Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Gimundo, which has the sub-heading “Good News…Served Daily,” provides only positive and upbeat news stories and videos. I wouldn’t make it the primary source of news for either my students or me, and, I have to admit, the idea of just sharing positive stories doesn’t feel right to me — I guess I prefer the real world.

However, I have to admit many of the stories are engaging, and are accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my website in the News section.

I’ve posted about E-Learning For Kids in the past, but I recently learned they changed the url address that will give English Language Learners free access to math, science, health, and language games and activities.

I’ve placed the new link on my website under Other Mixed Activities.

In2English is, I think, the BBC site to assist Chinese speakers learn English. Most of the activities there, though, are also accessible to any other English Language Learners.

There were two sections I especially liked: English For Fun and Listen To A Story.

English For Fun has numerous engaging English-learning games, and Listen To A Story features short fables with audio support for the text.

There’s a lot more on the site, and it’s worth exploring if and when you have time.

I’ve placed links to the various activities on my English For Beginners page.

Many of you may be familiar with the international ThinkQuest contest each year. Students around the world create educational websites, many of which I’ve posted about and/or added to my website.

I recently learned that there’s a ThinkQuest — New York City that acts as a more local competition. Clicking on that link will lead you to many accessible websites created by students, including:

* The New Seven Wonders Of The World

* The Buzz On Bees

* Great Wonders Of The World

I’ll be posting links to these, and other sites in the New York competition, throughout my website.

Newscred looks like a great way students (and anyone else) can create their own personalized online newspaper. Of course, it’ll even be greater when their site is consistently up. They were written up in the TechCrunch blog today, and I suspect they’re being overwhelmed with traffic.

I’ve been looking for a good site performing this kind of service for awhile, and have written about my frustrations. I was finally able to get through to Newscred and was impressed. Once they work out their technical issues, it should be an ideal place for students to identify topics that they’re interested in and have an attractively designed and accessible source to read about it.

The site has 2500 news feeds. It’s simple as pie to set-up your paper, and you can create multiple papers on different topics.

Obviously, a fair amount of the information that shows-up in these feeds is going to be quite challenging for English Language Learners to understand. However, since it’s on the topics they choose, and shown in an attractive form, it will certainly provide high-interest reading material that one can hope they’d want to ‘fight-through” a bit to comprehend.

I’m tentatively adding Newscred to The Best News/Current Events Websites For English Language Learners — 2009 — assuming they fix their technical issues.

Renee Maufroid has created another one of her great activities for English Language Learners.  This one is called Prepositions For Beginners.

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

ABC Fast Phonics is a pretty darn impressive site for beginning readers to reinforce their understanding of phonics.

I’m not a big fan of explicit phonics instruction being a huge part of a curriculum, but I do make it a part of the curriculum I use with Beginning English Language Learners. I teach it in an inductive way, though, which I describe more thoroughly in my upcoming book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work.

Sites like ABC Fast Phonics, though, do offer engaging ways students can practice.

I’m adding it to The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers.

Thanks to Gail Casson, an ELL teacher in Maine, for the tip.

Common Mistakes is a good website designed for English Language Learners to practice “common mistakes” made in the English language. Exercises are divided into Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced levels.

I’ve placed the link on my English Themes For Intermediate/Advanced webpage.

Thanks to Web English Teacher for the link. Web English Teacher is a good source of resources, and worth checking-out.

Soul Rebel: An Intimate Portrait Of Bob Marley is an engaging slideshow from The Washington Post.

We teach a unit on Jamaica in our ninth grade English classes, and Marley and his music are key parts of the curriculum.

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

Story Something is a new site that lets children personalize stories. Then, parents and their children are supposed to read them together. There is no audio or animation.

It’s in “beta” now, and I do hope they make a number of the upgrades they’re talking about doing. I’m not particularly impressed with the site as it is now. Just having the ability to put your name in the story and personalize it a couple of other ways is not a big deal.

The site does, however, have a nice “Choose Your Own Adventure” story called A Puzzling Winter Adventure!. This one is a bit more interactive, and I hope they produce more of them. I’ve added this story to The Best Places To Read & Write “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories.

Thanks to TechCrunch for the tip.

I have a pretty extensive classroom library — our school is committed to having ones in each English teacher’s classroom and spends a fair amount on books. Plus, as regular readers know, my mother-in-law volunteers with our local “Friends of the Library” group, which has contributed thousands of volumes over the years so our students can have libraries of their own at home. Though ninety-five percent of those donated books become owned by the students, I keep a small percentage as permanent loaners.

