Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

NASA has developed a Buzz Lightyear site to help teach math and science.

I wouldn’t say it’s a great site for English Language Learners (though one of the “missions” is an “I Spy” game that would be helpful for vocabulary development), but it has some good acitivities for math and science.

I’m putting it on my Math page, which is used extensively by English Language Learners and special Education students at our school.

Yesterday I posted about Tutpup, a math and spelling game site that I think has a lot of potential for English Language Learners.

In my post I shared a couple of questions I had emailed to the site to clarify if it was as good as I thought it might be. I just received their response, and am pleased to say that they have both of the features I was concerned about (it wasn’t very clear on their webpages).

Here were my questions, followed by their responses in italics:

I’m unclear about what teacher sign-up does. Will I then be able to see online what my students have done on your site?

Yes - you will be able to see what your students have done on the site. We plan to add a better explanation on the teacher sign-up page to encourage teachers to register.

Is there any way for students to just compete with other students in the same class?  Or, perhaps, with other classes with whom we have a relationship?

Yes they can if they tell each other what each other’s user names are. We will add more features in this area in the future.

If you have your students try Tutpup, please share their experience in the comments section.

Tutpup is a new site where students can compete in math or spelling games against other students from around the world anonymously — either with a made-up name or no name at all.

There are a number of sites where users can compete in learning games like these. The problem I’ve had with them is that there is no way to “level the playing the field.” In other words, an English Language Learner might be playing against a native-English speaker. A situation like that does not create much encouragement for an ELLer if they are going to lose all the time.

However, the key difference between Tutpup and these other sites is that Tutpup has multiple levels of play to choose from going from extremely easy to extremely hard. This ability to choose your level helps a lot.

Plus, there’s some sort of teacher’s option that allows students to sign-up in a class. It’s not clearly explained on the website what this means exactly — can students choose to play online with their classmates? If that were the case, my opinion of Tutpup would increase even more. I’ve emailed them for clarification, and will post their response (assuming I receive one).

Users can register a nickname or they can play without registering. Their spelling game is a good listening exercise, since audio for the word is voiced and the player has to then type the word correctly.

For now, I’ve just placed the link on my Math page.

Since I posted my list of The Best Ways To Create Online Tests, a couple of readers have asked me if I knew of a good site for math tests.

It seems to me that the website “That Quiz” is the place to go for math quizzes. The site also has some non-math tests, but those weren’t flexible enough in my eyes to be included in my original list since that was focused on non-math assessment.

The link can also be found on my Teacher’s Page under Math, along with other useful resources.

Soundex and Scrabble are two new games I’ve added to the Word and Video Games section of my Intermediate English page.

They’re both what I would call “word scramble” activities.

These games are part of a larger website called Math Slice, which mainly has math exercises.  The math-related games are good, too, and I’ve put a link to the main site on my regular Math page.  These don’t do much towards English language development, but they are helpful for learning math skills.

The Webby Awards announced their Nominees and Honorees today.  I got a chance to go through their Nominees list. I’ve already posted about some of them, and I did discover a couple of new sites that would be accessible and helpful to English Language Learners.

They are:

Math Moves U, a pretty cool looking series of interactive math activities that would be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

Electrocity, where players can create their own cities and see the environmental consequences of their design decisions.

Later today I’ll try to get a chance to look through the longer list of Honorees.

Teach The Children Well is an extensive and excellent collection of links geared towards elementary students and also accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

It’s organized by Elaine Doolittle, and I learned about it while digging around the archives of Phyllis’ Favorites.

The links seem up-to-date, and I’ll be placing direct links to many of the sites on my appropriate webpages. But I wanted to highlight the main page here. It covers all subjects, and is definitely worth checking-out.

Beacon Learning Center has a lot of Student Web Lessons and Online Books (a number with audio) that would be accessible to English Language Learners.  They cover English, Science, Social Studies and Math.

I have many direct links to the lessons and stories throughout my website, but you might want to check-out their main site.

I just added a Where Is Japan? lesson to the Asia section of my Geography page.

The new edition of ELL Outlook is focused on the topic of math and English Language Learners. It has several articles related to this topic. I’m sharing it with our math teachers, and though others might find it useful/interesting.

Here’s another list in “The Best…” series, this time focusing on my least favorite subject — Math.

