Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Max’s Math Adventures is from Scholastic, and offers a variety of relatively simple math games.

The key feature, though, that makes it so useful to English Language Learners is that audio support is provided for much of the text.

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

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.

The BBC has just announced a new website in their exceptional “Bitesize” series. This one is called KS3 Bitesize.

It includes activities for Math, English and Science.  What makes it truly exceptional — at least for English Language Learners — is that all the neat exercises listed as an “Activity” on the site not only are very engaging and informative, but have subtitles which make them more accessible to English Language Learners.

Various parts of this site are going to make it on a number of “The Best…” lists this year.

What Can a Mathematics Teacher Do for the English Language Learner? is an:

“…interactive document… developed during a professional development session, led by the Texas Comprehensive Center, for mathematics and ESL specialists from the Education Service Centers in Texas.”

It was just put on the Web by SEDL, a Texas-based education “think-tank,” and I thought readers might find it useful.

Math and Science Literacy For English Language Learners is the focus of the most recent issue of “Accellerate:The quarterly newsletter of the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition.”

You can subscribe for free to the NCELA listserv here.

Chart Go is another new site that lets you easily make…charts.

It doesn’t have an embed feature, but I assume you can use Embedit.in for that.

I’m adding it to The Best Tools To Make Simple Graphs Online.

Graph Jam is an extremely easy tool to for making simple online graphs.  I’ve added it to The Best Tools To Make Simple Graphs Online.

Thanks to Steve Dembo for the tip.

Yes, you read the headline correctly — The Most Popular Mathematicians.

The School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland has an impressive website filled with biographies for 2100 mathematicians.

Earlier this year, they developed a list of Most popular biographies and identified and ranked the 100 bio’s that were visited most often.

As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites and information, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”

Mr. Nussbaum is the number one site on The Best Websites For Teaching & Learning About U.S. History, but it has really exceptional activities covering many subjects, including math, spelling, and science.

Much of it is accessible to English Language Learners.

Go to his home page and you’ll see links to each section, and a list of new activites he’s recently added to the site.

Learning Clip provides a ton of free interactive math activities. First, students listen to a brief cartoon video explaining the concept (the British accent might make things difficult for some students). Then, users play games reinforcing the idea.

You have to first register for the site. It’s worth a visit.

Thanks to the Kent ICT blog for the tip.

For newer readers of my blog, I just wanted to write a post mentioning that my website has a ton of math activities for both English Language Learners and native English speakers.

You can find them in two places:

* My Math page, which has links to all math resources.

* The Math section on my English Themes page, which is just for English Language Learners and shares links that combine math with language development.

Of course, there’s also my The Best Math Websites For English Language Learners — 2007.

You’ll Never Get Anywhere Without Math is an engaging game to reinforce some basic math skills. It’s combined with some entertaining storytelling, which where English language-learning comes in.

I’ve placed the link on the Math page on my website.

Verifiable is a site where you can use data already contained on the website (or upload your own), choose the visual form in which you want the data explained, and then create a visual representation (which then has its own url which can be posted).

It’s impressive though, in terms of accessibility for Beginning and Intermediate English Language Learners, The New York Times Visualization Lab works better. Though you can’t upload your own data there — just use the Times’ info — that’s not a problem for how I use it with ELL’s. Not having that option, I think, also helps to make it easier.

What is most impressive to me about the Verifiable site is the lengths the go to make it accessible to the “layperson.” If you are an advanced ELL or native-English speaker, Verifiable has created an innovated system to guide you through the process. It would be great if other Web 2.0 tools used a similar process. Even if you have no interest in data visualization, I’d recommend you try it out just to see their “help” process.

Thanks to Information Aesthetics for the tip.

Here are a few new learning games I’ve added to various sections of my website recently:

Math Attack — Kill viruses and become a famous doctor by solving math problems.

Game Goo, which has a series of good games for Beginning English Language Learners, has a new spelling activity called The Big Kahuna.

Spelling Match is from Houghton-Mifflin and is a series of leveled games about….spelling.

Rich Chart Live is a new site to make pretty cool-looking animated charts and graphs.

It looks surprisingly to create them but, even with being able to say that, it’s still too complicated for me to use. I think, though, that this problem has more to do with my inability to use Excel or, in fact, any kind of numbers!

I’m not going to add it to The Best Tools To Make Simple Graphs Online because of that complexity (which may not make it accessible to English Language Learners), but I thought readers might find it useful, anyway.

I wasn’t planning to publish this post quite this soon, but a new and very useful related site called Nanocrowd just went public. So it makes this list a bit more timely. You can read more about Nanocrowd in the last section of this post.

This list is a “companion” list to The Best Popular Movies/TV Shows For ESL/EFL.  That list is primarily composed of resources related to videos and movies I’ve used in my Beginning, Early Intermediate, and Intermediate English classes.  This list is also somewhat related to The Best Places To Get Blog, Website, , Book, Movie, & Music Recommendations.

I had included in that ESL/EFL list some movie resources I’ve found useful in my Social Studies classes where I teach English Language Learners, too.  I thought that I’d create “The Best…” list here focusing on those specific Social Studies resources and “throw-in” some math and science movie sites at the same time.

Before I share this list, I should make it clear that I very, very seldom ever show an entire movie to a class (on occasion, I’ll have a substitute teacher show one if I’m out that day). At most, I’ll show five minutes (ten in an unusual situation) that is related to the theme we’re discussing, and follow it up with a writing and/or talking prompt. With English Language Learners,  I’ll also sometimes use an instructional strategy called “Back-To-The-Screen” where half the students are watching the movie with the sound off and have to describe what they’re seeing to their partner (you can read more about that method in Zero Prep:Ready-To-Go Activities For The Language Classroom by Laurel Pollard and Natalie Hess, which is on The Best Books For Teaching & Learning ESL/EFL list).

