Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

I’ve recently found a few more good sites, accessible to English Language Learners, that relate to the U.S. Presidential elections.

CNN has a nice comic-book-like interactive called Eight Steps To The White House. It’s an overview of the election process.

Ask A President is also from CNN. Four virtual presidents answer basic questions about the Presidental election process and how the U.S. Constitution works.

The New York Times has good interactive slideshows on the lives of Barack Obama and John McCain.

I’m going to be adding all of these sites to The Best Sites To Learn About U.S. Presidential Elections.

Linda DeVore was kind enough to send along a link to Pat Elliott’s Olympic Page. Pat is a school librarian, and has put together quite an impressive site that also includes many lesson plans.

I’ve added the link to The Best Sites To Teach & Learn About The Olympics.

How Prepared Are You If Disaster Strikes? is an interactive from The New York Times that should be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

It’s not “worthy” of being added to The Best Websites For Learning About Natural Disasters, but I have added it to the Natural Disasters section of my website.

The Human Footprint Interactive is an engaging activity that helps the user determine how much they consume each year, and how that compares with residents of different countries.

The language is accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’m adding this site to The Best Sites To Introduce Environmental Issues Into The Classroom.

I don’t think it’s necessarily useful enough to add to my The Best Sites To Teach & Learn About The Olympics list, but a New York Times map of Olympic Medals since the modern Olympics began is a pretty neat looking, and accessible, graphic that students might find interesting.

When you click on a date of the Olympics it shows the place and “bubbles” of various sizes indicating how many medals were won by different countries.

Thanks to the Flowing Data blog for the tip.

Making timelines can be a useful learning activity for all students, including English Language Learners. I actually think students working in small groups to create a big timeline poster is a better overall learning experience. However, I can see the development of online timelines could be a good project in some situations — for example, in sharing information with others around the world in our International Sisters Classes Project.

There are many online timeline tools out there. But I’ve only found very few — three, in fact — that are easily accessible to English Language Learners and non-tech-savvy students and teachers, free, and allow users to grab images off the web to add to their final product.

All three seem very similar. At least, I haven’t found much difference between them, but perhaps I’m missing something.

My picks for The Best Tools For Making Online Timelines are:

CircaVie

Xtimeline

Dipity

You can find links to these three applications, as well as to the other timeline tools that didn’t make this list, on my website under Student Timelines.

If you found this list helpful, you might want to see the other over-ninety ones, too.

You might also want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

A.D. New Orleans After The Deluge is a pretty impressive multi-part, web-based graphic novel about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

We teach a unit on New Orleans in our ninth-grade mainstream English classes, including advanced English Language Learners. This comic is certainly accessible to ELL’s and enticing to reluctant readers as well.

You can find a ton of resources about New Orleans on my website under….New Orleans, including a very quick VoiceThread slideshow I made after my family’s visit there four months ago..

If you go to National Grid Floe, and then click on “Befriend A Bear,” you’ll be prompted to register (it will take seconds) and you can begin interacting with a polar bear cub.

You can play different games with it — but only after you answer questions related to living more environmentally responsible. The questions are fairly simple, and should be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

And that cub is just so darn cute!

Teaching Tolerance, which is on my The Best Teacher Resource Sites For Social Justice Issues list, just announced that in September they will begin distributing, free-of-charge to teachers, a new documentary film and teaching kit. It’s called Viva la Causa! and will focus on the grape boycott led by the United Farm Workers Union in the late 1960’s.

It’s not yet listed on their website, so you can’t order it now. But you can sign-up for their email newsletter or just check back in next month.

Teaching Tolerance always develops excellent materials, and I’ve also always found them accessible to English Language Learners. And you can’t beat the price!

In teaching about the history of immigrants in California, I obviously include some lessons on the UFW.

You can also found links about Cesar Chavez and the UFW on my website under Our Changing Nation.

Thanks to the excellent blog Alt Search Engines, I’ve learned about about a neat new site called Green Planet Search.

It’s a search engine for environmental websites, plus the site and its host is solar-powered. It’s very attractively designed, and, even though they’re just starting, I’ve been able to find a number of sites that are new to me on it and that are accessible to English Language Learners.

I’m so impressed with it that I’m adding it to my surprisingly (at least to me) popular The Best Sites To Introduce Environmental Issues Into The Classroom.

I’ll be posting in the future about new sites I find through Green Planet Search.

