Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Thumboo! seems like a very quick and easy way to take a screenshot (a picture of a webpage) and add it to your blog or website. An embed code is provided. One negative, though, is it doesn’t appear that you can adjust its size.

I’m adding it to The Best Ways To Create Simple Screenshots.

If you’ve gone through the trouble of creating and maintaining a website or blog, you probably want to make sure that it’s working, and you might also want to monitor it to see if it’s reaching your intended audience.

I thought I’d put together a “The Best…” list that would provide some tools that do just that.

Of course, one key task you want to do is to back it up in case something goes wrong. You can find those tools at one of my previous lists –  The Best Ways To Back-Up Your Computer And Online Work.

Here are a few other applications that I’ve found helpful:

VERIFYING LINKS:

If you have a lot of links to other sites on your blog or website, it’s pretty de-energizing to students and others if lots of them are “dead” — no longer connecting to a site that exists.  I use two different free and automatic link verifiers.

One is the Any Browser Link Checker. It works easily and quickly to verify links on a page once you type-in the web address of the page you want it to check. Sometimes, though, it can’t handle a page if you have a ton of links on one, like I do on some of the pages on my website.

If you run into the same problem, then Dead Links is the tool to use. That always works, though sometimes you’ll get a fair number of “false negatives” — it’ll say a link is dead if it takes awhile to load when it really is still active.  You just have to double-check them.

BEING NOTIFIED IF YOUR BLOG OR WEBSITE IS DOWN:

Two free tools work well for monitoring your sites and then notifying you if they go down for some reason.

One is Observu and the other is Ding It’s Up. Observu will tell you when it’s down. Ding It’s Up will tell you when it’s down, but it also has the nice feature of letting you know when it’s up again, too. Are My Sites Up? is a similar service, as is Montastic.

KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR SITE STATISTICS:

There are obviously lots of different tools to keep track of your site’s statistics to see who is visiting your site, and how that compares with others. There are two in particular I like.

There’s the obvious one — Google Analytics. Sue Waters’ post on The Basics Of Using Google Analytics is the place to go to learn what all that data means.

Another tool you can use to obtain data about your site, and doesn’t require any installation of code onto your site, is called Dataopedia. A post at Read Write Web describes some of its useful features.

Also, check-out the Blog Grader for data.

CHECKING TO SEE WHAT YOUR READERS SEE:

One never knows what your blog posts look like in an RSS Reader or to email subscribers, or how your website or blog looks in different browsers….unless you check.

Read Sue Waters’ post on What Do Your Readers Really SEE? to get more suggestions on this topic, including information on a site which will give you screenshots of how your blog or website will look in a zillion different browsers.

OTHER USEFUL TOOLS

Website Grader will give you a lot of helpful information about your site. All you have to do is type in your address and it will immediately give you a report with recommendations on how to make it more accessible.

Spyder Mate, Examine URL and Link Voodoo will also provide you with free overall reports on your site with similar information.

These final tools don’t quite fit into this list, but they are related.

Copy Gator, Copyscape, Fair Share and Copyright Spot all are free and easy ways to monitor if your blog content is being copied by someone else who is then billing it as their own. Nik Peachey has written a good post about them.

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.

(Cross-posted at TechLearning)

Many years ago I helped operate a soup kitchen on San Jose’s (CA) Skid Row. We were well-meaning, but not the most responsible neighbors. On day I was sweeping around the passed-out men and women on our front porch when a police car drove-up. An officer got out and started yelling me, saying that we couldn’t control thing and they received many complaints about us. As the officer continued, one of the men on the porch pulled himself up on the railing and yelled out, “Officer, Larry tries. He tries hard. We just don’t listen to him!”

I’ve often thought about that incident during my nineteen year career as a community organizer and six years as a public school teacher. I’ve framed the lesson I learned that day as a question, “Do I want to be right? Or do I want to be effective?”

The issue of educational technology is, I believe, no different. Judgmental, frustrated, and angry comments can often be found in the education “blogosphere” as people share their often unsuccessful efforts at integrating ed tech into the learning and teaching culture of their schools.

