Inspired by the twentieth anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall this week, I’ve begun to think about developing some lessons related to walls — physical, mental, and emotional — and how they’re used by us and others to stay separate. I’m thinking it’s also an opportunity to help students learn about metaphors and similes.

This list is different, though, because usually I don’t post a list like this until I have some specific ideas on how to use the resources in a lesson.

I’m not there year, and, instead, am sharing these resources and asking for ideas on how best to use them. Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Absent a lesson plan, here are my choices for the The Best Sites To Learn About Walls That Separate Us (and are accessible to English Language Learners):

Raising Walls is an intriguing feature from The Wall Street Journal highlighting famous….walls in history and around the world.  The interactive graphic is supplemented by a slideshow, video, and article focused on walls being built around slums in Rio de Janeiro.

Great Walls In History is a slideshow from Newsweek magazine.

Here are two sites on the Great Wall of China:   One is a site from the University of Washington called the Great Wall that has text accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners and some nice photos.   I really like this other site.  It’s from an organization called The China Guide, and it’s a cool Virtual Tour of The Great Wall.  It gives a 360 degree tour and you can click on “hot spots” to move throughout the wall.

Two nice sites on the Berlin Wall are a series of photos from The Denver Post and an interactive from The Guardian.

Of course, the United States is building a huge border fence between the U.S. and Mexico. The New York Times has a map showing it. Here’s an interactive interviewing people who live near it. Earlier this year, the U.S. built a fence in the middle of ‘Friendship Park,” which is near San Diego and a place where friends and relatives from both countries would gather. You can watch a slideshow about what happened and also hear and read an NPR report on the event.

The Washington Post has an interactive about Israel’s plan to build a fence on the West Bank to separate Israel from the Palestinians.

Here are a series of images of Hadrian’s Wall, which was built in Great Britain long ago by the Roman Empire.

Walls of Incompetence is a series of photos of modern-day walls.

Baghdad: City of Walls, Pt.1: Scars of war is from the British newspaper The Guardian and highlights giant walls that have been built to separate Shia and Sunni neighborhoods.

Again, lesson ideas are welcome, along with suggestions of additional resources.

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The key feature, though, that makes it so useful to English Language Learners is that audio support is provided for much of the text.

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

Unfortunately, the article certainly doesn’t leave the impression (at least, in my reading of it) that they are going to seriously consider new types of assessments.

The comments on the article are also worth reading. Here’s one left by renowned ELL researcher Stephen Krashen:

At a time when children are overwhelmed with tests, when schools are being turned into test-prep academies, and when worth-while programs are being eliminated because of severe budget cuts, we are planning even more tests, tests that will match grade-by-grade standards, and carry a “hefty price tag.”

Judging by some of the other posts, I am clearly not the only person who thinks this is nuts. And I am not the only one who thinks it makes more sense to invest in maintaining and improving our educational system rather than developing more and more precise tests, tests that will add little or nothing to what we already know.

Unfortunately, this week President Obama echoed the typical stuff that has been coming out of his administration about schools in his speech at a Wisconsin school.

However, there was one part that I found intriguing. Maybe others know what he’s referring to in the last line of this excerpt. If you do, please leave a comment.

But what we want to do — what we want to do is finally get testing right. So it’s not about more tests, it’s about being smarter about our assessments. It’s about measuring not only whether our kids can master the basics, but whether they can solve challenging tasks, do they have the skills like critical thinking and teamwork and entrepreneurship; assessments that don’t just give us a snapshot of how a student is doing in a particular subject, but a big picture look at how they’re learning overall; and assessments that will help tell us if our kids have the knowledge and the skills to thrive when they graduate.

So we’re not just interested in can they fill out a bubble. What we want to do is to take a look generally — are kids learning and gaining the critical thinking skills that they need to succeed. Now, these are the kinds of assessments that our states should be putting in place, and we’re setting up a separate competition where they can win grants, extra grants to help them do just that.

I had not heard anything about this effort to have states compete to develop better assessments.  Is he serious?  Or is it just window-dressing to make all the bad stuff seem more palatable?

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:

CREATE A GAME OF HANGMAN: With the Flash Hangman Challenge, you can easily write a phrase, email it to a friend, and it will automatically be turned into a Hangman game that can also be posted on a teacher/student website or blog. No registration is required. I’m also adding it to The Best Sites For Making Crossword Puzzles & Hangman Games.

TALK LIKE AN ELF: K-Mart has just created a “Talk Like An Elf” application. Go to the site, click on Elfspeak, and then record your message or use the text-to-speech option. Your message, which has a pitch that they must figure an elf might sound like, can then be emailed to a friend and the url can be posted on a student/teacher website or blog. You can also embed it, or send it directly to Facebook. It’s a brand new app, and, when I used it a few times, it was a bit temperamental. But I’m sure they’re working the bugs out as I write this.

