Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

The Starbucks Love Project lets you watch some great performances of “All You Need Is Love” from around the world, and offers you the opportunity to contribute your own. In addition, you can make a “love drawing,” too, which is a lot easier and more accessible to our students.

This is somehow connected to a campaign to fight AIDS in Africa, though I’m a little unclear how.

Thanks to the Innovative Interactivity blog for the tip.

I’m a big fan of students annotating what they’re reading — either on the paper, or on post-its, and I feel the same about the web. That’s why I compiled the Best Applications For Annotating Websites list.

Layerpad is the newest addition to that list. After registration, you can make comments on the site, and see comments others have made. In that way, it’s similar to Blerp. However, Layerpad doesn’t let you position the comments in different places around the page, which limits its effectiveness as a way for students to show that they’re using reading strategies. Even though I’m adding it to the “The Best…” list, I won’t be able to highly recommend it until it adds that feature.

Dispostable is the latest addition to The Best Temporary Email Address Sites For Students (Or Anyone).

You can read more about it at the Make Use of blog.

The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…

Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:

* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.

* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.

* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.

* provide some language-learning opportunity (for example, students can write about their creations).

* not require any registration.

You can find previous installments of this series with the rest of my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year. Several hundred sites have been highlighted in these past lists. You might also want to take a look at the first list I posted in this series — The Best Ways For Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly, and Painlessly.

You might also want to look at The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009.

Here are the newest additions:

DESIGN A DONUT: Dunkin Donuts lets you create your very own virtual donut and share it with others. Students can describe what they made and explain why they made it that way.

COMPOSE LYRICS FOR A BEAVER ON A FIDDLE: You can compose lyrics to a song being played by a beaver that fiddles, and see them displayed as captions while the music plays. You can then post your creation on a student/teacher website or blog for all the world to see — lucky them….

MAKE A BABY TALK: etrade’s “Talking Baby” commercials during the Super Bowl are famous annual events. Now you and your students can create their own talking babies by either using the text-to-speech feature or recording their own voices. Their creations can be posted on a student/teacher website.

CREATE MORE MUSIC: The American Heart Association has unveiled a web application that lets you create a “hand symphony” and send the link of your creation to a friend or yourself. It can then be posted on a teacher website or blog. It’s designed to promote the Association’s new hands-only CPR, and the site also has a one minute video demonstrating it.

Feedback is always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

Citrify is a new, free, online photo editor.

It looks good, and I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Online Photo-Editing & Photo Effects, but I can’t say for sure that it’s a lot better than those already on the list.

I have what I think is an excellent The Best Online Sources For Images list.

Today, two other sites posted huge lists of their own selections for photo sites. I’m sorry, I just don’t have it in me to check them all out. So, for now, I just going to add links to those lists to my “The Best…” list. The two are:

180+ Resources sites to download Royalty Free Stock images

30 Websites To Download Free Stock Photos

etrade’s “Talking Baby” commercials during the Super Bowl are famous annual events. Now you and your students can create their own talking babies by either using the text-to-speech feature or recording their own voices. Their creations can be posted on a student/teacher website.

I’ll be adding this application to my next edition of “The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily and Quickly.” Because of the Super Bowl connection, I’ll also be adding it to The Best Sites Where ELL’s Can Learn About The Super Bowl.

I’ll certainly be using it in my Intermediate English class. It’s great speaking practice, and students will have a lot of fun with it.

Thanks to Richard Byrne and his exceptional resource-finding abilities, today I learned about the BBC’s “A History Of The World.”

It’s a neat interactive timeline display of historical objects with images and commentary. Not only is it an accessible and engaging way to learn more about world history, but after a quick site registration you can contribute your own historical object choice to the collection and write about it.

In some ways, it reminds me of “The Digital Vaults”,  an entry into the vast resources of the National Archives.  That site allows you to use those resources to create your own movies, posters, and what it calls “Pathway Challenges” to… challenge others to find connections between a series of images, documents, and other resources you put together.

I’m adding the link to “A History Of The World” to both The Best Websites For Teaching & Learning About World History and to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience.”

