Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

“Searching With Success” is an engaging tutorial on searching the web. It’s from Acadia University, and is accessible to high Intermediate English Language Learners.

Acadia also has a tutorial called Credible Sources Count. It’s probably only accessible to advanced ELL’s.

I’m adding both to The Best Resources For Learning Research & Citation Skills.

The United States Census Bureau does its every-ten-year census in 2010, and much of the allocation of public funds and resources is based on the results. Lower-income communities are often “short-changed” because many people don’t respond to Census questions for a variety of reasons.

The Sacramento Bee ran an excellent article today titled Capital-area activists seek full census count of Franklin Boulevard’s Latinos. The graphics that accompany the article are even better, especially one highlighting Sacramento’s Hard-To-Count Census Tracts.

It got me thinking…

The Census Bureau itself has a lot educational materials for us in schools, but I have to admit that I’m less than impressed with most of them. It does, however, have a simple and accessible Census Fact Sheet that I like.

We’re in the middle of a neighborhood research unit (I explain it in detail in my upcoming book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work, and I’ll post about it here one of these days). It culminates with their writing a persuasive essay explaining why they like living in their neighborhood.

I’m thinking that an interesting follow-up to that would be for students to do a little more analysis into why their neighborhood is considered “hard-to-count,” read a little more about the Census and what benefits could come in to make their neighborhood even better if more people responded, and develop their own version of a persuasive essay/poster to share in the community.

If you’re interesting in trying to do something similar, you can find which neighborhoods in your area are considered “hard to count” here.

Proofreading: Spelling and Writing is a really nice series of many, many exercises where students have to correct paragraphs. It’s divided by levels of difficulty.

I’m adding it to The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis (It’s a long story about why that list has that title — you can read the explanation in the post).

Thanks to the Langwitches blog for the tip.

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.”

SweetSearch Biographies has an extensive collection of accessible biographies. You can read Joyce Valenza’s post to get more detailed information.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Researching & Writing Biographies.

Earth.org is an online travel guide that makes it easy to find information about places around the world and, more importantly, makes it quite easy to add info, too.

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

I’ve recently begun to try some quick writes with my students using an activity I learned from Kelly Young called “PQC” (Point, Quote, Connect or Comment). It’s a simple exercise that students can use after reading a text that means:

1) Make a point
2) Quote from the text supporting your point
3) Make a connection to your personal experience, another text, or some other knowledge

Lots of you might already know this acronym, but it was new to me. After briefly modeling it for my students (if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that modeling is absolutely critical — the quality of learning is dramatically improved if I model activities and exercises first), students have really been successful. And they especially like that they’ve learned an easy process and acronym that they can use in their other classes when they’re asked to write something.

I’ve posted in the past about a similar acronym I learned from Kelly — “ABC.” It stands for:

1) Answer the Question
2) Back up your answer with evidence or facts.
3) Comment from a more personal opinion or perspective

If you have any other similarly useful acronyms, please share them in the comments section.

I’ve been spending some time lately trying to figure out how I can help my students respond to writing prompts a little better. The primary strategy I’ve taught is having students use this four-step approach that was suggested to me by my colleague Katie Hull:

1. Read the prompt
2. Circle important words and words that tell you do something
3. Number your paper 1, 2, 3, 4. Next to each number, In your own words, write the three or four things the prompt tells you to do.
4. Write your essay using that outline as your guide

That works out well, and is easy for students to remember, but I’m always interested in developing better writing strategies.

Earlier this month, Jim Burke shared a one-sheet handout that he uses with his AP students titled How To Write A Timed Essay. It’s an excellent piece and worth reviewing, though too advanced for my mainstream ninth-grade and English Language Learner students.

One of the comments on his post mentioned an “ABCD” strategy to help young writers that was developed by author/teacher Kelly Gallagher. After “googling” it, I was led to a PDF consisting of materials from an Ohio Research Center webcast on “Using Constructed ResponseQuestions to Foster Student Thinking, Writing, and Test-Taking Skills.”