There are lots of websites that provide online activities for students to practice math skills.  In fact, I’ve got a ton of them on my Math page.  One of the next tasks on my agenda is to make a list in the near future ranking them.

Today’s list, however, ranks websites that help students practice math and provide superior English-language development opportunities.  That generally means that, in addition to showing a lot of numbers and text in an interesting way, that they offer audio for the text and numbers.  And that the audio has to be said in a speed accessible to English Language Learners.

In addition to the links to these sites in this post, you’ll be able to find them (and others) in the Math section of my English Themes For Beginners (which is different from my larger Math page).

As in my other lists, some of these sites may have been around prior to 2007 but, since I didn’t post about them until this year, I’m including them here.

These sites range in skills from beginning addition to advanced algebra.

And, now, for this year’s nine Best Math Sites For English Language Learners:

Number nine is Visual Math Learning Pre-Algebra Lessons.  It offers audio with text support and illustrations on a variety of math topics.  The audio is clear and at an accessible pace.  It has links to many good interactive math activities but, unfortunately, they don’t have audio.

Number eight is HippoCampus, which offers well-designed online textbooks with text and audio support.  It has ones for Elementary and Advanced Algebra.

I’ve ranked Harcourt’s That’s A Fact game number seven.  It reinforces elementary lessons, provides audio support to its text, and students like playing it.

Another Harcourt interactive, called Show Me, is number six. It walks students, step-by-step, through many math concepts.  It’s very well done.

I’ve ranked Brainpop as fifth on the list.  Brainpop has made it on a couple of my other lists, as well.  It’s one of only two sites that cost money to be ranked on any of these lists and, in fact, its one of the only two sites I’ve blogged about at all the entire year that require a paid subscription.  Their animated math movies (closed-captioned) and follow-up activities make it worth spending a few hundred dollars each year for it.

Harcourt makes it again as number four.  Their Fast Forward Math Glossary provides excellent audio and illustrated definitions of many math terms.

Holt, Rinehart and Winston’s Multilingual Glossary is number three.  In addition to showing the English definitions of math terms, at the same time it shows the definitions in the language of your choice (including Hmong!).

Number two consists of two separate sites — Villainy Mission One and Villainy Mission Two.  They teach geometry and algebra through a story “game” about bad people taking over the world.  Players have to stop them.  Besides it being a fun way to learn math, a lot, if not all, of what the characters speak is shown in text as well as heard.  It’s been developed by Thinkport in Maryland.

The number one-ranked math site for English Language Learners is….well, it’s actually three sites, all from the extraordinary Learn Alberta organization.  The three math sites are Math Under The Sea, Math 5 Live, and Spy Guys Math.  Instead of explaining each one, I’m going to suggest that they’re definitely worth the time to just go and check them out.

You can see all my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year.

And, of course, you can find these links, along with 8,000 others, on my website.

I haven’t found many textbooks I like.  However, quite a few textbook publishers have some pretty good online resources that are accessible to English Language Learners and are freely available on the Internet. 

Links to many of them have been on my website for quite awhile.  Some new ones, though, have recently been produced.  I’ve placed them on the appropriate pages on my site, and thought I’d list the new links here.  If you can’t find where I put them on my webpages, just drop me an email and I’ll let you know.

For Math, I’ve added three new links to Harcourt.  They include two Glossaries of math-related terms and include audio, text, and visuals.  The third link is a good math game called That’s A Fact and includes audio support for the text.

McGraw Hill has a nice audio glossary for United States History terms.

McGraw Hill also has a great new set of resources for Science that’s definitely worth checking-out.  They also have a nice series of sample resources for their new Treasure textbook.

They have also clearly put a lot of time and resources into the online exercises to support their new series of textbooks for English Language Learners called Treasure Chest.  It doesn’t seem to me to be particularly well-designed or helpful, though.  I’m open to hearing other people’s opinions.

Again, I guess I’m feeling too lazy today to list the locations on my website for all these links.  Sorry.  But they’re in fairly obvious locations.

I’ve recently added quite a few new math activities to various parts of my website.  One fun site, which is not necessarily connected to English language learning (but is fun, nevertheless) is called Mathematics In Movies.  Who knew Abbot and Costello could be used in teaching math?  I’ve placed this link on my Teacher’s Page under Math.

