Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Here are several links that I think readers might find of interest:

* I’ve posted before about the Animoto Education Program. They now have a new and improved site.. Students can now make unlimited videos for free.

* Polleke’s Blue Room is a new online video game with a Walkthrough. I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games, and written here how I use these kinds of games as a language-learning activity.

* You might want to check out the latest Carnival of Education and Active Learning Carnival.

* Have students (it’s probably accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners) take this quiz from CNN to see what kind of Olympic sport they are personally most suited for…

You might have noticed over the past week that some pages of my website have been off-line for short periods of time.

Minds greater than mine are tracking down the problem, and I’m sure it will be fixed soon.

Through The Eyes Of The Condor: Arial Images of Latin America is an amazing collection of photographs from National Geographic.  Most of the photos were taken while the photographer was “hanging out of a helicopter.”

Each photo has a short audio narration, but, unfortunately, little text support.  The narration is probably accessible to high Intermediate English Language Learners.  All students, however, can get an unusual view of Latin America from these images.

I’ve placed the link on my Geography page under Latin America.

Learn English has quite a few good, thematic, Crossword Puzzles that are accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my Intermediate English page under Word and Video Games.

They have a number of other language games on the same site if you scroll down.  I had a hard time really getting how some of them are played, though.   One nice thing they did have was they had embedded a couple of popular, and well-designed, word games, Thesaurus Scramble and Topic Tangle.  The only place I’ve seen these games, or copycat versions, have been on online arcade-like sites that are usually blocked by School District filters.  They might slip past the filters being embedded this way.

I guess I should have looked a little closer at the Go Animate website I reviewed an hour ago.

Kathy Shields took a little more time than I did to review the content of Go Animate, and found a fair amount of inappropriate content. So, even though it’s a great tool, I have to pull my recommendation.

Thanks, Kathy, for the feedback.

This may be the third or fourth site I’ve reviewed here (out of 1,500) that I later founded probably wasn’t appropriate for the classroom. Sorry about that.

English Interactive, one of the top-rated sites in last year’s The Best Internet Sites For English Language Learners, recently changed its url address.

I couldn’t find-out what happened to it, and thought they had taken it off-line. Thanks to TeachersFirst, I found it again.

I’ve fixed the link on my list and on my website.

I just discovered that the poll that went along with my The Best Online Learning Games — 2008 list disappeared for a few days, but now it’s back.

Please vote on which ones you think are the ten best, and encourage your students to do the same. The poll will close on November 1st.

(Alice Mercer was kind enough to send out a message via Twitter letting people know about the feed problems with this blog and directing them to a post I wrote earlier about how they could fix it – http://tinyurl.com/ferlazzo . I don’t use Twitter, so would appreciate it if other readers out there would be open to letting their “followers” know, too. Thanks!)

I’ve written a few times about some problems people have been having with receiving updated feeds from this blog via Google Reader and Bloglines. Feedburner is now fixed, so please re-subscribe using the newer Feedburner feed This issue only relates to people who have subscribed prior to January using those two RSS Readers (and that includes over 400 people) — anyone who has subscribed since then is already using the Feedburner feed and shouldn’t be having any problems.

So if you haven’t been getting new posts from this blog each day this week, you probably need to get the Feedburner feed.

Other RSS Readers don’t appear to be having any issues, so I think this only relates to “older” Google and Bloglines subscribers.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but the problem appears to be out of my control.

I’ll also probably be running this same post now and then so that people who just “drop by” get the word, too.

What’s The Time is a simple game from the British Council.  You hear the time spoken, and then have to move the hands on the clock to the right time.  It’s a good activity for Beginning English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my Beginner’s English page under Telling Time.

Voting will still be going on for The Best Online Learning Games — 2008 unitl November 1st, but I thought people might be interested in results after the first week.

First place is being hotly contested between the Life Or Death Game, Spelling City, Play The News Game, Questionaut, and Stock News Game. 