I’ve discovered two intriguing sites where people can create user-generated content related to next month’s Winter Olympics. To tell you the truth, I’m not convinced that either one will really enhance one’s understanding of the Olympics much. But, for English Language Learners, they both certainly provide lots of good listening and speaking opportunities. So, for that reason, I’m adding them to The Best Sites To Learn About The Vancouver Winter Olympics:

Become A Virtual Sportscaster lets you, after registration, be a…sportscaster calling the action for several different video clips of Olympic events. You can then share the video with others.

The Best Of Us Challenge lets you see “challenges” (strange and fun competitions like balancing a stick on your foot) that Olympic athletes have created for ordinary people to beat them at. You can record your attempt at their challenge and post it at the site. In addition, you can create your own video challenges.

The American Heart Association has unveiled a web application that lets you create a “hand symphony” and send the link of your creation to a friend or yourself. It can then be posted on a teacher website or blog.

It’s designed to promote the Association’s new hands-only CPR, and the site also has a one minute video demonstrating it.

It’s a fun site, and I’m adding it to The Best Online Sites For Creating Music.

Thanks to Innovative Interactivity for the tip.

Free Web Me is a new way to create free websites. They say you can create one in less than a minute, and you certainly can. Plus, you can grab images off the web to use on your site. It’s pretty easy.

I’m adding it to The Best Ways For Students Or Teachers To Create A Website.

The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…

Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:

* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.

* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.

* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.

* provide some language-learning opportunity (for example, students can write about their creations).

* not require any registration.

You can find previous installments of this series with the rest of my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year. Several hundred sites have been highlighted in these past lists. You might also want to take a look at the first list I posted in this series — The Best Ways For Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly, and Painlessly.

You might also want to look at The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009.

Here are the newest additions:

MAKE A STORY COLLAGE: The Library of Congress has a neat Storybook activity. First, users have to answer some simple questions from The Wizard Of Oz, The Mermaid, and Aladdin (book excerpts are provided) and then you can make a collage out of the book’s characters that you can email and post on a teacher website or blog.

CREATE SUBTITLES TO SOCCER & TV PROGRAM VIDEOS YOU CREATE: I’ve written several times about the incredibly useful and fun Bombay TV, where you can create your own videos from cheesy clips and write subtitles (it’s my number one rated app on The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Videos (Using Someone Else’s Content) list.

Well, now it’s created sister sites where you can do the same with clips from old TV programs and from soccer games. They’re called Bombay TV 2, Futebol TV and Classik TV.

SEND AN eCARD WITH AN ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE: The National Building Museum lets you send some very informative Green Community E-Cards, which can then be posted on a teacher/student website or blog.

CREATE A TALKING POTATO-HEAD BASKETBALL: Yes, the title is accurate. Create it, make it talk with its text-to-speech feature, and post it on a teacher/student website/blog if you dare.

MAKE A SNOWFLAKE WITH A MESSAGE: Flurrious lets you design a snowflake, write a message that goes along with it, and then send it to yourself or a friend so you can get its url address to post on a student/teacher blog or website. The site says it will donate $1 to UNICEF for every snowflake sent, but I can’t really tell who’s behind the site to confirm that claim.

Feedback is always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

I’m adding these sites to The Best Online Sources For Images (neither require attribution for their photos though, of course, that would be a nice thing to do):

Unprofound

Burning Well

Over the past few years, I’ve been accumulating links to — and experimenting with — various online photo editors and sites for photo effects. There are certainly a zillion of them out there.

I finally decided it was time to narrow all the links down into some kind of “The Best…” list, and have divided this post into two sections. The first part lists sites where you can upload your own images and, with no registration required (or, perhaps, in one or two instances, an extremely minimal registration process) easily edit the photo or add effects. The second section lists sites that I’ve specifically used with my English Language Learner students. These sites let you easily grab an image off the web, lets you add add a speech bubble to it, and then gives you a more or less permanent url address for your creation that you can post on a student or teacher website/blog.

I’m sure I will have missed some applications out there, so feel free to share your suggestions in the comments section. I suspect there are also additional “categories” photo apps out there besides the two I’m using.

Using my categories and criteria, here are my choices for The Best Sites For Online Photo-Editing & Photo Effects (they tend to be fairly similar — with a few exceptions that are primarily “resizers” — so I’m just going to list the links and not describe each one):

PHOTO-EDITING & EFFECTS FOR UPLOADED IMAGES:

Tuxpi

Change Images

Aviary

Fun Photo Box

Thumba

Big Huge Labs

Dr. Pic

Pic Resize

Rsizr

EasyCropper

Pixenate

FotoFlexer

Be Funky

Picnik (I had meant to include this one I originally, but reader Brenda Hallowes pointed out that I had not. Thanks, Brenda!)