Here are my picks for The Best Places To Find Theatrical Movies On Science, Math, & History:

HISTORY:

The Internet History Sourcebook Project is an extraordinary collection of history resources.  I’m particularly impressed with their Modern History in the Movies, Ancient History in the Movies, and Medieval Movies. In those three collections, movies are categorized by era and described. It’s a gold mine for any Social Studies teacher, and especially for those of us who teach English Language Learners. I use very short clips of movies, following by a writing/thinking prompt, all the time.

American History Film Resources also offers a good listing of film resources for different periods of American history.

The History Place also has a good list of movies related to social studies.

MATH:

Mathematics In Movies has a list, and links to online clips, of math-related movie scenes.  Who knew Abbot and Costello could be used in teaching math?

Math and The Movies has a good description of movie scenes as well as printable worksheets that would go with them.

SCIENCE:

Here’s a list of one writer’s top ten science-related movies.

You might also find The Good And Bad Science In Popular Sci-Fi Movies useful.

ALL SUBJECTS:

Teach With Movies is a good resource for finding movies connected to your subject area. It costs $11.99 to have a subscription that includes specific worksheets and lesson plans. But, for the purposes of this list, their free subject matter index that shares which movies they they are related to what subject or theme is helpful to all history, science, math and English teachers.

Movie Lens is a new recommendation/search engine for movies, and it’s by far the most effective tool — for teachers, at least – I’ve found to search for movies.  The other typical sites that let you search for movies do it by genre (adventure, romance, etc.).  Movie Lens is the first that I’ve found that, in addition to searching by genre, lets you search by what they call “tags.”  For example, I searched for “World War II” and got an extensive list of World War II-related movies — a list that I would not have found through Amazon, Netflix, or any other tool on The Best Places To Get Blog, Website, , Book, Movie, & Music Recommendations list.  This could be applicable to all subjects.

And, wouldn’t you know it, just as I write that Movie Lens is the only movie recommendation tool that has those capabilities, a new one just comes out! Nanocrowd has been written-up by Read Write Web, and their post is probably worth a look. Basically, you start typing in the name of a movie that’s similar to what you’re looking for (as you type letters, movie titles will appear). Click “enter” and you will be led to a page filled with similar movies and descriptive “tags” for those movies, too. Click on the tags, and you’ll see more of the same. Again, it’s applicable to all subjects.

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.

I put out a “call” to readers to contribute suggestions for this “The Best…” list, and several responded.

To be included on this list, the site must have at least several hundred links easily accessible to students and/or teachers, and the links must be verified that they’re still “live” at least once a year or so (or, at least, it needs to appear to do so — you can usually easily tell if it has a lot of dead links).

I haven’t put them in any order of preference, and I’m sure there are a lot more out there.  Feel free to include them in the comments section of this post.

I’m not going to describe each one — it’ll be fun to go check each one out on your own!

Here are The Best Collections of Educational Links:

Ressources pour le College

Internet 4 Classrooms

Comox Valley School District

eToolBox Wiki

Teach The Children Well

History Link 101

Mrs. Mitchell’s Virtual School

ThinkQuest Library

The Utah Education Network K-12 Student Interactives

The K-5 Computer Lab Activities Wiki

Monique suggested the Warrensburg R-Vl School District site.

Miss Bosch suggests Learning Links from the Southfield Christian School.

Amy recommended Jim Moulton’s website.

Linda DeVore suggests several:

Blue Web ‘N

Awesome Library

Free Resources For Educational Excellence

Thinkfinity

Shambles

Utah Education Network

David Deubelbeiss rightly recommends EFL Classroom’s Diigo Collection.

John Paul Loucky suggests Call4All, which he describes as “a HUGE VIrtual Language Learning Encyclopedia or Language Ed Links Library, over 4,000 well-organized links so far and growing. Regularly updated, about once a month, so it fits your parameters. Enjoy it everyone!”

And I should list my website, which has over 9,000 categorized links accessible to English Language Learners.

The File Cabinet, created by Kelly Hines, is the newest addition to this list.

Mrs. Alline

Copacabana Public School Get Smart Interactive Activities

Classroom Web Tools

I’m adding the Vermilion Parish Curriculum Site (that main page leads to plenty of other great features, including their eHomework Pad) to this list.

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.

Study Jams, from Scholastic, are engaging activites for students to learn about math and science. That is, at least the free sample exercises available are — apparently you can pay to gain access to quite a few more.

They’re accessible to English Language Learners. The sample “Study Jams” are on fractions, math operations, the water cycle, and gas/liquids/solids.

I’m placing links to Study Jams both on my Math and Science pages.

I wanted to point out that I have several Math Glossaries on my website under Math section. They include:

* Ron Blond’s Math Glossary, which is in English-only, but has excellent animated examples of each word.

* McGraw-Hill’s Multilingual Glossary, which translates math words into thirteen different languages (including Hmong).

* Jenny Eather’s fine Math Dictionary.

* Houghton-Mifflin’s eGlossary, which provides audio support for everything you see on the screen.

* HRW’s more advanced Multilingual Glossary.

* Harcourt’s Math Glossary, which also provides audio support and images.

All of them are accessible to English Language Learners.

Matrix Learning has a series of new online math games, including several that deal specifically with developing math vocabulary. This would certainly be helpful to English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on the Math page of my website.

Thanks to Brent Sordyl for the tip.