Summer school students at our school have had a great time determining a criteria, playing the games, and then voting.

I just realized that I had forgotten to include The Tapestry For Teachers Of English Language Learners in The Best Resource Sites For ESL/EFL Teachers. I’ve now added it to the list.

The Tapestry is a joint project the International Reading Association, TESOL, and a large number of other organizations are doing that includes bringing together research results on what works with English Language Learners.

I’m planning on handling my year-end “The Best…” lists a little differently this year, and wanted to share my tentative plan and, ideally, receive reader feedback. This plan is certainly not set in stone.

Starting at the beginning of September, I’m planning on sharing one major “The Best…” list each month:

September: The Best Online Learning Games — 2008

October: The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2008

November: The Best Internet Sites For English Language Learners — 2008

December: The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2008

Each list will have approximately thirty sites that I will be ranking based on my own judgment and experience.

I’m also interested in experimenting with the “wisdom of crowds.” So, each list will be set-up as a poll that will allow votes from the same IP address, but be restricted by “cookies” so, theoretically, people will be blocked from voting twice.

My thought is to leave each poll open for two months so both teachers and students can participate in voting for no more than ten choices in each list.  I thought that would give teachers enough time to incorporate this into their lesson plans if they so chose.  There could then be a sort of a People’s Choice (Student’s & Teacher’s Choice?) Awards for the top ten vote-getters in each list.

I thought it would be interesting, and educational, for teachers to involve their students in trying-out these sites and determining which ones they thought would be the ten best. I could certainly see my students getting a lot out of it, including wrestling with developing their own criteria about which ones constitute the best sites.

I’d probably also come-up with a few other year-end lists that wouldn’t necessarily engage readers in voting.

What do you think?

I decided to do some “cleaning” today. Part of that process is sharing a number of links that I’ve been “sitting-on” for awhile. So here’s just a quick list of interesting sites you might want to check-out:

* Greenpeace Weather is an online multi-player game where you are faced with responding to environmental threats.

* Vistazoo is a neat tool that lets you create online tours. It would really be great if you could grab images off the Web, but it only allows you to upload photos from your computers for now.

* You Convert It lets you convert any file format into any other one.

* Scrabulous is the popular Facebook application that’s an online version of Scrabble. You don’t have to a member of Facebook now to play it. However, in terms of classroom use, I’d still rather just have my students play the board game version. One advantage with Scrabulous, though, is that you have the benefit of an online dictionary.

Thanks to Webware for the info.

Today was the last day of our regular school year. I’ll continue to write here daily, but probably not the usual number of multiple posts.

I’ll be spending the summer teaching Economics to English Language Learners, working on two major writing projects, playing basketball, spending time with family, and just plain relaxing when I can.

I’ll also be doing some preparation for the fall. I’ll be teaching two periods of United States History to Intermediate English Language Learners — one class will be using technology 75% of the time and the other class will be spending my more typical 20% of time in the computer lab and using what I like to think of as my typical engaging non-tech engaging curriculum. I’ll be periodically using a number of assessments, including self-assessments, to compare results from the two. Any suggestions for how to do that are appreciated.

I’ll also be teaching a ninth-grade English class to mainstream students, as well as an Intermediate English class. And, of course, I’ll be helping out with our ESL Computer Lab and our Family Literacy Project providing home computers and Internet access to immigrant families.

In August, we’ll be gearing up for our Sister Classes Project again as well. We now have Intermediate English classes in ten countries interested in participating. There’s always room for more!

A local affordable housing organization that has computer labs in its developments is interested in using our ESL Computer Lab model of using computers to help develop face-to-face relationships. They’ve also begun distributing computers to their residents where they have Internet access for their developments, and are using our Family Literacy Project as their model for that program. So it will be interesting to see how that goes in the fall, too.

Education Week has an “open house” for the next five days. Most, if not all, of its content is free during this time, including this week’s front-page article about how we work with English Language Learners at our school.