In my community organizing career, I learned that a key to engaging people to move beyond their comfort zone is to first build a relationship — a reciprocal one. A relationship entails eliciting from others their hopes and dreams, along with sharing your own. It involves finding learning the frustrations and challenges that people are experiencing. It involves looking for ways to help the other person realize those hopes and dreams and get beyond those challenges. And, if educational technology can genuinely help in those ways, then building a relationship means framing the invitation to try it in a way that speaks to what the other person wants, which may not be the way you would prefer to frame it. It is the difference between “being right” and “being effective.”

Based on the conversations I’ve had with many teachers, here are some of the simple ways I’ve introduced using educational technology as tool reluctant colleagues might want to consider — after I’ve developed or deepened relationships with them.  I’ve framed the invitations based on what they’ve said they wanted, which might or might not be similar to what you learn.  Even if they are different, these “A Few Simple Ways To Introduce Reluctant Colleagues To Technology” might provide a useful template for you to develop others.

When talking about using ed tech, I’ve found it important to stress two points — how it helps meet the immediate and direct self-interest of the individual teacher by making things easy and simple, and how it provides added value to the students’ learning experience.  I’ll discuss each of these “Few Ways” in that context.

1) Using a Computer Projector. One simple benefit for teachers is being able to easily show video clips without having to deal a VCR/DVD Projector, or the small size of a TV screen. It vastly increases the number of easily accessible video clips for all subject areas, even if you eliminate YouTube because it’s blocked by most school content filters. Yes, there are ways to access even those, but this post is about the easiest ways to introduce people to tech who might not be comfortable with it.

2) Using a Document Camera. Eliminating the need to make transparencies is every teachers’ dream if they’ve been using an overhead projector, and a document camera does the trick. Being able to have students bring their work up to easily show the class models is a great teaching tool.

3) Easily Creating A More Authentic Audience For Student Work. Students can be much more engaged in, and committed to, what they’re writing/creating for class if they know the audience is for more than just one person — the teacher. Here are some easy ways to make this happen:

To Make It Easily Viewable By Other Classmates:

Any document, including one in Microsoft Word, can be quickly uploaded to the Internet with File2.ws. All you do is click on your file and seconds letter you’re given an url address for it. Once you have that, though, what do you do with it to make it accessible?

There are two options, I think, that make it most feasible to a “reluctant” colleague.

One is by simply creating a free blog from Edublogs (since that is the blog host that is least likely to be blocked by school content filters) and having students past the url addresses of their own creations to the blog as a comment. Other students can leave comments in the same area making observations about their classmate’s posts. Or they can just write them on a piece of paper to share.

Another way is by having each student email their creation’s url address to the teacher. The teacher can then easily copy and paste them to something like Dinky Page, a super-easy website creation tool that doesn’t even require registration. Another option is using sites like Posterous or Moomeo, which both allow you to email what you want to appear on your website without even having to go set it up.

To Make It Easily Viewable By Others Beyond The Classroom:

There are plenty of places where students can easily copy and paste what they’ve created for class so that others throughout the world can read it.  They can also get the url addresses of what they create and post it in one of the ways just mentioned so that classmates, and the teacher, can easily see it. Students can be pretty excited at the possibility, and their level of commitment can increase.  Potential places for students to place what they write (with no added work required from the teacher) include:

Timelines is a neat tool that lets users contribute towards making “timelines” of historical events with text, photos, and videos. People can then vote on which ones they like best, though everyone’s contributions appear to remain displayed.  It’s extremely easy to contribute — much, much easier than to something like Wikipedia. Google’s Knol is also another easy place to use for the same purpose.

Students can write book reviews at Shelfari, Library Thing, and Book Army.

They can decide a question they want to learn the answer to, post it (or have another classmate post it) on one of numerous question/answer sites) and reearch and write the answer.  Good sites for this activity include Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, and Wikianswers (yes, the last two are indeed different sites).

They can create their own online books at Tikatok or Tar Heel Reader.

