First, I want to begin by saying that, obviously, the best place to get good recommendations for any of these categories are people you know and whose judgment you respect.
Secondly, I want to clarify that in this list I’m not going to cover any of the many websites that allow you to see what your “friends” are suggesting, either.
Instead, this “The Best…” list will highlight ways to get recommendations that are (or at least I think they are) based on some kind of computer generated formula. And, in some of them, they might be considered more like a search engine.
I’ve used these applications to identify new resources to assist in my teaching, and I’ve also had students (primarily reluctant-readers from my ninth-grade mainstream class) use one or two of them to find books in which they might be interested.
I’m sure I’m missing some good tools out there, so please feel free to leave suggestions in the Comments section.
Here are my choices for The Best Places To Get Blog, Website, Book, Movie, & Music Recommendations (again, through some kind of computer generated system):
BLOGS & WEBSITES:
Two obvious places are the “related feeds” section in Bloglines, which lists other blogs that are supposed related to the one you’re reading at that time; and Google Reader’s “recommendations.”
I also like In Suggest. It lets you provide a website you like, and then shows you a bunch more it thinks you’ll like. More interestingly, you can do the same with your del.iciou.us bookmarks (you can also use images).
BOOKS, MOVIES, & MUSIC:
Here, one obvious tool is Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item..” section that lists the books, movies, and music that other people purchased who also bought the item you’re looking at.
Live Plasma uses a neat Flash Interface that uses Amazon’s data base to highlight movie and music recommendations.
Zoomi doesn’t quite fit into this recommendation category, but it’s pretty close. It’s another much more visual representation of Amazon’s catalogue that shows books in a virtual bookshelf. You can then access Amazon’s recommendations. I’ve found that some of my reluctant readers are more engaged in looking for books using this tool than Amazon’s usual rather bland interface.
Scholastic has recently started the Teacher Book Wizard. It’s a data base of over 50,000 books that’s searchable by keyword, title or author. You can also type in the title of book and indicate if you are looking for similar books at the same, lower, or higher level. I typed in the keyword “immigration” and was able to find quite a few that I know my students would consider “high-interest” ones. I certainly got a better selection that I did when I typed the same word at Amazon’s site. I think this might end up being quite useful to teachers of English Language Learners.
LookyBook allows you to “flip” through all of the pages of a growing number of recent picture books. You can also choose ones to keep on your own virtual “bookshelf.” For example, when I was looking for stories to use as part of a unit on fables with my English Language Learner students, I was able to search for books using the keyword “fable.” I was then able to find quite a few — some which my students were able to read online, and one that I purchased. Being able to see the whole book is a big advantage over, for example, the preview function available on Amazon’s website.
Soundflavor is an intriguing and new music website. It’s basically a source of online music not unlike several others I’ve already posted about and placed on my website under Movies & Music For ESL.However, it does have one unique feature — you can search for music by subject (nature, war, peace, work, money, etc.). It looks like the results are a little uneven, but even so this kind of capability could be very helpful to an ESL/EFL teacher who’s being hard-pressed to find a song connected to a theme he/she is teaching in class.
Netflix’s “Enjoyed By Members Who Enjoyed” and “More Like This” features are also useful sources of recommendations.
Again, this list might not “go together” as smoothly as some of my others, but there does seem to be at least a little bit of a common thread that might make it useful to teachers.
Links to all of these sites can also be found on my Teacher’s Page.
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