I don’t think I’ll be quite as prolific as I’ve been over the past few months coming up with new “The Best…” lists, but I do have several more on the “drawing-board.”

They include:

The Best Websites To Learn About United States History

The Best Online Video Sites To Learn English

The Best Sites For Students To Use For Researching Demographics

The Best Sites To Learn About California

I’ve got a number of others in mind, as I’ve shared earlier. I’ll just have to see how much time I can make to write them. Also, in the fall I will begin preparing for some year-end lists, including:

The Best New Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2008

The Best New Internet Sites For English Language Learners — 2008

The Best New Online Learning Games — 2008

The Best New Articles About Education — 2008

The Best New Ways To Create Online Content Easily — 2008

I’m hoping to involve readers of this blog more in the creation of these year-end lists. If I can figure out how to make it work technically on this blog, I’d like to list my choices and then have readers vote on their own preferences.

Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments section for other lists you’d find most helpful.

It’s time for the fifth edition of the bi-monthly ELL/ESL/EFL Blog Carnival. Bloggers from thoughout the world who teach English Language Learners have contributed some great posts.

The next edition will be published on August 1st and the deadline for contributions is July 31st. You can use this easy submission form.

Starting with the August edition, different bloggers will be taking turns hosting each Carnival. David Deubelbeiss, the founder and coordinator of EFL Classroom 2.0, will be our next host. David has some fun ideas about turning this next Carnival into a contest. He’ll be announcing details soon on EFL Classroom 2.0, and I’ll be reprinting it here.

Let me know if you’d be interested in hosting future editions of the ELL/ESL/EFL Blog Carnival.

And, now, here are this month’s exceptional contributions (I’m a little tired today, so sorry if the listing is a little “dry”::

Since David Deubelbeiss will be the host of the next Carnival, I think we should start off with his excellent and timely post on The Mars Mission and Your Classroom.

Sebastian Mercado wrote about a neat Web 2.0 application called iSketch and shared an absolutely wonderful video of his students playing charades that you just have to watch.

Mary Ann Zehr, writer of the must-read EdWeek blog Learning The Language, contributed an excellent post (and don’t miss the comments, too) on ELL’s “Are Sick Of” Writing Their Immigration Story.

Lifting The Curtain To Share My Coordinate Graphing Lesson comes from my Sacramento colleague, Alice Mercer, who writes about a neat use of VoiceThread.

A helpful lesson plan for Earth Day was sent in by Sabrina De Vita.

James Feudo contributed Public Speaking Tips: Five Tips For ESL Speakers

The Learn English– English Speaking Tutorial blog wrote Apostrophe Usage — It’s A Blast! and When Is A Question An Indirect Question.

Eric Koshinsky submitted How To Teach Speaking.

ESL Trail wrote Why Phonics For ELLs/ESOL Students?

1 Language wrote about the Advantages Of Learning With Phonics.

Thanks again to the contributors from around the world!

Sail Safe is a combination game and tutorial on how to sail a ship.  The National Maritime Museum in Great Britain created it.

It’s an opportunity for students to learn vocabulary and to answer questions and follow simple instructions in English.

I’ve placed it on my Intermediate English page under Word Games and Video Games.

I just saw the newest Indiana Jones movie, after having re-seen the first three last week. I’ve posted my thoughts on How A Good Teacher Is Not Like Indiana Jones at “In Practice,” our group blog that’s written by teachers who work in low-income communities.

You might want to check it out and add your own ways on why a teacher should not (or should) be like the famed action hero.

My next “The Best…” list will be The Best Listening Sites For English Language Learners.

I’ve got quite a big group I’m considering for inclusion, but I’m open to additional suggestions. Feel free to leave ideas in the comment section. I’m hoping to post it by this coming weekend.

As I’ve done in past, even if your recommendations don’t make my list, I’ll still include them in the post giving you credit.