Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Be Funky is a very easy web application that allows you to grab a photo off the web and, among other things, write a “text bubble” for a person or animal in the photo. You can then post the url of your creation.

It would be a fun, and useful, writing activity for an English Language Learner. Plus, it’s accessible to all language levels.

I’ve placed the link on my Examples of Student Work page under Student Photos.

Students (or anyone) can send Nelson Mandela a virtual birthday card. His ninetieth birthday was actually a couple of days ago, but apparently there’s a big celebration coming up in a week, and they’ll choose some of the messages to show at the party.

It’s a fundraising effort to support Mandela’s charities, but you don’t have to contribute to send the greeting. You can also get a unique url address of your greeting to post on a website or blog.

Users of the site can also see greetings that “celebrities” have sent him, and check out some other things.

By the way, since our mainstream ninth-grade English classes include a lengthy unit on Mandela, I have a section on my website filled with accessible resources about him. You can find it at Mandela.

One of the key ways we teach writing to English Language Learners at our school is by using materials from The WRITE Institute.  They have great stuff.

One of their units is on the persuasive essay.  A review of different advertising techniques is included in the lessons.

Coco’s Adversmarts would be a nice supplemental online activity to that topic.  Students have to create a website using various advertising techniques to attract children.  It’s designed to help students see these sites are really just prolonged commercials.

It’s very accessible to all levels of English Language Learners, with text, audio support, and multiple images.

I’ve placed it on my English Themes for Intermediate under Persuasive Essay.

With Hippopost, you can either upload a photo or pick one of theirs; write a note and the address of the person you want to receive it; and then they’ll mail (and pay for) the hard copy postcard. Each postcard will have a supposedly small ad at the bottom, and you can choose which business is advertised.

This could a nice little exercise for English Language Learners — everybody likes to receive something in their mailbox, and I knew it would be an event for my students. Student’s names could be picked out of a hat to see who would write to who.

You can read about Hippopost in this TechCrunch post. They just released a Facebook application, but you can also do the same thing from the company’s main website without being a Facebook member.

BBC’s Blast Poetry Tool “lets you put together your visual interpretation on a poem using images, video and sound effects that have been provided by the BBC and other Blast users.”

You can then post the link to your creation on a website or blog.

Some of the BBC’s best Web 2.0 tools can’t be used outside of the U.K., but I was able to use this one in the U.S.

It’s pretty neat, and definitely accessible to English Language Learners.

Virsona is a very new site that lets you re-create and interact with historical figures. I think it’s a brilliant idea.

Users decide on a historical or fictional figure, and program a “talking bot” that visitors can chat with using text. The site is still in the experimental stage, and the bots that were available were very limited in their ability to communicate. However, if and when the site develops and more people participate, this part of the site would certainly be accessible to English Language Learners.

Creating your own talking bot would take a student’s learning to an entirely different level.   The process seems fairly complicated now, but if they simplify it a bit it seems to me that high-level Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners would be able to do it.

This is certainly a site to keep one’s eye on in the coming months.

Fina Tuna lets you easily grab any image off the web, write a note or speech bubble for placement on it, and then email it for posting on a blog or online journal.

I’ve shared many similar applications that let you add speech bubbles, but Fine Tuna has some advantages over the others.

One, you can write much more lengthy notes about the images that “shrink” and you only see when you click on it. This could be helpful for English Language Learners, or other students, who could write a short report connected to the photograph. In addition, other readers can also add comments and other notes to the image once it’s posted.

It’s definitely worth a look.

I decided to create another quick “The Best…” list today rating sites that allow you to create online comic strips.

These can be excellent opportunities for English Language Learners to be able to focus more time on developing language, writing, and storytelling skills instead of having to focus on creating drawings. Of course, I’m not denigrating the role of art in the classroom. It’s just that there are a number of online sites that make that part easier, and might make both writing and reading a little more engaging and attractive.

I’m differentiating “comic strips” from cartoons. There are many sites that let you add speech balloons to single images off the Web. You can find links to several of them on some of my The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly lists.

The sites here let you tell a story in several frames.

My criteria for including a site on this list include it being free, accessible to English Language Learners, and appearing to have some monitoring of its site to help monitor content so it appears to be appropriate for classroom use. In addition, the user’s creation is hosted on the site indefinitely.

