Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

The Mini Page is all grown up. After delighting young readers for more than 40 years in newspapers across the country, this beloved insert has found a new home online. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library has published digital archives of The Mini Page‘s more than 2,000 issues dating from 1969 through 2007.

The collection, donated by The Mini Page founder and first editor, Betty Debnam, contains decades’ worth of lessons, activities, puzzles, pictures, and recipes based on a different topic each week. Biff Hollingsworth, a library staffer who works in the Southern Historical Collection, worked closely with Debnam to achieve her vision for how the archive should appear. “She’s considering this as a way to make sure all the issues she’s worked so hard on are given a new life,” Hollingsworth said.

Educators can put the archive to use in a variety of ways, according to Hollingsworth. If a class wanted to look at how African American history was celebrated over the last 40 years, for example, they can compare early Mini Page issues with today’s. In addition, since The Mini Page is written for early readers, the plain language might be helpful for ESL students learning to read a new language.

Visitors can currently search the collection based on date, title, people, places, and topics. Library staff are working hard to make The Mini Page archive more searchable, adding keywords and other metadata. Hollingsworth went on to say that if educators would like to be able to search via additional criteria, they can submit a request through the library contact page.

The Mini Page Archive 1969-2007

BY KEVIN HODGSON

A rule of thumb for learning idioms is that you can’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Just when you think a student has mastered the strange elements of idiomatic language, along comes a phrase that has your student barking up the wrong tree. Is it time to have them think outside the box? The IdiomDictionary is an online source for learning about idioms. With a simple interface, the site gives you not only the definitions, but also some historical background on the phrases and examples in a sentence.

The site claims to have more than 5,000 idiom phrases on hand for search. Certainly for second language learners, the understanding of idioms can be a struggle. But with the IdiomDictionary and a little help from the teacher, students should be able to hit the nail on the head and get a better sense of our language and its all of its quirks.

Idiom Dictionary

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BY AARON FOWLES

If you’ve ever been dropped into a foreign country against your will, and then forced to spend eight hours a day surrounded by a language your you’re not familiar with but expected to know, then you might begin to grasp what it’s like to be a student who is an English language learner in the United States.

Babelwith.me attempts to bridge the language barrier automatically and in real time. One person creates a chatroom, which is assigned a random short URL, then distributes that URL to everyone who wishes to participate in the chat. Each user selects their language, then the messages in the room are translated into that language.

So, you might have John writing in English, Jan writing in Polish, Juan writing in Spanish, and Jean writing in French, yet they are all able to communicate (tolerably). Online translation is still a work in progress, and we are nowhere near the universal translator of science fiction.

With your own students, Babelwith.me can be a very powerful tool. If you teach students from many different language backgrounds, consider that these students often spend entire days with each other, yet are largely unable to communicate. Babelwith.me makes that communication quick and easy for them.

Babelwith.me

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How Technology Talks: Sharing and Learning Language through Technology

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

It’s not till I tried (pretty unsuccessfully) to learn a foreign language that I learned how little I understood about the nuts and bolts of linguistics. In particular, conjugating German verbs still gives me a painful flashback to a dark, distant time. But the fact of the matter is that in order to really understand how a language works, conjugation in all of its “present perfect continuous” glory is just something you have to know. As a native speaker you don’t really even think about it — you simply know that “I have been walking” is the way it’s said, not that it’s the present perfect continuous conjugation of the verb “to walk”.

But for English language learners this can be a daunting task, and something that needs to be mastered if their goal is fluent, conversational English. At Conjugation.com, a free English verb conjugation tool, simply type in a verb and the site will give you every possible conjugation under the sun. Conjugation.com couldn’t be simpler to use and is a great resource for anyone who is an ELL or ESL student working on their verbs.

Conjugation.com

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BY AARON FOWLES

A few years ago I spent some time in Poland teaching English. While there, I created a simple website to help my students learn English. It wasn’t anything special by today’s standards, but back then it was reasonably popular. It was called Englishweb. I know, very creative.

I remember getting an e-mail from Sean Banville telling me about his brand new website, Breaking News English. This was in 2005. Since then, this website has been cranking out fully-featured lesson plans every 1-3 days (with a brief hiatus in 2006). Each plan is based on current events and includes audio support and extra activities.

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BY AARON FOWLES

I imagine that most people reading this are familiar with Last.fm, an online streaming music site. I taught ESL social studies last year with a focus on geography, and while my students were working on a project about Poland, I had the idea to play some music from that country.

Somehow, it worked. Rather than choosing jazz, as highlighted in the screenshot, I just entered the word Polish and let last.fm do the rest. My students were immediately immersed in the aural spectrum of a country of which they had no immediate knowledge. Talk about meaningful.  “What are they saying?”  “They like hip-hop, too?”  “What’s this music about,” my students kept clamoring. Yes, clamoring.

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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