I’ve been asked a few times to share how I organize the library, and thought I’d make it into a short post. I don’t think there’s any brilliance to it, but it works well for my students and me. I’d love to hear ideas on how I could make it better, though, so please feel free to share your own tips in the comments section.

Thanks to the help provided by my extraordinary wife Jan over the summer, the books are divided into the following categories, with each one in separate sections or shelves. Each category has a colored circle on its spine, except for the largest category, which has no circle. I have a sign in the front with the code. The categories are:

Most Popular Books (I’ve pulled out the 100 or so books that over the years have seemed to be the most popular among students)

ARW Fiction (our ninth grade English classes are called Academic Reading and Writing — ARW, and this is my largest category)

ARW Non-Fiction

Intermediate English Non-Fiction

Intermediate English Fiction

Beginning English Language Learners

Bilingual Books

I also have separate sections for Goosebumps books and American Girls, but they don’t need color-coding. I have a small section of graphic novels, too.

I make it very clear to my ELL’s that the categorization is only to help keep the books organized, and that they should pick any book they want, even if it’s in the ARW sections. I certainly don’t want it to be limiting, which is what I understand often happens in an Accelerated Reader type of program. That message is clearly heard, and ELL’s will often check-out higher-level reading.

All students, including mainstream ones, can get extra credit by checking out the Beginning ELL books and reading them to a younger sibling or cousin. Here’s the form they complete and turn-in after they’ve done it.

Students are also surprisingly respectful about keeping the books in their categories.

Let me know if you have any good tips you’d like to share!

There are a lot of sites out there designed for spelling practice. I thought it would be helpful to create a “The Best…” list to narrow them down a bit.

For English Language Learners, and for others, the best spelling sites are ones that offer audio and also use the words in the context of sentences. Websites that offer both are the most highly-rated on my list. And, of course, they have to be free to be here, too.

You can also find links to the sites here, and to many other spelling related resources, on my website under Spelling.

Here are my ranked choices of The Best Spelling Sites (that are best for English Language Learners):

Number thirteen is Catch The Spelling. It’s a series of games specifically geared towards English Language Learners.

Number twelve is the Alpha-Bot game. It’s a nice game where you first listen to the word spoken and then have to find the correct letters to spell it. I probably should place it a little higher on the list, but I learned about this game after I completed this post, and was just too lazy to change the rankings .

Number eleven are spelling quizzes from The Interlink Language Center. They’re simple exercises, but there are a lot of them.

Number ten is Kidspell. There are a ton of spelling games, and you can also easily create ones using your own spelling lists. However, they’re not offered in context and there’s no audio pronunciation.

Number nine is Word Sort from Houghton Mifflin. In addition to providing audio, it has the added feature of challenging students to look for word patterns. However, the words are not used in sentences.

Number eight is Spellbee!,  a spelling game where, after you register, you choose a player to compete with in a spelling contest. Each player chooses from a variety of words and challenges their opponent online to correctly spell the word that is spoken to them in the context of a sentence.  It’s a pretty neat concept and, though the text-to-speech software it uses is definitely not top-tier, it’s still a game students would enjoy playing and would be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.  It’s quite easy for players to register very quickly. There’s also a slightly more complicated registration process that students and teachers can use in order for teachers to monitor student progress.

Number seven is Spin and Spell. It’s an excellent spelling and vocabulary-building exercise for ELL’s. Images and audio are provided, and players select the categories they want to use. It, too, however, doesn’t use the words in sentences.

Number six is Spellits, an excellent site from the BBC. It provides some direct instruction in spelling patterns — using audio and text — and has a number of games that provide the same level of support.

I don’t think that Spelling Bees different schools and communities sponsor are particularly healthy or educational for kids.  However, there are several online versions that I think would work well with ELL’s. I’m ranking Spelling Bee: The Game at number five.  It has lots of great features.  The only it’s missing, though, is that it appears like you can’t pick your level of difficulty.

There’s another free online version called Big IQ Bee that I’m ranking at number four (other similar “Spelling Bees” are coming up on this list, too).   Students have to register, which is very easy to do. Then they determine their difficulty level. Words are spoken in a computer-generated voice, and are also used in a sentence. Players then spell the word.  Players are rated in some kind of leader board, but they’re not actually playing against others in real-time.