I wasn’t really able to rate them in order of preference because many of them are so similar, though I do highlight a few. They can primarily be divided into two categories:

1) Ones that require no registration; are extremely simple to use; and don’t create a potential problem with inappropriate content since you pretty much don’t have access to other comic strips created on the site. The downside to this sites are they only allow you to link to the comic strip, not embed it. In other words, you can’t actually place the comic strip itself on a blog or website — just a link to the strip. In addition, most of the sites in this category generally don’t offer the same level of creativity that the next group does — most here have a smaller number of pre-set templates for the strips.

2) Ones that require registration, are more complicated (though they’re all certainly accessible to even Beginning English Language Learners with a few minutes of instruction) and have many more options for creativity. These also allow you to embed your creations in a blog or website. The potential downside (and upside — there are plenty of examples to use as models) to these sites is that there is easy access to strips created by others. The sites I’ve listed in this category seem to monitor for appropriate content, but there is always the possibility, however slim, that something might slip in. Of course, after you embed student creations on a blog or website, that dramatically reduces the possibility of their accessing other non-student creations, anyway. The risk is when they’re at the site creating them. There’s a risk in everything we do, of course, and I’ve had my students access these sites without any problem at all.

Here are picks for Category 1:

I’d say my favorites in this category are Make Beliefs Comix and Bubblr!.

Make Beliefs is a fairly well-known site that has a variety of characters that can be used in pre-made templates. It’s already popular in schools — both in mainstream and ESL/EFL classes.

Bubblr! comes from the extraordinarily creative people at Pim Pam Pum, who have developed a number of sites that work well with English Language Learners. Bubblr! lets you search for images from Flickr and create a comic strip slideshow with speech bubbles. They seem to have some sort of “safe search” control in place because in the four years I’ve used their various web applications none of my students have ever found an inappropriate image.

(Editor’s Note:  Jay Bennett wrote in the comments section that he was able to pretty quickly discover an inappropriate image using Bubblr!, so perhaps the site isn’t as “classroom-safe” as I have thought.)

The other two sites in Category 1 are KiddoNet and Scholastic’s Captain Underpants.

And now for my choices in Category 2:

I have four sites in this batch, and I have to say — in my eyes at least — it’s difficult to distinguish between them. The four are:

Pixton, a newer site that, if you make a series of comic strips, lets you put them into a virtual “book.” It also seems to have a very overt and pro-active (at least it says it does) policy on ensuring that only appropriate content remains on the site.

Comiqs, which lets you make comic strip slideshows with photographic images — very similar to Bubblr!. Their content seems classroom appropriate, but it’s not clear to me what their policy is.

Toonlet, where, like Pixton, you “draw” your comics. Like with Comiqs, their content seems appropriate, but I’m unclear on their specific policy.

The final one on my list is ToonDoo. When you go to their site, at the top you see something that says “Safe Search On.” All you have to do is click on that to gain access to mature content, apparently, but I’ve done that and haven’t actually found anything inappropriate.

As always, feedback is welcome.

Links to these sites, and to others, can be found on my website under Student Comic Strips.

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Listen and Write is a new web tool that I think has a lot of potential for English Language Learners.

A user first chooses a text he/she wants to hear read to him/her. Many of the choices are from the Voice of America, and are both high-interest and accessible. Their levels of difficulty are also indicated.

Then the story is dictated to you, and you have to type it correctly. You can choose the speed of the reading and how often it’s repeated. When you type only the correct letters actually show-up on the screen, and you can ask for hints.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Listening.

Ronaldo Lima, Jr., a very talented EFL teacher in Brazil, and my colleague in our growing international Sister Classes Project, wrote a great post in February comparing VoiceThread, Splashcast, and Qlipboard. These are three web applications that, as Ronaldo wrote, “unite pictures and voice in slideshows.”

I’d strongly encourage you to read his comparison of the three sites. I, for one, clearly did not read it very closely.