There is a great description of Gallagher’s ABCD strategy there on page 17 and is designed as a student-handout. It comes from his book, Teaching Adolescent Writers. I have to admit, though I’m familiar with his books on reading, I didn’t know about this one. ABCD stands for “Attack, Brainstorm, Choose, Detect.” His “attack” phase is very similar to what I do already, but his other suggestions are simple and, most importantly, are designed in a way that my students could remember and implement them.

I love not having to reinvent the wheel!

I’ve posted about Tutpup several times, and must have had a “brain freeze” when I forgot to include it in The Best Spelling Sites.

Thankfully, Steven Roberge kangirsuk reminded me about it. I’ll just quote how he described it, and you can also look at my previous posts on it:

Students must spell words that are spoken to them. The activity is a multi-player game. There are 5 levels of difficulty. Teachers can create class accounts, so they can monitor the progress and statistics of their students.

Thanks, Steven!

There are a lot of sites out there designed for spelling practice. I thought it would be helpful to create a “The Best…” list to narrow them down a bit.

For English Language Learners, and for others, the best spelling sites are ones that offer audio and also use the words in the context of sentences. Websites that offer both are the most highly-rated on my list. And, of course, they have to be free to be here, too.

You can also find links to the sites here, and to many other spelling related resources, on my website under Spelling.

Here are my ranked choices of The Best Spelling Sites (that are best for English Language Learners):

Number thirteen is Catch The Spelling. It’s a series of games specifically geared towards English Language Learners.

Number twelve is the Alpha-Bot game. It’s a nice game where you first listen to the word spoken and then have to find the correct letters to spell it. I probably should place it a little higher on the list, but I learned about this game after I completed this post, and was just too lazy to change the rankings .

Number eleven are spelling quizzes from The Interlink Language Center. They’re simple exercises, but there are a lot of them.

Number ten is Kidspell. There are a ton of spelling games, and you can also easily create ones using your own spelling lists. However, they’re not offered in context and there’s no audio pronunciation.

Number nine is Word Sort from Houghton Mifflin. In addition to providing audio, it has the added feature of challenging students to look for word patterns. However, the words are not used in sentences.

Number eight is Spellbee!,  a spelling game where, after you register, you choose a player to compete with in a spelling contest. Each player chooses from a variety of words and challenges their opponent online to correctly spell the word that is spoken to them in the context of a sentence.  It’s a pretty neat concept and, though the text-to-speech software it uses is definitely not top-tier, it’s still a game students would enjoy playing and would be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.  It’s quite easy for players to register very quickly. There’s also a slightly more complicated registration process that students and teachers can use in order for teachers to monitor student progress.

Number seven is Spin and Spell. It’s an excellent spelling and vocabulary-building exercise for ELL’s. Images and audio are provided, and players select the categories they want to use. It, too, however, doesn’t use the words in sentences.

Number six is Spellits, an excellent site from the BBC. It provides some direct instruction in spelling patterns — using audio and text — and has a number of games that provide the same level of support.

I don’t think that Spelling Bees different schools and communities sponsor are particularly healthy or educational for kids.  However, there are several online versions that I think would work well with ELL’s. I’m ranking Spelling Bee: The Game at number five.  It has lots of great features.  The only it’s missing, though, is that it appears like you can’t pick your level of difficulty.

There’s another free online version called Big IQ Bee that I’m ranking at number four (other similar “Spelling Bees” are coming up on this list, too).   Students have to register, which is very easy to do. Then they determine their difficulty level. Words are spoken in a computer-generated voice, and are also used in a sentence. Players then spell the word.  Players are rated in some kind of leader board, but they’re not actually playing against others in real-time.

Number three is the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee.  You don’t have to register to play, and it automatically adapts to your spelling ability. It remembers which words you got right and wrong and quizzes you periodically on words at your spelling level that you spelled incorrectly in the past. A human voice, and not a computerized one, says the words. Plus, it shows you a diagram of similar words.  It doesn’t give you a sentence example using the word, but I guess you can’t have everything…

Number two is The Spelling Bee from Annenberg Media. Not only does it let you pick your level of difficulty, provide audio support, and give the words in context, but the context is not just in a sentence — it tells you a story.

