Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

I’ve discovered two intriguing sites where people can create user-generated content related to next month’s Winter Olympics. To tell you the truth, I’m not convinced that either one will really enhance one’s understanding of the Olympics much. But, for English Language Learners, they both certainly provide lots of good listening and speaking opportunities. So, for that reason, I’m adding them to The Best Sites To Learn About The Vancouver Winter Olympics:

Become A Virtual Sportscaster lets you, after registration, be a…sportscaster calling the action for several different video clips of Olympic events. You can then share the video with others.

The Best Of Us Challenge lets you see “challenges” (strange and fun competitions like balancing a stick on your foot) that Olympic athletes have created for ordinary people to beat them at. You can record your attempt at their challenge and post it at the site. In addition, you can create your own video challenges.

The American Heart Association has unveiled a web application that lets you create a “hand symphony” and send the link of your creation to a friend or yourself. It can then be posted on a teacher website or blog.

It’s designed to promote the Association’s new hands-only CPR, and the site also has a one minute video demonstrating it.

It’s a fun site, and I’m adding it to The Best Online Sites For Creating Music.

Thanks to Innovative Interactivity for the tip.

Free Web Me is a new way to create free websites. They say you can create one in less than a minute, and you certainly can. Plus, you can grab images off the web to use on your site. It’s pretty easy.

I’m adding it to The Best Ways For Students Or Teachers To Create A Website.

The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…

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:

MAKE A STORY COLLAGE: The Library of Congress has a neat Storybook activity. First, users have to answer some simple questions from The Wizard Of Oz, The Mermaid, and Aladdin (book excerpts are provided) and then you can make a collage out of the book’s characters that you can email and post on a teacher website or blog.

CREATE SUBTITLES TO SOCCER & TV PROGRAM VIDEOS YOU CREATE: I’ve written several times about the incredibly useful and fun Bombay TV, where you can create your own videos from cheesy clips and write subtitles (it’s my number one rated app on The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Videos (Using Someone Else’s Content) list.

Well, now it’s created sister sites where you can do the same with clips from old TV programs and from soccer games. They’re called Bombay TV 2, Futebol TV and Classik TV.

SEND AN eCARD WITH AN ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE: The National Building Museum lets you send some very informative Green Community E-Cards, which can then be posted on a teacher/student website or blog.

CREATE A TALKING POTATO-HEAD BASKETBALL: Yes, the title is accurate. Create it, make it talk with its text-to-speech feature, and post it on a teacher/student website/blog if you dare.

MAKE A SNOWFLAKE WITH A MESSAGE: Flurrious lets you design a snowflake, write a message that goes along with it, and then send it to yourself or a friend so you can get its url address to post on a student/teacher blog or website. The site says it will donate $1 to UNICEF for every snowflake sent, but I can’t really tell who’s behind the site to confirm that claim.

Feedback is always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

I’m adding these sites to The Best Online Sources For Images (neither require attribution for their photos though, of course, that would be a nice thing to do):

Unprofound

Burning Well

Over the past few years, I’ve been accumulating links to — and experimenting with — various online photo editors and sites for photo effects. There are certainly a zillion of them out there.

I finally decided it was time to narrow all the links down into some kind of “The Best…” list, and have divided this post into two sections. The first part lists sites where you can upload your own images and, with no registration required (or, perhaps, in one or two instances, an extremely minimal registration process) easily edit the photo or add effects. The second section lists sites that I’ve specifically used with my English Language Learner students. These sites let you easily grab an image off the web, lets you add add a speech bubble to it, and then gives you a more or less permanent url address for your creation that you can post on a student or teacher website/blog.

I’m sure I will have missed some applications out there, so feel free to share your suggestions in the comments section. I suspect there are also additional “categories” photo apps out there besides the two I’m using.

Using my categories and criteria, here are my choices for The Best Sites For Online Photo-Editing & Photo Effects (they tend to be fairly similar — with a few exceptions that are primarily “resizers” — so I’m just going to list the links and not describe each one):

PHOTO-EDITING & EFFECTS FOR UPLOADED IMAGES:

Tuxpi

Change Images

Aviary

Fun Photo Box

Thumba

Big Huge Labs

Dr. Pic

Pic Resize

Rsizr

EasyCropper

Pixenate

FotoFlexer

Be Funky

Picnik (I had meant to include this one I originally, but reader Brenda Hallowes pointed out that I had not. Thanks, Brenda!)

PhotFunia is suggested by reader Ann Carnevale.