I’m adding Scholastic News Online: Election 2008 to The Best Sites To Learn About U.S. Presidential Elections. The language is written so it’s accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners, and some features have video and audio support for text. An interview with news anchor Brian Williams about the election is a good example of that kind of excellent accessibility.

Lucy Gray has bookmarked quite a few good links about the U.S. Presidential elections.

Some of them are new to me. When I get a chance to review them all, I’ll write a post sharing if I’m going to add any to my  The Best Sites To Learn About U.S. Presidential Elections.

Lucy always shares great links if you subscribe to her blog, so I’d encourage you to do so.

Politifact is a feature from the St. Petersburg Times newspaper that does a very short and accessible analysis on various attacks and statements made in the presidential campaigns.

I’m not sure if I’ll add to The Best Sites To Learn About U.S. Presidential Elections, but it is an intriguing tool that could be used by Intermediate English Language Learners.

I learned about the site from the excellent Instructify blog

BBC Learning English just game out with some nice materials on the history of the Olympics that provides audio support for the text.

I’ve added their Olympics 2008 feature to The Best Sites To Teach & Learn About The Olympics.

The Heritage Explorer has several good interactives for learning about British History. 

They include The Burning of the Martyrs, related to the tension (to say the least!) between Protestants and Catholics several hundred years ago.  This is a particularly good activity for English Language Learners who are studying World History.  It shows an old woodcut of a scene, and then asks the user to identify several specific elements of the picture.

The site’s Tell and Test section is also good.  The interactives there show parts of castles and monasteries and are then followed by “drag-and-drop” tests for students to label the same parts.

I’ve placed the links on my World History page under the Later Middle Ages.

The Environmental Intelligence Unit is a learning game about the environment.  Players are sent on various missions to respond to environmental problems.

The language is probably accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners.  In addition to learning about the environment, students will also gain an understanding of some basic vocabulary.  Plus, they’ll have fun doing it!

I’ve placed the link on my World History page under Toward The Twenty-First Century.

America By Air is a website sponsored by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.  The online exhibition tells the history of airline service in the United States.

There are quite a few interactive exercises/games that Intermediate (and maybe some Early Intermediate) English Language Learners can use.

I’ve placed the link on my Geography and United States History page under Problems At Home and Across The Sea.

The number of sites that offer online instructional videos has increased by a huge amount over the past year. Most of them have quite a large selection of excellent videos. However, almost all of them also include a few or more than a few (primarily related to sexual content) that make their sites not suitable for classroom use.

I thought readers might find it useful to see a “The Best…” list which highlight the ones out there that seem to have very good content and appear to have adequate screening in place (at least for now) that would allow their sites to be used in schools.

I’ve posted about several of these “how-to” sites in the past, but either I didn’t do very good screening then or they’ve added some inappropriate (for the classroom, at least) videos since that time.

That narrows things down quite a bit. In fact, there are only three of them left, and one is “iffy.”

These kinds of videos provide great listening practice for English Language Learners. It’s high-interest content that they can choose. Plus, students could then write a summary about what they’ve learned, talk about it to a peer, demonstrate their new knowledge in front of a class, or use these videos as a model for developing their own video or written instructional piece on something they are an expert at doing.

Given my relatively strict criteria, here are my picks for The Best Online Instructional Video Sites:

I like Graspr a lot. Not only does it have quite a few good videos, but you can also skip around the videos to get to the scene you want and actually write notes which can be saved and shared.

How Stuff Works is great. It has a huge collection of online videos and other materials that includes a lot of “how-to’s” as well as telling…how stuff works.

Expert Village has a good selection, though I have to say a series they host on “How to Survive a Zombie Attack” is one that I could do without having my students have access to and makes this site borderline. Some of their advertisers (Jeffrey Dahmer videos) also make it suspect. So I’d go to this one with care.

Let me know if you think if I didn’t adequately screen these three that made my list, and if you have recommendations for others that should be added.

If you found this list helpful, you might want to see the other over-ninety ones, too.

I just learned about a nice resource offered  by PBS’ Online News Hour called China Prepares For 2008 Olympics, and I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Teach and Learn About the Olympics.

It has several good features, including some interactives and lesson plans.

Thanks to the excellent Librarians’ Internet Index for the tip.

While you’re at the New Hour site, you might want to explore their News For Students section, too.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has a twelve minute film, with subtitles,  called A Promise Of Freedom: An Introduction to U.S. History and Civics For Immigrants.

It’s a decent introduction, though you definitely have to play it at full-screen size.

I’ve placed the link on my Geography and World History page under Building A New Country.