And, now, the number one Best Spelling Site is….Spelling City. It has all the features that one can ask for, and is plenty of fun. You can make your own word list, or create your own.

(I’ve posted about Tutpup several times, and must have had a “brain freeze” when I forgot to include it originally in this list. Thankfully, Steven Roberge kangirsuk reminded me about it. I’ll just quote how he described it, and you can also look at my previous posts on it:

Students must spell words that are spoken to them. The activity is a multi-player game. There are 5 levels of difficulty. Teachers can create class accounts, so they can monitor the progress and statistics of their students.)

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.

The Rutgers Research Information Online Tutorial is an excellent interactive tool to help students learn research schools. Closed-captioning is also provided, which helps English Language Learners.

It’s still a bit advanced, but, nevertheless, I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning Research & Citation Skills.

ESL Bee is a teacher-designed site to assist Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners in writing academic essays.

There’s a lot of material there. For me, though, the gold mine is in the examples of student essays (for example, these persuasive essays). It’s not easy to find good, short, accessible, and well-written examples of different types of academic essays that can be used with English Language Learners as models, but you’ll find a wealth of them here.

The same site also has a number of good English practice quizzes.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Practice Writing.  I’ve also added it to The Best Websites For K-12 Writing Instruction/Reinforcement.

Twick it is designed to be sort of a version of Wikipedia. The difference is that every entry has to be 140 characters or less.

In the future, once there are many entries, it might be a great source of information for English Language Learners. Now, however, it’s an excellent opportunity for students to identify topics, develop their own 140 character answer or description about the topic, and then post it to the site.

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

We’re just beginning our Persuasive Essay unit in Intermediate English, and I thought I’d identify some relevant sites. I’ll also be converting this list into a more student-accessible post on our Intermediate English class blog.

Other “The Best…” lists that we use during this unit include:

The Best Sites To Learn About Street Gangs

The Best Sites For ELL’s To Learn About The Dangers Of Smoking

The Best Sites To Learn About Advertising

The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis

Here are my choices for The Best Online Resources For Helping Students Learn To Write Persuasive Essays:

Here’s a Fact and Opinion game.

Try another Fact and Opinion Game.

Here are lots of fact and opinion activities.

PBS’ Arthur has a simple Facts and Opinions game.

It’s A Fact! is an online activity from Scholastic.

Making Connections is another exercise from Scholastic.

Argument is an activity from the BBC. Other activities connected to it are:

Read

Watch

Quiz

The BBC has another activity called Argue, Persuade, and Advise. Revise is a connected exercise.

Earthlings, Unite! is an interactive sample persuasive essay.

The Joystick of Learning is another interactive sample essay.

Hungry Students Can’t Study is one more sample essay, though it’s not interactive.

Here’s an accessible tutorial on writing a persuasive essay from Great Source.

Students can quickly and easily create a “map” of their persuasive essay here and post its url on a student or teacher website.

I like this persuasive essay outline generator a lot.

Persuasion Map is from Read Write Think, but it can only be printed-out, not saved.

ESL Bee has a number of sample persuasive essays written by ESL students.

“Seeing The Forest Through The Trees” is a post I wrote about teaching the Persuasive Essay that teachers might find useful.

As always, feedback is welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to explore the other 350 “The Best…” lists and consider subscribing to this blog for free.

I’ve included Fact Monster in some of my “The Best…” lists.  Today, though, I’d like to highlight a specific feature of the site called People and Biographies.

It has links to short, accessible biographies of over 30,000 people. My English Language Learner students have found it very helpful.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Biographical Essay.

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.

Opposing Views highlights key questions (political, scientific, etc). It then, in a fairly succinct “bullet” format, has an “expert” share pro and con arguments. Users of the site can also leave their own comments.  The language and lay-out of the site is fairly accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.  After reading the arguments, users can easily leave their own comments on the issue.

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.

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.

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

The Robo-Penguin is a slideshow from TIME Magazine.

Curious Robotic Animals is a slideshow from LIFE about robots designed to look and act like animals.

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.