Pixlr

SITES FOR ADDING “SPEECH BUBBLES” TO WEB IMAGES:

Bubblr

Caption Bubble

Picbite

Feedback is always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

Free Clip Art by Phillip Martin seems to be a pretty impressive site for clip art that’s free for non-profit use. The art seems a cut above many other clip art sites I’ve seen, and appropriate for many subject areas (that’s how they are categorized).

I’m adding it to The Best Online Sources For Images.

Thanks to Explore the Possibilities for the tip.

Weird-looking critters always generate high-interest from students — English Language Learners and mainstream alike. Reading, writing, and talking about them are excellent language-development activities, and I’ve listed some good accessible sites on this list.

In the second part of this post, I share some sites that — believe it or not — let students also easily create their own weird-looking animals. First designing, then describing (along with talking and listening) them also provide good language-learning opportunities.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Learning About Weird-Looking Creatures And For Making Your Own!):

LEARNING ABOUT THEM:

19 Insanely Weird Animals is a slideshow from LIFE Magazine.

The weirdest animals on Planet Earth comes from the British paper The Telegraph.

MSN has some of the World’s weirdest animals and Weird Animals That You Can Travel to See.

Weird New Animals From Antarctica’s Deep Seas is from National Geographic.

Nick Baker’s Weird Creatures is a show on the Smithsonian Channel, and you can see many clips on their site.

The Web Ecoist has several good resources, including:

The 9 Strangest Animals on Earth

Nine Outstanding Expanding Animals!

15 of the World’s Strangest Animals

20 Scary Animals

The Weird Animal Express is a student-created site.

Strange, odd and beautiful creatures is from a Florida newspaper.

CREATING YOUR OWN:

With Animal Mix-Up you can create a bizarre creature, email the link and post it. English Language Learners can not only use it as an opportunity to describe their creation, but the design process itself provides an excellent opportunity for vocabulary development. There are a lot of choices for creature modifications, and their accompanied with visual and text descriptions.

Build Your WIldself is from the New York Zoos and Aquarium. Instead of explaining it here, I’m just going to suggest you read a post from Kevin Jarrett which explains it in detail.

The Switch Zoo is another similar site. However, you can only print-out creation, not save it online.

Feedback is always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

As regular readers know, I’m always on the look-out for new web applications that allow for easy collections of thumbnail images of images and websites. In fact, one of the most popular “The Best…” lists I’ve developed is The Best Social Bookmarking Applications For English Language Learners & Other Students. In that list, not only do I share a long list of accessible sites, I also give ideas on how to use them to to develop higher-order thinking skills, including categorization.

I’m adding a new one to that list. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s the best, but it’s certainly worth a look. I also have to explore it further.

It’s called TinkrBox. After registration, you’re able to easily just paste the url address of an image and website into a box, and then it’s image appears. You can write a “tag” for the box or boxes, and the url address of your collection can be made public and accessible by others if you want. It’s worth a look.

Editor One is a system used by many educational institutions, who purchase it. However, they make a “demo” version available to anybody for free, and it’s pretty easy to use. It has a fair number of clips you can “mashup” and use to create your own video.

I’m adding it to The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Videos (Using Someone Else’s Content), which I recently updated.

Thanks to the Make Use Of blog for the tip.

Flurrious lets you design a snowflake, write a message that goes along with it, and then send it to yourself or a friend so you can get its url address to post on a student/teacher blog or website.

The site says it will donate $1 to UNICEF for every snowflake sent, but I can’t really tell who’s behind the site to confirm that claim.

I usually don’t post much about web applications that require the use of a webcam just because webcams are problematic for school computers for safety issues, along with needing to dowload its required software.

However, if you can use a webcam, Send Shots has got to be just about the easiest way to send a video message to someone. No registration or download is required — just record and send. There are no ads, and there’s no way to access other people’s video messages. You can post the url address of the video on a teacher or student’s website.

Silvia Tolisano has written a nice article titled Create a simple classroom webpage. It’s focused on using NetVibes.

I’m adding the article to The Best Ways For Students Or Teachers To Create A Website.

Tesco, the large British-based grocery chain, is donating funds to help plant tress for every Christmas eCard you send from their site.

It’s simple to do, no registration is required, the card is musical, and you get to write your own message, too. You’re given the url address of your creation, so it can be posted on a student/teacher website or blog.

I’m adding it to The Best Places To Learn About Christmas, Hanukkah, & Kwanzaa.