DESIGN A WEIRD FLOWER: The musical group Black Eyed Peas has created a site called Planting My Ideas. You can use music, images, and words to create your own flower, which would then be posted in the site’s gallery. You can also post the link on a student or teacher’s website/blog, and have students write about it as a language development activity. It’s supposed to inspire creativity.  It’s interesting, fun, and a bit weird.

MAKE A BOOK: 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.

It’s a short list this time, but the next one I’m sure will be filled with a ton of Christmas-related activities.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources About President’s Day.

There’s a ton of different and engaging online activities there for Beginning through Intermediate English Language Learner students.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Vocabulary on my website, even though it also includes reading and listening exercises..

They can also be used as good speaking opportunities for English Language Learners.

I’ve written a lot about how I use online video games with ELL’s. One thing I’d like to do is have students play video games using “walkthroughs” (instructions and hints about how best to “win”) and create instructional screencast ”walkthroughs” that would teach other students how to play the game.

Of course, students could also just leave a stationary picture on the screen and talk about it.

In order to make it on this list, the application needed to be accessible to ELL’s and not require any downloading of software, since downloads are problematic for many schools.

Here are my picks for The Best Tools For Making Screencasts:

As regular readers know, my favorite is Screentoaster. It couldn’t be more simple to use, and they’ve recently added both the ability to record audio and add subtitles. All you do after you log-in is click on a button, open up the window on your screen that you want to record, and it starts recording your screen.  After that’s been recorded, you can provide audio or subtitles.  And it’s free. I’ve also placed it on The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.

DemoGirl also has a screencast on how to use that application, but it might not include its newest features.

Screencast-O-Matic is also nice, but a bit more complicated than Screentoaster.

Two newer apps that look good are Screenr and Screenjelly.

The great site Teacher Training videos has a screencast on how to use Screenjelly.

And, though I’m limiting this list to apps that require no software download, I do feel I have to at least mention Jing, which is a very popular free tool available by download. Teacher Training Videos also has a screencast explaining how to use Jing.

If you think I’m missing any tools, or if you have other ideas on how they can be used effectively with students, feel free to leave a comment.

You might also be interested in the other nearly 350 “The Best…” lists.

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Ordinarily, I certainly wouldn’t be using space on this blog to talk about somebody getting married (well, I have to admit I might write a word or two if it’s one of my kids). However, when our mayor, who turned a public high school into a private charter; who is the midst of a campaign to change the city’s charter so that the mayor gains huge control over the city; and who I would bet is planning on trying for mayoral control of the schools at some point, is getting married to one of the most outspoken advocates of many initiatives that I think are not helpful to public schools and the teachers and students in them, I’ll make an exception.

I wonder what this news might mean for schools in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C.? Especially with Rhee’s recent troubles.

There are some posts that could have been included here, but, instead, I’ve decided to add them to a future post titled “The Best Articles (And Blog Posts) Offering Practical Advice To Teachers — 2009.”

I have not included any additional description where the titles are self-explanatory.

Here are my choices for The Best Reflective Posts I’ve Written About My Teaching Practice — 2009:

“Data-Driven” Versus “Data-Informed” talks about my principal’s perspective on the use of data and my own response to lower standardized test scores in one of my classes.

What Do Pit Bulls & Cockroaches Have To Do With Learning & Teaching? shares my thoughts on what I view as my “teaching metaphor.”

Why I Support The Cellphone Ban At Our School

Results From Student Evaluation Of My Class And Me

Results From Student Evaluation Of My Class And Me (Part Two)

Have You Ever Taught A Class That Got “Out Of Control”?

“I’ll Work If You Give Me Candy” shares my response to a student who said that to me.

Writing Letters To Students

Results From My Year-Long U.S. History Tech Experiment is where I shared the assessment results and my reflections from teaching two U.S. History classes — one entirely in the computer lab and one in my classroom with my typical curriculum.

The Best Part Of The President’s Speech & How I’ll Use It shares how I use a different type of goal-setting lesson regularly with students  in class.

In “Seeing The Forest Through The Trees” I write about my amazing ability to not see things that are so obvious.

I wonder about the Hopes and Dreams that my students share in a beginning-of-the-year exercise in The Hopes And Dreams Of My Students.

Reading Logs — Part Two (or “How Students Can Grow Their Brains”) shares some lessons I was planning to use with students to help them see that they could literally make their brains “stronger.” “Now I Know My Brain Is Growing When I Read Every Night” describes what happened when I tried them in the classroom. “This Is Your Brain On Learning” shares a follow-up lesson I did. “I Know My Brain Is Growing…” Slideshow Of Student Work displays work that came out of the lesson.

Helping Students Develop Self-Control shares another lesson in the same vein as the one on the brain.

“I Like This Lesson Because It Make Me Have a Longer Temper” (Part One) shares the actual lesson on I did on self-control.

“I Was Disappointed With What Happened Yesterday…” talks about some class management issues.

“I Made My Agreement With Mr. Ferlazzo And Kept It…” talks about about the importance of making individual “deals” with students.

Getting Our Students & Their Families Thinking About College

“Lean-In” is about a short lesson to help students become more attentive.

Feedback , as always, is welcome.

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