PhotFunia is suggested by reader Ann Carnevale.

Pixlr

Citrify

SITES FOR ADDING “SPEECH BUBBLES” TO WEB IMAGES:

Bubblr

Caption Bubble

Picbite

Feedback is always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

Free Clip Art by Phillip Martin seems to be a pretty impressive site for clip art that’s free for non-profit use. The art seems a cut above many other clip art sites I’ve seen, and appropriate for many subject areas (that’s how they are categorized).

I’m adding it to The Best Online Sources For Images.

Thanks to Explore the Possibilities for the tip.

Weird-looking critters always generate high-interest from students — English Language Learners and mainstream alike. Reading, writing, and talking about them are excellent language-development activities, and I’ve listed some good accessible sites on this list.

In the second part of this post, I share some sites that — believe it or not — let students also easily create their own weird-looking animals. First designing, then describing (along with talking and listening) them also provide good language-learning opportunities.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Learning About Weird-Looking Creatures And For Making Your Own!):

LEARNING ABOUT THEM:

19 Insanely Weird Animals is a slideshow from LIFE Magazine.

The weirdest animals on Planet Earth comes from the British paper The Telegraph.

MSN has some of the World’s weirdest animals and Weird Animals That You Can Travel to See.

Weird New Animals From Antarctica’s Deep Seas is from National Geographic.

Nick Baker’s Weird Creatures is a show on the Smithsonian Channel, and you can see many clips on their site.

The Web Ecoist has several good resources, including:

The 9 Strangest Animals on Earth

Nine Outstanding Expanding Animals!

15 of the World’s Strangest Animals

20 Scary Animals

The Weird Animal Express is a student-created site.

Strange, odd and beautiful creatures is from a Florida newspaper.

CREATING YOUR OWN:

With Animal Mix-Up you can create a bizarre creature, email the link and post it. English Language Learners can not only use it as an opportunity to describe their creation, but the design process itself provides an excellent opportunity for vocabulary development. There are a lot of choices for creature modifications, and their accompanied with visual and text descriptions.

Build Your WIldself is from the New York Zoos and Aquarium. Instead of explaining it here, I’m just going to suggest you read a post from Kevin Jarrett which explains it in detail.

The Switch Zoo is another similar site. However, you can only print-out creation, not save it online.

Feedback is always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

As regular readers know, I’m always on the look-out for new web applications that allow for easy collections of thumbnail images of images and websites. In fact, one of the most popular “The Best…” lists I’ve developed is The Best Social Bookmarking Applications For English Language Learners & Other Students. In that list, not only do I share a long list of accessible sites, I also give ideas on how to use them to to develop higher-order thinking skills, including categorization.

I’m adding a new one to that list. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s the best, but it’s certainly worth a look. I also have to explore it further.

It’s called TinkrBox. After registration, you’re able to easily just paste the url address of an image and website into a box, and then it’s image appears. You can write a “tag” for the box or boxes, and the url address of your collection can be made public and accessible by others if you want. It’s worth a look.

Editor One is a system used by many educational institutions, who purchase it. However, they make a “demo” version available to anybody for free, and it’s pretty easy to use. It has a fair number of clips you can “mashup” and use to create your own video.

I’m adding it to The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Videos (Using Someone Else’s Content), which I recently updated.

Thanks to the Make Use Of blog for the tip.

Flurrious lets you design a snowflake, write a message that goes along with it, and then send it to yourself or a friend so you can get its url address to post on a student/teacher blog or website.

The site says it will donate $1 to UNICEF for every snowflake sent, but I can’t really tell who’s behind the site to confirm that claim.

I usually don’t post much about web applications that require the use of a webcam just because webcams are problematic for school computers for safety issues, along with needing to dowload its required software.

However, if you can use a webcam, Send Shots has got to be just about the easiest way to send a video message to someone. No registration or download is required — just record and send. There are no ads, and there’s no way to access other people’s video messages. You can post the url address of the video on a teacher or student’s website.