Instructify

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

If you’re teaching English-language learners in your class — which includes pretty much every teacher in every school — then you need to check out the great resources at ESL Basics. English is an incredibly frustrating language for many to learn, what with its hundreds of synonyms, and spelling and grammar so complex that even most native speakers can’t master them. Well, for those trying to learn English, ESL Basics is a great free resource to try and make sense of the oddities of the language.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

In response to the overwhelming need for resources for English language learners, ESL- and ELL-based websites and web-based resources are popping up like mushrooms after the rain. If you’re thinking about putting together an online resource or just blogging about your experiences in ESL and ELL environments, you might want to check out ImagineLearning’s free Widgets dealing with translating and other language-based resources.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

A word of warning about this blog entry: if you don’t do any work with websites or Moodle, you might not find this very pertinent. But if you do, you’ll be interested in NanoGong. This app lets anyone with an internet connection and a microphone record audio via a web-based interface, then save it locally or to a website (click here to try their sample website).

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BY BILL FERRIS

Last year we reviewed Xtranormal Text-to-Movie, a free computer animation app that lets you create your own cartoons. The folks at Xtranormal have made an even more impressive program called State, which adds characters who can walk around, advanced camera movement, movies with multiple scenes, and the ability to record your own voiceovers to your movies for free.

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BY NICK YINGLING

Lately, during my lunch break, I usually sit at my desk and drop crumbs of food into my keyboard. That’s a terribly boring way to pass your lunch hour. So, naturally, I started watching my favorite show, The Golden Girls, on a streaming TV site. The main problem now is that most sites don’t have full episodes, just the excerpts. So I dug deeper. One site that streams shows is based somewhere in Asia. There are all sorts of foreign characters bannered across the top of the screen and the subtitles can sometimes take up one-third of the screen. How cool would it be if I managed to learn to read Chinese from passively exposing myself to the subtitles on my streaming episodes of The Golden Girls during my lunch break?!

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BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features an express flight to Mars, Web 2.0 project ideas, alternatives to book reports, and online sites where you can learn a new language. Read about all of it after the jump.

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BY BILL FERRIS

For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.

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BY NICK YINGLING

Is English your first language? Did you know that if you constantly find yourself at a loss for words and keep making mistakes you might not exactly be considered fluent? Sure, I do hold an impossibly high standard and I am indeed applying a rather narrow definition for language fluency. My point is this: you probably need to give yourself a refresher. What better way to study than by helping someone else learn!

English Portal Community from Talk and Learn is an educational site for users around the world who want to improve their English. Users are able to study online, take quizzes, and after creating their own profile, chat with other members in English. (more…)

The early buzz about the world wide web was that it would throw open the floodgates of the world’s accumulated knowledge, creating a window into the cultures of the most far-flung places on earth. We instead got lolcats, pop-up ads, and meaningless quizzes about which superhero you are.

Fortunately, some wise folks had an eye on that original idyllic vision all along, and those folks now bring us the World Digital Library. A project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO, the site provides access to high-quality digital scans of primary source materials from all over the world.

These cultural treasures include maps, photographs, manuscripts, audio and video recordings and more, and there’s at least one item from every UNESCO member country. The WDL’s interface is phenomenal, offering beautiful, high-resolution scans with incredible zooming capability. Check out this 18th century Japanese woodblock print; you can zoom in close enough to see individual paper fibers.

The site is also exceptionally easy to navigate — perhaps dangerously so, if you like looking at pretty pictures and are prone to losing track of time. You can browse by place, time, topic, type of item, or contributing institution, and the site is navigable in seven different languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The possibilities for using the WDL in the classroom are nearly endless: Social studies teachers, obviously, will find a treasure trove of primary source materials, but they can also show works created contemporaneously from around the globe for any era, enabling students to develop a holistic sense of global history. Second-language teachers can have students view culturally significant items in their target language. English language arts teachers can identify exquisite images, audio, and video for use as writing prompts. And the ability to browse by topic provides opportunities for use by those often-neglected STEM teachers: Among the topics to choose from is “natural science and mathematics,” which can be further limited to astronomy, geometry, medicine, physics, etc.

An entry under the topic “mathematical geography” is a 15th-century Egyptian book called A Guide for the Perplexed on the Drawing of the Circle of Projection. Many thanks to the World Digital Library for raising our collective IQ. This is what I always knew the internet could be. -EMILY JACK

World Digital Library

Related stuff:

Visit the Library of Congress online

Access Primary Sources Online with the Perseus Digital Library

Check out ibiblio, the Online Library

Do you have one of those classes that skipped some lessons on manners, like saying please and thank you? Do you have language learners who need to increase their vocabulary for social conversation? Is your class stuck in the blahs between the February holidays and spring break? You can meet these needs and more at Thanks-o-meter, a site that lets you write thank-you notes either free-style, or using the word choices they give you. That’s the creation part. Thanks-o-meter then takes the words picked and adds them to a graph showing how frequently others have used the words you picked. In addition, you can send the thank-you to your recipient as an email. Another plus, they are really trying to keep it school- and kid-friendly, giving rules for the road, and the ability to flag inappropriate content. So recognize others, teach manners, and teach vocabulary at Thanks-o-meter. -ALICE MERCER