There are numerous other options, but these are the best ones.  Readers can find more at The Best Places Where Students Can Create Online Learning/Teaching Objects For An “Authentic Audience” and at The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience.”

Yes, these are all small steps. In fact, community organizers call these kinds of things “fixed-fights.” These are the small actions that have an extremely high probability of success that serve as confidence boosters to people trying something new.

The next time you’re feeling frustrated at a colleague who might be resistant to some educational technology you’re trying to introduce him/her to, why not try some relationship-building and simple confidence-boosters instead?

I don’t consider myself too much of a “worry-wart,” but I figure I’ve spent a lot of time into developing my website, many materials stored in my computer,  and my various blogs and, even though I have a lot of confidence in the webhosts and my computer hardware, anything can happen.  And given that possibility, it doesn’t hurt to “play it safe.”

I particularly like these services that provide automatic back-up for all my work.  I don’t have to even think about it, and just receive daily, or even more often, reports from them confirming that my materials have been backed-up. I’m sure that there are others, though, so please leave your suggestions in the comments section of this post.

One is Mozy, which backs-up everything on my computer. And I’ve barely used half of the capacity you get for a free account. And it costs peanuts to upgrade, if necessary.

For my blogs, I use Blog Backupr.

For Twitter, I use Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feed of my Twitter account.   Surprisingly, though, I haven’t been too impressed with the ability to search my “tweets” though Google Reader’s search function.

There’s also another different kind of back-up site called BackupURL.

BackupURL lets you enter a website address and then it immediate creates a backup copy of the site with it’s own url address. All the links remain live, and when I tried it with my website I was pleasantly surprised to find that it actually copied all the pages of my site and not just the one page address I had entered.

It’s different from the other online back-up programs in that they will create a copy of a site that you can access and then “re-launch” if you lose all your data, and you have to register for them. Those also automatically update new addition.

BackupUrl sort of “takes a picture in time” and makes it immediately accessible. If you want to update it, you have to enter the site address again and get a new url address for that updated site.

It could definitely come in handy for me since very infrequently my website (with 9,000 categorized links accessible to English Language Learners) might go off-line temporarily. Having a back-url will be useful because students could just use that instead.

Feedback, of course, is always 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.

Measy “helps you find the perfect gadget.” It’s the newest addition to The Best Sites For Learning Which Consumer Electronics To Buy list. It looks pretty neat.

You can read more about the site at this TechCrunch post.

Wize, which is number two on The Best Sites For Learning Which Consumer Electronics To Buy, has just redesigned its site to make it even better.

You can read about the changes at TechCrunch.

Moomeo lets you send an email to it and then it posts it on the Web with its own url. They immediately send you the link. No registration is required. People can leave comments on it, but it doesn’t appear that you can change the content once it’s posted.

Web tools like Moomeo and Posterous (which also lets you post by email, though there you can change it once it’s posted) are ideal application to introduce technology to teachers or others who are reluctant newcomers. In fact, look for an upcoming post here titled “Ten Ways To Introduce A Reluctant Colleague To Technology.”

This may sound like a bit of a strange post for my “most popular” series, but please bear with me for a moment.

Google Insights is a tool that allows you to map how often, and from where, people use specific search terms. TechCrunch has a useful post about it.

When I checked to see users from which countries most searched for the term “ESL,” the top three were South Korea, Cambodia, and Mongolia. When I checked on the term “EFL,” the top three were Oman, South Korea, and Poland. And when I checked “English,” the top three were Cambodia, Mongolia, and Pakistan.

I could see this site having some opportunities to create conversation in the classroom. For example, I think it could initiate an interesting conversation with Hmong students to find that the term “Hmong” was searched for most, by far, in Laos, where some Hmong still live and from where my students’ families fled. Then, when I searched for “General Vang Pao,” the most well-known leader of the Hmong here in the United States and one of several people arrested here in Sacramento last year for allegedly planning a coup in Laos, practically all the searches came from within the United States.

I have to think a little bit more about how this new tool can be used and am interested in hearing other ideas.