In terms of math and language development activities, I’ve placed quite a few new links on my English Themes For Beginners page under Math.  All the links in that section provide audio and text explanations, as well as using figures, to teach math concepts.  The Magic Gopher is one example.

Finally, I’ve added a ton of new links to my general Math page.  The Multiflyer is just one of many.

Shopping Math is a nice site from Dositey where students have to select the appropriately priced objects they can purchase with the money they are given.  It’s a good exercise for students to begin to learn U.S. coins.

I’ve placed the link on my English Themes For Beginners page under the Money section.

I learned about this site from the Techlearning Site of the Day.  Techlearning is a great place to not only learn about new websites, but also ideas on how to use technology in the classroom.

I just learned through Paul Hamilton about a Canadian middle school library that has a great collection of links.

One of the nice features of Courtenay Middle School’s links is that they are also labeled by reading level.

Over the next week I’ll be adding some direct links from their collection to the appropriate subject categories on my website.

It’s a very good collection, but be aware that some of them lead to dead links.

Linda DeVore passes along another good site.  It’s from a company in New Zealand called Learning Media.  By going to the link you can find several geography, science and math learning activities that are accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’m placing direct links to their activities on the appropropriate webpages.  I especially like Home, Sweet, Home, which provides audio support to a story about an Australian house that is underground.

I’ve placed that link on my Geography page under The Pacific Region.

I just learned from the Primary Teacher UK about the BBC’s new version of Bite Size Math and Literacy.

It has a lot great learning games for Beginning English Language Learners.  The Math site also has audio support for text.

I’ve placed the Literacy link on my Favorite Sites section on the English Themes For Beginners page, and the Math link under Math on the same page.

I’ve written about Brainpop Movies before (Brainpop Movies).  If you’re teaching a content class (Science, Social Studies, Health) to English Language Learners, I’ve found it so helpful that it’s one of the very, very few web applications I think worth paying for.

It’s just gotten even better for English Language Learners.  In the past, they’ve only had closed-captions on the smaller number of movies available on Brainpop, Jr. 

But now it appears that all, or at least most, of their regular movies also have closed captioning available.

They always have many movies for free, even if you’re not a subscriber, so it’s worth checking out this new feature.

HippoCampus is a great site from the Monterey For Technology and Education.   It’s recently been substantially revised.

It offers multimedia content from several textbook publishers and the University of California – none that I’ve seen before.

The non-AP United States History and Government sections are accessible to higher Intemediate English Language Learners, and are surprisingly extensive.

The Algebra series offers even more audio support for its text, and would be accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners.

The site also provides teachers with the ability to set-up their own pages with the specific chapters and exercises they want their students to review.

I’ve recently found a ton of new links I want to place on my webpages, so I probably won’t actually link to this site until the weekend.  I’ll be putting the link on my Geography and United States History page, and to the Math section of the Themes for Beginners page.  I’ll also probably add a few direct links from some activities to my World History page.

So many links, so little time……

I’ve already written a post about the Math section on the English Themes For Beginners and Early Intermediate.  I’ve placed many links under this category that teach math and provide exceptional opportunities for English Language development at the same time.

I also want to highlight the Math Page on the part of my website that is not specifically designed for English Language Learners.  This page is definitely under construction.  In addition to having all the same Math links that you’ll find on my English Themes page, you’ll also find over fifty links to what I believe are the most effective and fun online activities to teach all levels of math.  These are under the section called “Math Sites To Be Categorized.”

I’ve been collecting these for awhile in preparation for a Math Lab we may start at my school next year.

I’ll be doing substantial reorganization of this page at some point, but thought that people might find it helpful in the meantime.  The vast majority of these activities are accessible to English Language Learners though, apart from the ones you’ll find on my English Themes page, they won’t necessarily help substantially develop English language skills.

Talking Math Flashcards is another online math application that, in addition to teaching math skills, provides an English language development opportunity, too.  Students are given many addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division math problems to solve.  The key element that differentiates this site from other math practice sites is that audio support is given, too.  The problem is spoken as well as shown.

I’ve placed the link on the bottom of the Math category on my English Themes for Beginners page.

Remember, on this page I only place math links that I believe also give students an opportunity to develop their English skills.  I have a separate Math page that has thousands of other math activities and games.