I say that because I just saw a Splashcast by Sudanese students taught by Hala Fawzi, another participant in the Sister Classes project. It’s a great presentation, and I was surprised to find that you could easily leave audio comments on it. Of course, if I had carefully read Ronaldo’s post from a few months ago, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I agree with Ronaldo that Splashcast doesn’t seem quite as easy to use as VoiceThread, but it’s nevertheless another viable alternative. One advantage it does have is that you don’t have to be registered with Splashcast in order to leave an audio comment (like you do with VoiceThread). So it’s easier to leave comments. However, it also doesn’t have comment moderation. You can easily delete comments that are left, but you can’t review them before they’re posted.

Ronaldo also wrote about Qlipboard. The last time I had looked at the site, it required a download to use. However, as Ronaldo pointed out, and which I missed, they have since added an online version.

In the online version, you can only use one photo. A major advantage, however, is that you don’t have to register for the site at all. You can just grab the url of an image off the Web, leave a voice commentary (it has a few other features, too), and you get an embed code and a url. Others can leave comments, too, though it doesn’t appear to me to be quite as obvious how to do that as with VoiceThread or Splashcast.

I’ll be posting links to both Splashcast and Qlipboard on Examples of Student Work page. Of course, VoiceThread has been there for quite awhile.

I think having English Language Learners create short online animations is a great benefit the Web provides. Students can work individually or in a group very methodically by making well-thought-out storyboards and then implement them, or they can make “quick and dirty” ones right on the spot.

Their creations can then be posted for all to see and comment on, both online and in-person.

Because they can be so useful to English Language Learners, and to other students, I’ve decided to create another “The Best…” list — this time highlighting the sites that I think are most accessible to English Language Learners (and are free).

You can also find links to these sites, and to other animation sites that didn’t make this list, on my Examples of Student Work page.

All of these sites are very good (or else they wouldn’t be on my list!). However, there is one that stands-out among the rest. So even though I’m not ranking them all like I usually do, I will be highlighting one as the best.

Here are my picks for The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Animations:

I’ll start off with the site I think by far is the best (and which has appeared in other “The Best…” lists) — Dvolver Moviemaker. It’s so easy, no registration is required, and it can be done quickly. Very new Beginning English Language Learners have been able to use it very effectively. You can see many examples of their work here. The company also has a more advanced application called Digital Films. You can create a more complex animation, but it is far more complicated to use — so I stick with the first version.

Junior Net is an easy animation site that’s comparable (though not quite as good) as Dvolver. You don’t have to register here, either, in order to create a show, get its url address, and then post it on a blog or website.

Myths and Legends is a United Kingdom site where students can create animations of……myths and legends. It’s pretty neat and easy, and has the added great benefit of letting students record the narration for their story. Teachers have to register, and they’re very open to schools participating from around the world.

The Zimmer Twins are another popular animation site among ESL/EFL teachers. You have to register for it, but doing so is quick and easy. One nice feature it has is that you can make a movie from “scratch” or it gives you pre-made scenes and plots (I guess its the animation equivalent of sentence-starters or sentence frames).

Kerpoof is a great site where you can make an animation and a lot more. You have to register here, too, but the process is also easy. Up until recently you weren’t able to get the url address of what you’ve created, but they’ve now developed that option.

Fuzzwich is a new site that is in the process of developing a full-blown animation process. Right now, though, you can easily create a “mini-animation” called Minivids. One advantage they offer is that, in addition to providing their url addresses, you can embed your Minivid in a blog or website.

Feel free to offer feedback and suggestions.

If you’ve found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free. You might also want to check-out my other “The Best…” lists.

Boy, there sure are a lot of web applications that let you make free slideshows. Because of this glut, I thought it would be helpful to my students, readers of this blog, and me to do a quick review of many of them, and identify my picks for the best ones. So, here’s another “The Best…” list.

In order to make it on this list (there is one exception), a site had to…

* be free.

* be simple. There are a number of web tools that just have too many “bells and whistles” for me, and they certainly don’t improve accessibility for English Language Learners.

* allow you to grab images off the Web, and not just from your computer.

* not have content inappropriate for classroom use readily available, at least not during the multiple times I visited the site.

* allow for the creation of captions and other writing.

I’ve come up with nine web tools that I think are worthy of being on this list. They all have some unique qualities, though, that make them ideal for different projects. So they are not ranked first-to-ninth. Instead, I’ve put them into different categories.