In addition, here are a couple of other resources for finding the most popular “search” terms:

What People Search For – Most Popular Keywords is an article that appeared almost three years ago sharing a lot places where people could find this type of info. Surprisingly enough, practically all of the links are still live, accurate, and useful.

Chromomulator is a new site that “takes the top 100 Google searches at the moment (from Google Trends) and scours the web, collecting related news, blog posts, pictures, and videos for each search. If you need to know everything about what’s hot on the net right now, the Chromomulator can tell you. Updated several times daily.”

As I mentioned earlier in this post, I’d be interested in hearing ideas on how to use these sites and their information effectively in the classroom.

myGuide is a United Kingdom-supported site that has incredibly accessible tutorials on everything computer and Internet-related. It’s visual, provides audio support for the text, and it geared towards novices. It’s quite an impressive site, and I’m adding it to The Best Eleven Websites For Students To Learn About Computers.

In addition, the same site has a Taste Of English game that is very well-done. It does have a decidedly UK-perspective, though, so teachers and students in other countries should be aware of that prior to using the this particular activity.

Thanks to Barking Robot for the tip.

I know the title of this post is a bit awkward and unwieldy, but I couldn’t come-up with anything better.  I wanted to differentiate this post — which is specifically focused on safety and legal issues teachers should keep in mind when their students are creating online content — and several of my previous posts, which include:

The Best Sources For Advice On Student Blogging relates to the logistics of maximizing the learning benefits of student blogging.

The Best Resources To Learn About Copyright Issues provides both teacher and student links to learn about copyright issues.

The Best Sites For Learning Online Safety contains sites that are accessible to English Language Languages where they can learn about being safe on the Web.

This “The Best…” list does not include all the suggestions I received after asking for advice on Twitter. It only contains a few links to the sites that I’ve personally found most helpful to the narrow range of questions I have (privacy guidelines for students to follow, and parent permission forms). A number of people asked me to post this list right away because they want it for the beginning of their school year, and I just didn’t have time to write a lengthy a post including everyone’s suggestions. However, I will be writing an addendum to this list as soon as I have time.

Here are my picks for The Best Teacher Resources For Online Student Safety & Legal Issues:

Tips On Blogging With Students by Sue Waters at The Edublogger, as usual, is a source of great advice on these issues.

Crista Anderson offered the blog permission form she created and uses with her students.

Weemooseus suggested a nice site titled Internet Safety for Teachers and Students.

Maryna Badenhorst has permission documents if student faces will be online.

Thanks to everybody who sent in suggestions.  As I said, I’ll be writing an addendum soon, so fee free to contribute additional sites.

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.

This was originally going to be a simple “The Best…” list on ways to easily convert PDF files to Word, and to do the reverse. It started off small when I began, but there has recently been an explosion in sites offering free conversion services, and I just haven’t had time to try them all out, nor put much time to carefully revising this post.

So it’s turned more into a somewhat disjointed “list” of these kinds of services.

I didn’t really understand why I might want to convert a document to a PDF until I read this article listing ten reasons Why To Convert Word To PDF.

Here are links to several online conversion tools:

PDF Converter

PDF Generator

Guardar Como PDF

PDF On Fly

Zamzar

Now, for the other way around.

One thing that has annoyed me is the difficulty in copying and pasting text from a PDF document I find on the Internet. Sometimes I see a portion of a document, for example, on language learning research that I want to email to someone or incorporate in an something I’m writing (with attribution, of course!), but it won’t allow me to extract a portion of the text.

There’s a free online application that lets me insert the PDF and, in seconds, come out with an editable text from the PDF. It’s called PDF Text Online. It works like a charm, and certainly serves my purposes.

In addition,  Zamzar and Cometdocs lets you convert both ways.  As do You Convert It and Convert Files. You can also use them to grab and convert YouTube videos for your laptop to show in class (though I never do that and just use the excellent EdublogsTV service).

There’s also a web tool called PDF UNdo that lets you do the same thing.  As does PDF Hammer.