Number three is the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee.  You don’t have to register to play, and it automatically adapts to your spelling ability. It remembers which words you got right and wrong and quizzes you periodically on words at your spelling level that you spelled incorrectly in the past. A human voice, and not a computerized one, says the words. Plus, it shows you a diagram of similar words.  It doesn’t give you a sentence example using the word, but I guess you can’t have everything…

Number two is The Spelling Bee from Annenberg Media. Not only does it let you pick your level of difficulty, provide audio support, and give the words in context, but the context is not just in a sentence — it tells you a story.

And, now, the number one Best Spelling Site is….Spelling City. It has all the features that one can ask for, and is plenty of fun. You can make your own word list, or create your own.

(I’ve posted about Tutpup several times, and must have had a “brain freeze” when I forgot to include it originally in this list. Thankfully, Steven Roberge kangirsuk reminded me about it. I’ll just quote how he described it, and you can also look at my previous posts on it:

Students must spell words that are spoken to them. The activity is a multi-player game. There are 5 levels of difficulty. Teachers can create class accounts, so they can monitor the progress and statistics of their students.)

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.

Here are some recent additions to The Best Online Personality, Career, Political & Just Plain Fun Quizzes:

The Los Angeles Times uses technology from the company Visual DNA to have users take a News Match Quiz. It’s really pretty neat. You’re asked some simple questions and shown a variety of images you use to answer — What is your favorite kind of treat? What would spark a conversation with you?

Then, at the end, you’re given a report on your personality and a series of newspaper articles the program thinks you’d be interested in.

It’s useful for English Language Learners on a number of levels. I’ve seen the Visual DNA technology used in other sites, and have liked it, they those other sites have usually been dating-related or on other sites not appropriate for the classroom.

A somewhat similar quiz sit– though not nearly as good as Visual DNA’s application — is called ID Solution. It identifies your “cultural taste.” One thing I do like about it is that some the questions ask your preferences of various texts instead of images.

The New York Times Skimmer, a visually engaging way to read the paper online, is now officially released.

I’ve had a link to the prototype version for quite awhile on The Best Visually Engaging News Sites, but it appears that they have now worked out all the bugs.

Thanks to Read Write Web for the tip.

Harcourt has an excellent Multimedia Art Glossary that provides audio support for the text in addition to visual images.

I’m adding it to The Best Art Websites For Learning English, as well as placing the link on my website under Music and Art.

The Calgary Academy has a quite impressive online and interactive short story unit. The ambitious activity provides audio and visual support for the text, and is designed for students to learn the different elements of a short story.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Short Story.

And this is just one of many exceptional online exercises on that site.  I’ll be highlighting others in future posts.

Project Third Edition is another new excellent site from Oxford University Press supporting one of their textbooks.

There’s a ton of different and engaging online activities there for Beginning through Intermediate English Language Learner students.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Vocabulary on my website, even though it also includes reading and listening exercises..

Google announced today a new feature in their popular Google News page — you can now create your own customized news sections, and publish them so they’re accessible to anyone (if you want to). For example, I just created one on Hmong news, which is obvious interest to many of my students.

Of course, in a lot of ways you do something like this with an application like Daymix and, unlike with the new Google news feature, you don’t have to sign-in at Daymix to create your custom page.

But I could see Google’s page just being one more way for students to create their own high-interest content to read.

Thanks to Mashable for the tip, which also has more info on it.

The Smithsonian and the National Center For Family Literacy have jointly developed several brand-new learning interactives. They include a virtual sit-in at a lunch counter and an exercise to learn more about the American flag. All provide audio support for the text, and would probably be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’ll be adding direct links to various sections on my website.

PUSH by Sapphire is an extraordinarily popular book among teenagers. Here is its description:

Claireece Precious Jones endures unimaginable hardships in her young life. Abused by her mother, raped by her father, she grows up poor, angry, illiterate, fat, unloved and generally unnoticed. So what better way to learn about her than through her own, halting dialect. That is the device deployed in the first novel by poet and singer Sapphire. “Sometimes I wish I was not alive,” Precious says. “But I don’t know how to die. Ain’ no plug to pull out. ‘N no matter how bad I feel my heart don’t stop beating and my eyes open in the morning.” An intense story of adversity and the mechanisms to cope with it.

This month, PUSH is coming to movie theaters as Precious. You can see the trailer at the link.

The National Center For Family Literacy is working with the film distributor, who will offer literacy tips on its website. The film will also be in limited release in November to help recognize National Family Literacy Month.