AUDIO-NARRATED SLIDESHOWS

Having said that I wasn’t going to rank the sites, however, it’s clear that one site is clearly the best, especially for English Language Learners. The ability to combine audio narration (and comments) with the written word at VoiceThread , along with its ease-of-use, make this a great application. Combine that with the special free educator membership and its benefits and you have the best site out there, period, for English Language Learners.

You can see a lot of samples at our Student Showcase blog, where Intermediate English students from various countries created VoiceThreads.

Just FYI, at our school we’ve been having a problem logging-in the regular way recently at VoiceThread. However, we can also log-in easily here. (Thanks to Alice Mercer for that tip!)

And since, for English Language Learners, having that audio component trumps other special effects, Show Beyond is another option if you can’t access VoiceThread for some reason. It’s not as easy to use as VoiceThread, and doesn’t allow you to leave audio comments, but it’s certainly accessible to English Language Learners.

You can easily embed slideshows from VoiceThread and Show Beyond into an online journal, website or blog. You can also just post the link to your creation.

SITES THAT DON’T REQUIRE REGISTRATION

There are several slideshow creation sites that don’t require you to register and still meet all my criteria. I think for most classes, if you don’t need the audio narration feature and you’re okay just posting a link instead of embedding the show in a blog or website, these should work fine.

Bookr is another great tool for anybody, including Beginning English Language Learners. You just type in a “tag” to search Flickr for images, drag them into a book and write about them. Here are samples made by my students.

Big Huge Labs is a site that lets you grab any image off the web — not just Flickr. The interface is not as easy as Bookr’s, but you do have access to far more images.

And, for the very Beginning English Language Learner, there’s the Colgate Smile Slideshow. You just drag-and-drop from a small number of images, and then do the same for captions. This would also be a good introductory activity for younger native English speakers, too.

(Editor’s Note: I’m adding Rock You to this list, too.)

A SITE WITH A FEW BELLS & WHISTLES

Magtoo is a newer site that has a number of features like being able to add music, show your slides in a variety of formats, and even create panoramas. But even with these extra features, it still seems pretty simple to use. Plus, you can embed your slideshow on a blog or website.

You might also want to check out 280 Slides. You can read my post about it here.

SITES WITH A FEW BELLS & WHISTLES — PLUS THEY LET YOU COLLABORATE

There are two sites in particular that, like Magtoo, have a few easily usable bells and whistles, can be embedded, and let you create slideshows with others over the Internet (not in real-time, though). I was attracted to them because of the collaboration feature and the possibilities of using them with our international sister classes, but they are also excellent sites to use without taking advantage of that aspect of the site.

One is Mixbook, which I think is very accessible (though I wish their tool to write text was a little bit better). Fliptrack is the other site worth considering.

(Note: Fliptrack just changed its name to Moblying and appears to be even better now)

A SITE WITH A HISTORY FOCUS

Digital Vaults from the National Archives has an incredibly easy-to-use tool to create online slideshows related to history. You can access images from historical time periods and easily drag-and-drop them into your show, along with writing captions. It’s just one feature of this extraordinary site.

All feedback on this list is welcome.

You can find links to these sites, and to many more slideshow creators, on my website under Student Slideshows.

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My Great World is a newer site that lets you choose a place on a world map and access images from that location.

The key feature of the site, though, is that you can then (without registering) choose an image, write a fairly lengthy message, and mail them both as an E-Card. The url address of the card can then be posted on an online journal or blog.

It’s an easy online application that can be used by English Language Learners for a multitude of lessons, particularly geography.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Student E-Cards.

Captioner allows you to type in the url of any photo on the web, create some talk “bubbles” to position within the photo, type text into the bubble, and then you’re given a url for the photo with your bubble in it.

It’s a fun exercise for English Language Learners, and then the url can be posted on a teacher’s web page or blog.

I’ve placed the link on my Examples of Student Work page under Student Photos.

xTimeline has been a decent timeline-making web tool, though I don’t think it’s been the best or most accessible one for English Language Learners. However, they’ve just released a new version that might have fixed some of their shortcomings.

A post in the Mashable blog gives a pretty good summary of xTimeline’s changes.

