complicated now, but if they simplify it a bit it seems to me that high-level Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners would be able to do it.

Nik Peachey has also written a useful post about it, in addition to a lesson plan using the site.

David Deubelbeiss at EFL Classroom 2.0 has been working on some innovative ideas regarding chatbots and English language teaching. I’ll be writing a separate post about that in the future, and then be adding his resources to this list.

Suggestions and feedback, as always, 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.

Many English Language Learner teachers and students are familiar with Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab. It’s provided high-quality listening exercises on the web for a longtime.

It’s now gotten even better with the addition of videos. Video Snapshots for ESL/EFL Students show short video clips along with comprehension quizzes for students to take.

I’m adding the site to The Best Listening Sites For English Language Learners.

Thanks to Ressources Pour Le College for the tip.

April is “Financial Literacy Month” (which is news to me).  In recognition of it, Brainpop is offering a series of their financial-related movies for free during April.

You can find them at Brainpop Spotlight: Financial Literacy.

The Denver Post Media Center has many slideshows accessible to English Language Learners, along with interactive graphics.

I’ve placed the link on my website, along with many other similar sites, under Multimedia Resources From News Outlets.

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

Even thought it’s for teachers, it’s so good that I’m adding it to The Best Listening Sites For English Language Learners.

Google is just beginning “Google Voice” which, as Mashable puts it, is like “Gmail for Voicemail.” It allows users to make phone calls (free in the U.S.), leave voice messages and also generate an automatic written transcript of the message.

Since the service isn’t public yet, it’s unclear how accessible how it will be for English Language Learners to use, but the speaking, listening and reading advantages are obvious.

Check out the Mashable post (and also one at TechCrunch). You can request an invitation from Google to use the service here.

I’ve posted about “chatbots” before — online virtual “people” that can carry-on a reasonable conversation with an online user. The best provide audio as well as written responses. They can provide excellent writing and listening practice to English Language Learners.

In fact, I’ll soon be posting The Best Chatbots For English Language Learners list.

Today, though, I learned about an intriguing “bot” that I thought I’d write about now. It can incorporate “emotional cues” like laughter and and yawning. It’s also an opportunity for ELL’s to develop some additional vocabulary about these emotions.

Check out the Text-To-Speech Bot With Emotional Cues and let me know what you think.

Yesterday I posted about a new site called English Speak that appeared to have some potential, but was having technical difficulties when I was trying to access it.

Well, it’s working now, and it really is good. Among other resources, it has 100 listening lessons (framed as dialogues) that give you two different speeds in which to listen to them.

I’m adding the site to The Best Listening Sites For English Language Learners.

An insurance company has developed a very engaging interactive to help people learn more about health and safety issues related to their home. The spoken language and instructions is probably accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Life Skills.

I know I’ve written a couple of posts about this topic already, and it’s also a bit late, but I’ve recently found some more resources that I think might be helpful to English Language Learners. It’s certainly an engaging topic.

Here are my picks for The Best Sites For Learning About The Hudson River Plane Crash:

The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom has a good interactive on the crash.

The Associated Press has an informative interactive, too.

The Wall Street Journal published an excellent video about it that’s perfect for ELL’s. It has good footage of the plane, along with an animation. But, most importantly, it includes the audio of the communication between the pilot and the air traffic controller along with the transcript showing-up on the screen (very clearly) as the words are spoken.

The New York Times has, as usual, published a number of good online multimedia pieces about the crash, particularly one on tracking the flight.

I learned about a good ELL lesson plan created by Karenne Sylvester on the U.S. Airways river landing. It’s a good frame for a number of current events topics, so it’s worth a look.

Here are some videos from Newsday.

CBS News has a series of interactives called Miracle On The Hudson.

The New York Times also has an interactive on the raising of one of the plane’s engines from the Hudson’s bottom.

As always, feedback is 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.

Phrasals For Fun is another good listening game/activity from the British Council. Players listen to short conversation and then have to answer a few questions about it.

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

I have nearly 9,000 categorized links — all except for a few accessible to English Language Learners — on my website.

It’s designed for self-access by students. Many classes at our school use it, including our daily after-school ESL computer lab. My understanding is that classes throughout the world use it, too.

You can read a more extensive description of each page here.

I’d also encourage you to read articles I’ve written that describe how, in my opinion, computers can be most effectively used with English Language Learners and other students.

I have approximately twenty separate pages on my website.  Links become obsolete pretty quickly on the Internet, so I verify links on my site about twice each year.  My “system” is to verify links on one page each week and, then, when I’ve gone through all of them, start again.

I thought it might be useful  to create a “The Best…” list highlighting what I think are the most useful sections of my site. After all, nine-thousand links can be an intimidating number to both students and teachers alike.

Here are my choices of The Best Sections On My Website (not in order of preference):

I have less than one hundred links under Favorite Sites. These are the ones that I think — out of the 9,000 — are the best for English Language Learners. You can’t go wrong with any of them. Most are best for Beginning and Early Intermediate ELL’s, though many are also suitable for Intermediates.

I also like the substantial Citizenship section. You can find many accessible links related to government and civics that are very helpful to students at any language level preparing to take the U.S. Citizenship test.

You can find links to literally thousands of “talking stories” for Beginning English Language Learners under Stories.

Writing is another good section for Beginning ELL’s.

The links under Health are appropriate for any level of ELL, though a small number might not be suitable for very young students.

Word and Video Games is filled with English-learning games for all levels. You might want to read about how I use the online video games that are listed there as a language learning activity.

You can find a ton of tools and examples of how students can easily create their own online projects at Examples of Student Work.

Students enjoy a lot of online Geography games.

There are also a lot useful links on the Teacher Page.

I began to create a The Best Websites page adapting all of my “The Best…” lists.  However, I found that it was just as easy for my students to access them directly from my blog, especially since I had them all organized in one place.  After putting versions of twenty of the lists on my website, I just couldn’t bring myself to do 170 more.

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.