And, of course, there’s the appropriately-named site called Convert PDF To Word. And there’s another similarly named tool called PDF To Word.  Plus, a newer one is called OCR Terminal.

The HTML PDF Converter will let you convert any webpage into a PDF file.

And, while we’re talking about PDF’s, you might find Text2PDF useful. You just copy and paste content into it and it magically converts it into a PDF. You might also want to try the PDF Maker.

Let me know which ones you think work best!

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

Easy Guides To Using Today’s Technology are a collection of many “how-to” online videos related to…today’s technology. They’re from an organization called Learn it Teach it.

The videos are designed for teachers, but since they’re closed-captioned, I think they would be accessible to advanced English Language Learners who want to learn more about tech.

I’m adding the link to The Best Eleven Websites For Students To Learn About Computers.

Several people sent a tweet about it on Twitter, and I learned about it from Prestwick House.

PC Magazine just came out with their choices for The Top 100 Web Sites of 2009.

It’s an interesting list and work a look.

One of the first “The Best…” lists I created was The Best Eleven Websites For Students To Learn About Computers.  I included two-or-three sites about online safety that were accessible to English Language Learners on that list.  Since that time, though, quite a few additional resources have become available, so I thought it was time to make a list entirely devoted to that topic.

You can also find these links, along with many others, on my website under Computers.

Unfortunately, most of the sites on this list — except for the first one — might be considered a bit too “childish” by teenage and adult English Language Learners.  I didn’t include others that might be more mature, but they had people speaking too fast or didn’t offer audio support for complex text.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Learning Online Safety (and are accessible to English Language Learners):

Think U Know has a good animated and audio Cyber Cafe that older ELL’s would like.

The Northwest Learning Grid has a collection of games teaching online safety.

The Welcome To The Web section on Staying Safe is very good.

Brainpop has a free movie on Internet Safety. Brainpop also has a Digital Citizenship page that periodically has other related movies available at no cost.

Privacy Playground uses “cyberpigs” to teach online safety in an animated adventure.

Netty’s World comes from Australia, and is a series of animations about online safety.

Sid’s Online Safety Guide is pretty exhaustive.

Safe Kids has a decent online safety quiz.

If you still need more cybersafety resources, the place to go is a page at New Jersey’s Belmar Elementary School’s website. Kevin O’Donnell has put together an exhaustive group of links together.

As always, suggestions and feedback are 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.

As regular readers know, as part of my “The Best…” series I’ve included lists of useful blogs, including my choices for:

The Best blogs for sharing resource links

The Best ESL/EFL Blogs

The Best (& Most Thoughtful) Blogs On “Big Picture” Education Issues

This list is also sort of a companion list to The Best places to learn Web 2.0 basics.

As another installment in that series on blogs, I thought it might be useful if I shared my picks for The Best “Practical” Ed Tech Blogs.

By that, I mean blogs that regularly share “how-to” posts for people, like me, who are not particularly technologically savvy and learn best through a simply-explained step-by-step approach — ideally with screenshots and/or videos.

It’s a pretty short list.  There are lots of great edtech blogs out there (and I’ll be composing lists for other categories) , but really not many who fit this criteria.

Here are my picks for The Best “Practical” Ed Tech Blogs:

I have to start with both of Sue Waters’ blogs.  One used to be called Mobile Technology In TAFE, but I see it’s now been changed to…Sue Waters Blog. Her other blog, of course, is The Edublogger.

Another obvious choice for this list is Silvia Tolisano at Langwitches. Her screenshot tutorials are awesome.

A neat blog I’ve recently learned about is called “Ask Auntie Web.” It’s published by the Munich English Language Teachers’ Association, and regularly posts useful pieces on technology and English language instruction, though the info would be useful to a teacher of any subject.

Nik Peachey’s Learning Technology Blog is another good one that’s geared towards ESL/EFL teachers, but his practical posts are useful to anyone.

Who else do you think should be on this list?

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.