Sprixi is a new search engine for images, mostly ones that have a Creative Commons license. It’s design is very attractive and easy to use. The key reason I like it, though, is because when you want to use one of their photos, it automatically shows whatever permissions are required. I know the New York Public Library photo collection does the same thing when you use their photos in a VoiceThread, but I’m not sure of other services that do the same.

In the comments section, please let me know what other web applications you know of that offer a similar service.

I’m adding Sprixi to The Best Online Sources For Images.

Thanks to Diana Dell for the tip.

I guess lots of new “EtherPads” are cropping up.

PB Works, a well-known service to create wikis that is used by many educators, has now begun their own version called NetherPad.

Thanks to Tim for the tip.

(Since I wrote this post, I’ve been told that EtherPad has indeed already gone open source. I hadn’t realized they had done it already)

As readers might remember, Etherpad, the great collaborative tool that is on both The Best Online Tools For Real-Time Collaboration and The Best Online Tools For Collaboration — NOT In Real Time , was bought by Google recently and they were shutting it down.

Then, after the negative response to that plan, they made some modifications to it. They said they were going to made their code available, but I didn’t think they were going to do it so soon.

Now, there’s a new web application called PiratePad that appears on the surface to be the same as EtherPad and, in fact, on its home page says it’s powered by EtherPad.

PiratePad looks good.

Jogstr is like Stumbleupon for sites that have been bookmarked on the popular Digg service. You can identify your preferences, and the sites you see will go through that filter first (Got to “My Jogstr Preferences” in the upper right hand corner).

I’ve added it to The Best Places To Get Blog, Website, Book, Movie & Music Recommendations.

The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…

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:

BE A CHIPMUNK: A new version of the Get Munked application is out. Design a chipmunk, record your voice, and have it converted so you sound like Alvin. Paste the link on a student/teacher blog or website.

MAKE THE STRANGEST LOOKING ANIMAL YOU’VE EVER SEEN: With Animal Mix-Up you can create a bizarre creature, email the link and post it. English Language Learners can not only use it as an opportunity to describe their creation, but the design process itself provides an excellent opportunity for vocabulary development. There are a lot of choices for creature modifications, and their accompanied with visual and text descriptions.

SEND A TALKING CAMEL HOLIDAY CARD: Have a talking camel speak your holiday message using its text-to-speech feature. Camels?

CREATE FLASHCARDS: Memorize.com is not fancy at all, and it’s more complicated than most other online flashcard sites to create anything more than a rudimentary mini-flashcard system. However, it is very easy to make-up a simple series of flashcards and, most importantly, you can do so without having to register (you can post a link to them on your blog/website). Because of that, I’m adding it to The Best Tools To Make Online Flashcards.

COMPOSE & PERFORM WEIRD MUSIC: The only way I can explain Glitchscape is it lets you make boxes and then turns them into music. You then get the url address of your creation for posting on a blog or website. No registration is required.

MAKE A LIST: Thinkmeter is a neat new application that offers exceptional opportunities for educators and students.  I’m going to repeat a somewhat lengthy description I wrote when I originally posted about it:

It’s designed as a survey-like tool, where you can ask a question and have people vote by clicking on the number of stars they want to give it. People can also leave comments when they vote. You can create these surveys, and vote in them, without registering. If you pick an item from Amazon, it will show an image of the item and, at least if you list a book, it will also show a description of it. In addition, if you insert the url address of an image from the Web, it will show it. You can post the link to your survey wherever you please.

Here are just two ways I will try using it:

* Having students pick their favorite books from Amazon and have other students rate them and leave comment.

* Having students use it for the same activities I list in The Best Social Bookmarking Applications For English Language Learners & Other Students, like listing their favorite games from my website and having others vote on them. In many ways, Thinkmeter can function as a super-easy bookmarking tool for students. As I mention on that “The Best…” list, students can also use a tool like this to create “picture data sets” — a collection of images they can grab off the web that fit into a specific category. On Thinkmeter, once you insert the url address of a photo, the entire photo shows-up on the list, and students can leave a description and justification about why they think it belongs into that particular category.

In fact, I think Thinkmeter has so much potential that I’m adding it to that bookmarking “The Best…” list.

Lazyfeed is a neat way to search social media, and have just updated their interface. You type in a query, and… instead of describing it, go to TechCrunch, who has written about it in a much clearer way than I could.

I’m adding Lazyfeed to Not “The Best…,” But “A List” Of Search Engines For Social Media.