Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

I’ve been thinking of having students try to set-up and participate in an online debate that would involve both their classmates and others. It might be a good writing opportunity to prepare them for a persuasive essay, and a way to generate some high-interest reading possibilities as they prepare their positions.

I’ve been exploring what possible sites might be out there students can use. I’m narrowing them down but, since I haven’t actually had them do this activity yet, I can’t say positively which one is best. But I thought I’d share the conclusions I’ve reached after my initial experiments, and invite readers to share their experiences with these sites and others.

So, given that caveat, here are my choices for The Best Sites For Students To Create & Participate In Online Debates:

I like Create Debate a lot. One of its key advantages is that it appears to allow the creator of the debate to moderate the discussion. I’m imagining that a student can create the debate and that I then add it to the site under my name and within the initial prompt indicate which student started it. Then, they and others can contribute, but I can check regularly and delete any inappropriate comments made by others.

Heads Up seems to be an ideal site, and is specifically designed for students and teachers to use. However, it’s designed for use in the United Kingdom. I haven’t contacted them yet (but will soon) to see if non-UK schools can participate.

Two other sites – Riled Up and For And Against — appear to have some potential, but moderation of discussions on both sites seems very limited so I’d be concerned about using it in class.

Procon is not a site to participate in debates but, instead, offers what seems to be very well-researched pro and con positions on multiple controversial issues. It could serve as a good model for students to use as they craft their own positions.

Debategraph is in a category all its own. It looks like a cool way to visualize arguments, but I can’t quite figure it out.

Additional suggestions and feedback are welcome.

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With Picture Book Maker, you can easily create a…picture book (including text). It can be saved online or printed out. It’s super-easy to use, plus no registration is required. The url of your creation can be posted on a student/teacher blog or website.

Thanks to Angela Maiers for the tip.

I’ve found that students of all ages are interested in robots. Given that interest, I thought it would be a good idea to bring together a number of resources about them that are accessible to English Language Learners. They make for high interest reading material, and provide good images to write about, too. The videos provide good listening practice.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites To Learn About Robots:

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has a nice series of photos of Robots.

The Big Picture also has another series of similar images called More Robots.

The Tech Museum has a nice group of robot-related activities.

LIFE has a slideshow on Japanese Robotics.

LIFE also has a slideshow of famous robots from television and the movies.

Robots, Robots Everywhere is an online CBS News video on Japanese robots.

Here’s another CBS News video — this one on soccer games between robotic dogs.

Robots can help when disaster strikes, according to this video news report.

The Robot Hall of Fame has a slideshow.

ABC News has a slideshow on robots replacing human teachers in the classroom.

CNN has several interesting videos, including ones on:

A Home Robot

A Robotics Competition

The First Robotics Championship

Robotic Suits To Help The Disabled

I’d certainly be interested in hearing other suggestions, so please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

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.

Sue Waters has just announced the winners of a contest for the best advice on student blogging in the classroom.

Announcing The Winners Of The “Share your tips–and win BIG!” Competition! is a great source of advice, and I’m adding the link to The Best Sources For Advice On Student Blogging.

How to Avoid Plagiarism: A Complete Guide for ESL Learners is an excellent article specifically designed for ELL’s. It even provides audio support for the text.

I’m adding it to The Best Online Resources To Teach About Plagiarism.

Thanks to Tara Benwell from English Club for the tip. I also think she created the resource.

This “The Best…” list is sort of a combination of two lists I had been thinking of making to go along with The Best Online Resources To Teach About Plagiarism (Another list to keep in mind might be The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners — 2008).

The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt that a list of engaging (and even fun) sites to teach research skills and accessible citation resources would make a good combination.

Since a graduation requirement in our district is that seniors need to develop a “Senior Project,” I’ve spent some time finding these kinds of helpful sites that might be accessible to English Language Learners.  I have to say, though, that these sites (except for the first one) would probably only be accessible to more advanced ELL’s.

Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning Research And Citation Skills:

LEARNING RESEARCH SKILLS:

Here’s the one resource that’s probably accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners. It’s called How To Do Research, and its from the Kentucky Virtual Library. It’s designed to look like an interactive board game.

The Information Literacy Game comes from the University of North Carolina. It’s an online game designed to help students develop research and citation skills.

Adventures In Library Research comes from Lycoming College. It was created to teach students how to navigate successfully around library resources.

Students learn some Internet research skills through playing The Gold Rush Game. The group that created this game, 21st Century Information Fluency, has also developed quite a few other interactives designed to help students learn about using the Web for research, including The Internet Search Challenge, the Keyword Challenge, and even more challenges. All of these are accessible to Intermediate ELL’s.

Carnegie Mellon has two games related to research and libraries — “I’ll Get It” and “Within Range”.

The St. Joseph School Library has a large number of surprising accessible games related to research.  This site might be accessible to high Intermediate English Language Learners.

Boolify is a search engine designed for elementary and middle school students that is accessible to English Language Learners. I think there are others that are more accessible, but this is a good one to help teach basic search strategies.  It’s on  The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners — 2008 list.

The City University of New York has an excellent series of exercises on actually writing a research paper.

CITATIONS:

Fairfield University has a good tutorial on Using Citations. It’s followed by a quiz.

Eastern Washington University also has a good tutorial on Citing Your Sources.

Here are several sites that will correctly format citations once you input the necessary information:

Ottobib
Citation Machine
Bibme
EasyBib
MLA Citation Generator
OSLIS Citation Maker
Knight Cite

Suggestions are 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.