As some readers might remember, Holly Coyle (my exceptional student teacher) and I taught two United States History classes with English Language Learners this year — one entirely in the computer lab, and the other — for all practical purposes — entirely out of the computer lab (but using what  –in my mind at least — is a very engaging curriculum).

We did assessments and evaluations at the beginning of the year, at mid-year and at the end of the year.  You can read more about this — and download the actual assessments — at my post Mid-Year Results Of My “Experiment”. Two of the assessments tested basic knowledge of U.S. History (admittedly, pretty low on Bloom’s Taxonomy) and the third was a student evaluation of the class.

In January,  the results showed that student achievement gains were about equal, though students in the technology-oriented class seemed more engaged and interested in U.S. History.

The two June assessments that tested U.S. History knowledge on a basic level were, like they were in the ones we gave in January, just about the same in both classes.

The one where students evaluated the class itself — if they liked it, if it made them want to study more US History, etc — was a bit of a surprise.  As I wrote earlier in January, even though both classes evaluated it positively, the zero period class was more engaged.  In the year-end one, again both classes evaluated it positively, but this time the non-tech class was much more engaged.  The only place where the tech class evaluated it more positively was that they clearly felt like they developed more computer skills — which was to be expected.

I’m not surprised that the knowledge level is similar, but I am surprised that the non-tech class felt that they liked it more and got more out of it.  The fact that the tech class took place an hour before regular school began, and that students repeatedly complained about having to getting-up early, might have some effect on the difference, but the amount of difference really was pretty striking, so it’s unlikely to have been the only factor (by the way, all students voluntarily chose to take the early class).

In retrospect, I would have done two things differently:

1) I wish we had given a straight pre-and post-assessment on English comprehension.  Based on the data from our family literacy home computer project, I would have expected that those in the computer lab would have had a greater increase in understanding English, though I might very well have been proven wrong.

2) I would have put more time into figuring-out how the tech class could have connected more with our International Sister Classes. We started out strong in that regard — for example, students were corresponding with an EFL class in Spain to learn how the Spanish Conquest of the New World was taught in that country — but ended up succumbing to the impulse of having to “cover the curriculum” and those connections fell by the wayside. I suspect with a little more strategic planning on my part that kind of cooperation could have been integrated.

Feedback is welcome.  Again, you can download the assessments by going to my January post.

If you’d like to see the actual raw data, let me know in the comments section and I’ll email it to you or, if there’s enough interest, I’ll include the link to download it on a future post.

I’ve posted in the past about Aviary, a photo-editing site that I think is a bit too complicated for my taste.

However, today they just announced a feature that makes it just about the easiest way possible to capture a screenshot that you can then email or embed on a website. All you have to do is type “aviary.com/’ in front of any URL address. That’s all there is to it.

I’m adding it to The Best Ways To Create Simple Screenshots.

Thanks to Webware for the tip.

I just received the following email from EFL teacher Denise Morland. If you have any ideas, please leave a comment on this post:

I am going to be in Costa Rica soon and am trying to bring some materials to help out a very remote ESL school there. They have some brand new computers, but no ESL software or internet connection. I would love to download some software onto a flash drive and take it to them. Unfortunately the vast majority of what I find can’t be downloaded! Do you have any suggestions for games, vocabulary exercises, or other beginner ESL software that I can actually download (for free would be nice!)?

Thanks!
Denise Morland

(Jody Oliver suggests Educational Freeware)

Su.pr is a new tool to shorten url addresses that is being developed by Stumbleupon.

It’s not quite open to the public yet, but it seems to have a lot of nice features. Instead of writing a long post explaining it here, you can go to the Make Use Of blog and read their good description.

I’m sure I’ll be adding it to The Best Ways To Shorten URL Addresses.

Fur.ly is a new tool that lets you combine multiple links into one.

It’s a little different from others I’ve posted about — they show you visual snapshots of each site that you can then click on one at a time. Fur.ly, on the other hand, shows you the first link in the collection and you can then click on arrows to go review each one.

I’m adding it to both The Best Places To Create (And Find) Internet Scavenger Hunts & Webquests and The Best Ways To Shorten URL Addresses.