Thanks-o-meter

A big thank you to Larry Ferlazzo for this tip

My thank you to our editor, Bill Ferris

A spoonful of podcasting helps the science go down. Yes, that’s a terrible lead sentence, but when a site has a name like Bytesize Science, how could I not think of utensil-sized portions? Or Mary Poppins? Bytesize Science delivers hot new scientific developments via their series of two- to three-minute podcasts. Your students can learn about paper-thin stereo speakers, underwater camouflage, or how chemists have improved artificial turf. You can download select episodes in Spanish as well, which would be helpful for some of your ESL students. To make things even easier, you can subscribe to Bytesize Science in iTunes or via RSS feed, so you can download each episode automatically. And since each episode is about the length of your average pop song, your students can learn intriguing scientific facts without expending a huge amount of time. Bite-sized indeed. -BILL FERRIS

Bytesize Science

Related stuff:

Celebrate weird science with the Ig Nobel Awards

Visit the University of North Carolina on iTunesU

Tune In: Education Podcasting Network

PicLits provides you with interesting images and, if you need them, word prompts. It all starts with a picture they provide. If you don’t like the one that comes up, you can look for others. Then, your students provide the caption. The word prompts lend themselves to the poetic, so this is a great way to get students writing in that genre. All they need to do is drag and drop the words, or type in their own. The visual and vocabulary support make it ideal for EFL/ESL students. Students can then save what they write on PicLits, or put snapshots on a blog or social network, or email a link to the PicLits page.

If you’re looking for a good writing prompt, or something to add visual pizazz to writing in your class, give PicLits a shot. -ALICE MERCER

PicLits

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Great Literature, Now With Road Maps

I have been using VoiceThread a lot this year with my students. VoiceThread is a great online tool that lets you link or upload pictures, add video, and audio narration, and leave text comments and “doodles.” Many folks end up using it like PowerPoint for final projects, but I like to use it for concept development from the start of a thematic unit. I’m going to go through the steps I used in one Voice Thread as an example. Are we ready campers?

This is an important part of vocabulary and language development, critical when you are working with English Language Learners, or students with a learning disability. We’ve all used K-W-L (Know, What I want to know, what we Learned) charts. VoiceThread is a great way to make them interactive and visual.

The VoiceThread was for a unit on friendship. Since I have a large number of English language learners, starting with the visual is the best approach. Even if they don’t have the vocabulary, they know what friendship looks like. I started by locating Creative-Commons-licensed pictures on flickr with the word “friend” in the title or the tags. I then shared the pictures with the class by showing them on the digital projector, and had them help pick out the pictures they thought showed friendship. In addition to letting them show what they knew about friendship without reading or writing, their choices also let them express their creativity.

These were the first photos I added to the VoiceThread. The important thing is to get the URL for the photo (you can do this by right clicking on the picture in your browser and selecting “copy image location”). The tool in VoiceThread to add flickr photos will only access your photos, not pictures posted by others.

Next, I had students “show” what friendship looked like. This is an important part of vocabulary development because it lets students show what they know, AND it helps them create examples for others to view. Acting out is great way for both language learners and students with social/emotional issues to show what they know, and to practice appropriate social behavior. You can upload pictures to VoiceThread from your computer or memory stick.

This is where I have students add their voices. I had students tell me what people were saying in the pictures showing friendship. This is oral language practice for the students, and another way to show what they know about social skills.

Next, we’re ready to work with words. This should be at least a little ways into the unit to get the most interesting questions. For primary, I have them come up with oral questions they have about the concept, and I type it into a PowerPoint in front of the class. You can upload a PowerPoint slideshow directly into VoiceThread, just like you can with a regular picture.

You should be far enough into the unit that they will be able to provide some answers to the questions. This is where students can perform higher-order and deeper thinking. I usually do this by calling the students back in pairs or triads, and asking them to pick a question to answer. I have them go through their answers one time before I hit “record.” They then record their thoughts into the VoiceThread, showing what they’ve learned. All during the process, I have students checking to see new things that are being adding to the VoiceThread, so they can see it building. Voila, your K-W-L is done. -ALICE MERCER

Photo credit: Mii Friends from natliej’s on Flickr

Seriously! Karaoke is good for more than just drunken businessmen (and others) letting off steam. It can be a great way for language learners to practice and improve English language skills. The lyrics rhyme and are repeated, it comes with a written prompt, and the music helps to bring it all together. As Larry Ferlazzo says, singing is a lot less threatening to language learners than having a conversation (since it’s acceptable to hum through the parts you forget or don’t get).

So where to go? My two favorite sites are Sims on Stage. Both are easy to use and have a minimal registration process. You will need a microphone if you are recording your or your students’ singing, but you can just practice. You can find easy classics under the Kids category. My school does a monthly “sing-a-long” assembly. I had the kids practice singing “Jingle Bells” for this month’s show. -ALICE MERCER

All of these ideas are stolen come from Larry Ferlazzo and his great blog

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Escuchen la One Semester of Spanish Love Song

Photo credit: tomasu.co.uk on Flickr

When teaching English language learners, understanding their cultural backgrounds is crucial. You’ve probably already done a lot of research on the topic, but sometimes it helps to hear students’ stories in their own words.

At Education and Class, blogger Jane Van Galen has found several videos in which Spanish-speaking student immigrants give accounts of their upbringing and culture. These first-person narratives shed some light on these students’ lives, and the challenges they face learning a new language and adapting to a new culture.

Maybe hundreds of YouTube videos have lowered my standards, but the production quality looks really good — tasteful background music, clear subtitles, and nifty camera angles add to the storytelling. They’re produced by Learning and Teaching Scotland, who also feature language podcasts and other language learning tools on their site. Good production plus a one-on-one perspective makes these videos work as reminders that getting to know your students can help you teach them more effectively. -BILL FERRIS

In Their Own Voices

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¿Como se dice Podcast? ESL Pod