You can find a link to xTimeline, and many other online timeline applications, on my website under Student Timelines.

Go2Web20 just shared about a new tool to create online comic strips called Pikikids.

It seems like an okay site where you can search for images on Flickr and make a series of strips inserting your own speech bubbles.

There are many other similar sites, though, including ones where no registration is required. You can find links to them all on my website under Student Comic Strips. It’s nice to have so many applications accessible to English Language Learners, but I just don’t know if the world needs any more online comic creators.

Tikatok is a new site that is a real find for English Language Learners (and lots of other students). Users can create online books that they write and illustrate (they can also use lots of images available on the site).

It has a number of features that really make it stand-out. You can make a book from scratch, or you can use one of their many story frames that contain “prompts” to help the story-writer along. In addition, you can invite others to collaborate online with you to develop the book.

Once the book is done you can email the link to a friend, teacher, or yourself for posting on a blog, website, or online journal. You can create the online version for free, but have to pay if you want them to print a hard-copy version.

I’ll be placing it somewhere on my Examples of Student Work page, not to mention on a future “The Best…” list.

(Here’s an example of a book created by Pierre Renaud’s students using Tikatok. It’s in French, but you can certainly see how useful this site could be. Pierre, by the way, has an excellent site for English Language Learners (and French Language Learners), too.)

The Virtual Museum of Canada has a neat activity called The Train Messenger.  It would be accessible to English Language Learners of all levels.

In it, you can design a train and the scenery, write a message about it, and then email the url so it can be posted on a blog or online journal.  While you’re making your train, you can also read (in simple English) information about the types of rail cars and locomotives you’re deciding to use.

I’ve placed the link on my Examples of Student Work page under Student Train Messages.

ZeeMaps is an online mapmaking tool I recently learned about. It seems to be pretty similar to the twenty other free sites that I have listed on my website under Student Maps.

Registration takes a few seconds.  It does seems to have a specific collaboration feature that I haven’t seen on many of the other map sites, so it may warrant a look for that reason alone.

This is latest in my “The Best….” series of lists. Like the resources on most of the others, the sites on this list can be helpful to both English Language Learners and native-English speakers alike. Certainly, all my mainstream students need assistance in developing a mastery of academic English.

One way this list is different from the others is that I don’t rank them in terms of which ones I like the best. They’re all pretty good, and I’ll leave it for you to decide which one works better in your situation. Most of the online activities are accessible to either high-intermediate or advanced English Language Learners, though teachers can use the information on the sites to develop their own classroom activities accessible to students with a lower English proficiency.

Here are, in my opinion, The Best Websites For Developing Academic English Skills & Vocabulary:

Academic Vocabulary not only provides you with Academic World Lists based on their frequency of use (which I’ve found very useful for determining which words I should prioritize in class), but it also provides you with tools to create your own online exercises.

Kate Kinsella is a professor at San Francisco State University who does a lot of excellent training on how teachers can best help their students learn academic English. Clicking on her name will take you to a page where you can download many of the great materials she uses. It doesn’t substitute for taking one of her workshops, though, which I’d encourage you to do if you ever have the chance.

Academic Vocabulary Games has lists of academic vocabulary words for each content area from K-10. These lists were developed by the state of Tennessee working with Dr. Robert Marzano. You can print them out as cards to be used in games, and resources are also provided to develop your own online versions.

Vocabulary Exercises For The Academic Word List has a ton of online exercises to help students learn….academic vocabulary.

An Academic Writing Module: Paragraphs is designed for student self-access, and has many interactive exercises.

Using English For Academic Purposes has a lot of good oline activities. I found it a little confusing to navigate, though. This page has a lot of direct links to exercises. Also, you’ll find a more accessible index for this site on another entirely different site called Free Online Academic Reading and Writing Exercises. You’ll also see a number of other links to other resources there.

One of Sacramento’s own, Elizabeth Hanson-Smith, also has developed a nice interactive tutorial with a long name: Constructing The Paragraph: A Tutorial and Self-Testing Program For American English In Academic Settings.

Please let me know if you have any other suggestions for adding to this list, or what you think about the ones already there.

Also, drop me a line if you have ideas about other topics for future “The Best…” lists.

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