My Intermediate English class just completed their first assignment to create user-generated content by using a great text-to-speech site and create their own talking animals.

After they all signed-up for email accounts, it was a fun little exercise to get them feeling competent and confident with the computers. On our class blog, you’ll be able to see subsequent scaffolded online activities.

We’re in the computer lab twice-a-week for one hour on each of those two days. Our other Intermediate English class will be doing the same — they will be making their own talking animals tomorrow for posting there.

The Universal Record Database could be a fun activity for students that could also provide language-development opportunities.

It’s a site where you describe in writing and upload a video of any kind of “world record” you want to set — and it can be as silly as you want. For example, I could see a group of students lying on their stomach and setting a record for “The longest time Luther Burbank High School students have been on their stomach and spoken in English about Hmong food.”

Five Borrowed Tips for Helping Students Become Better Bloggers is another great post by Gail Desler.

I’m adding it to The Best Sources For Advice On Student Blogging.

Storybird is a neat new site where users can choose artwork from a specific artist and then add text to create a storybook. Susan Stephenson from the excellent Book Chook blog has written a post about it, and I’d encourage you to go over and read her description.

I’m adding the site to The Best Places Where Students Can Write Online.

While you’re over at Susan’s blog, be sure to also check-out the new issue of Literacy Lava, “a free pdf ezine for parents, offering tips on ways to incorporate reading, writing and communicating into family life.”

I know the title of the “The Best…” list is both awkward and a mouthful (and it’s not even entirely accurate). Let me explain…

During the first part of the school year, we focus on writing Problem/Solution and Persuasive essays in our Intermediate English classes. Then we do one on Response To Literature. I already developed The Best Resources For Learning How To Write Response To Literature Essays, which contains a lot of good interactive exercises for that genre.  In a moment, I’ll share all my Best lists related to writing.   But even though I have quite a few, I really didn’t have one that would be particularly helpful to our upcoming Problem/Solution essay.  And when I began trying to find them, I discovered that all the good ones I found were not specifically about Problem/Solution, but instead where about various kinds of related-writing.

So, for lack of a better title, I came up with The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analaysis.  I’m all ears if anybody can come up with a better one.

Before I share my choices for this list, here are links to all my other writing-related ones:

The Best Websites For K-12 Writing Instruction/Reinforcement
The Best Places Where Students Can Write Online
The Best Sites For Grammar Practice
Not “The Best,” But “A List” Of Mindmapping, Flow Chart Tools, & Graphic Organizers
The Best Resources For Researching & Writing Biographies
The Best Resources For Learning How To Write Response To Literature Essays
The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”
The Best Places Where Students Can Create Online Learning/Teaching Objects For An “Authentic Audience”
The Best Places To Read & Write “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories
The Best Sites To Learn About Advertising
The Best Websites For Developing Academic English Skills & Vocabulary

Also, instead of describing each of these links, I’m just going to reprint what I have written for our Intermediate English class blog. That’s designed for student self-access. I just don’t have it in me today to do much more than that.

Here are my picks For The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis (as reprinted from our class blog, including instructions):

Words Move Me is a neat site from Sony where users add short book passages that have…moved them. Others can leave comments on the quotes.

I’m adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience.”

Gail Desler has written an excellent post titled Five Tips for Helping Students Become Better Bloggers.

I’m adding it to The Best Sources For Advice On Student Blogging.

I’m adding The Top 12 Most Profit-Producing Words For Marketing Campaigns to The Best Sites To Learn About Advertising.

It will be a useful resource for our Persuasive Writing unit.

Rate It All is a new site where users can post reviews about everything. I’m adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience,” where it joins some similar sites.

Some advantages that Rate It All, however, has over those other listed sites are that you can post a review without being registered, and you can post it via email, too. That’s a great advantage if school content filters block the review sites themselves.

Thanks to TechCrunch for the tip. Their post explains more about how Rate It All works.

Share Your Ideas is a neat feature on the California Academy of Science website. Users can easily leave their ideas on how to help the environment, which then appear on sort of a bulletin-board like page. You can read more about the site here.

I’m adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”.

Thanks to anacik for the tip.

(Jonathan Wylie just left a comment identifying some inappropriate classroom content, so I’m removing Blurt It from “The Best..” list.  Thanks, Jonathan!)

Blurt It is a new site where people leave questions and others can write their responses. It seems pretty easy to use, and, in a quick look, I didn’t see any inappropriate content.

I’m adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”, where it joins several other similar sites.

BookRix is a new site that appears to let you very easily upload a document which is then turned into an embeddable virtual book.

I use the word “appears” because I really haven’t had time to try it out yet. It does look easy-to-use, and the final product has a neat interface that I think students would like. The site also seems to have a fairly strict code on content suitability. In addition, you can upload audio books, though I haven’t had time to see if you can record directly on the site or if you have to upload your own mp3 recording.

It’s worth checking out further, but I’m not ready to add it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”.

If you get a chance to try it out, please let me know what you think.

Everlater is a new web application for people to document their travels. It’s very accessible, and tools like this are excellent for students to document field trips, historical journeys, etc.

I would add it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”, where it would join similar sites that are listed there.  However, unlike those, Everlater doesn’t allow you to grab images off the Web.  At this point, they only let you use your own.

If and when they change that policy, they’ll certainly be put on a “The Best…” list.

Thanks to TechCrunch for the tip.

Jason Renshaw has written two excellent posts sharing ideas for writing activities with English Language Learners (though many of his suggestions are useful with all students).

They’re worth reviewing.