TOP 10 TOOLS 2007, 2008 & 2009
Larry Ferlazzo

Larry teaches English Language Learners and native-English speakers at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. He has a website with 7,000 links accessible to ESL students  and a blog for teachers, Websites of the Day for Teaching ELL, ESL, and EFL. He is the Grand Prize Winner of the 2007 International Reading Association President Award for Reading and Technology.

Larry's Top Tools as at 7 March 2009

1. Edublogs is a great  blog-hosting site for teachers and students alike. It's specifically designed for educational use and is incredibly responsive to user needs, suggestions, and problems. They've also begun  Edublogs.TV, It's a “video-hosting site dedicated to education.” You can upload videos, such as educationally useful ones from YouTube, and then Edublogs.TV does magic to it so that schools can access them when the original site might be blocked.

2. Google Reader: RSS seems like magic to me, and I switched to Google Reader because it seems so much more reliable than other RSS readers out there.

3. FeedBlitz makes it incredibly easy for people who don't use an RSS aggregator (which make-up the majority of people using the Internet -- by far) to receive blog updates via email.

4. VoiceThread: You can upload pictures and create an audio narrative to go along with them.  In addition, audio comments can be left by visitors.  VoiceThread also provides a great deal to teachers by allowing them to get their premium services for free, including allowing them to create a zillion VoiceThreads for free.  You can include images off the web just by inserting their url.

5. Vocaroo is a super easy way for students to record a message — of any length — and then place a link or an embed code on a student or teacher website. It’s got to be one of the most simple ways for audio recording out there — no registration is required and you just click “record.”

6. Posterous is another great blogging application.  Users can just email what they want posted on their blog and it is automatically posted with the subject line as the title and the body of the email as its content. You can copy images off the web and paste them in an email, along with a written description, and it all immediately appears on your“Posterous.” You can email attachments and some embeddable applications.  You can also post directly to your blog without emailing. 

7. Mozy gives me peace-of-mind by never having to worry about backing-up anything ever again. It automatically backs-up everything on my computer every few hours.

8. Imagination Cubed - a free web application that has an incredible number of uses. Students can create original designs, do scientific work (my students have drawn models of the solar system), write text, draw pictures for inclusion in online stories. The urls can then be emailed and posted, and remain hosted at Imagination Cubed. Even better, when you visit the design, you see it as it was being created (in fast-motion), so can almost see the student's thinking process.

9. Bookr:  It would be difficult to create an easier application to make slideshows with captions on the web.  The only drawback to it is you can only use images off Flickr, and not others on the Web, but that’s a small price to pay for such an accessible application.

10. The Search Me search engine. It’s an excellent search engine that shows snapshots of the webpages in addition to text information, which makes it very accessible to English Language Learners. In addition, you can create “stacks” of categorized sites, images, and videos; embed them in a blog or website; and/or email them to a friend or teacher.

Larry's Top 10 Tools as at 12 September 2008

1. Edublogs is a great free blog-hosting site for teachers and students alike. It's specifically designed for educational use and is incredibly responsive to user needs, suggestions, and problems. They've also begun  Edublogs.TV, It's a “video-hosting site dedicated to education.” You can upload videos, such as educationally useful ones from YouTube, and then Edublogs.TV does magic to it so that schools can access them when the original site might be blocked.

2. Google Reader: RSS seems like magic to me, and I switched to Google Reader because it seems so much more reliable than other RSS readers out there.

3. FeedBlitz makes it incredibly easy for people who don't use an RSS aggregator (which make-up the majority of people using the Internet -- by far) to receive blog updates via email.

4. VoiceThread: You can upload pictures and create an audio narrative to go along with them.  In addition, audio comments can be left by visitors.  VoiceThread also provides a great deal to teachers by allowing them to get their premium services for free, including allowing them to create a zillion VoiceThreads for free.  You can include images off the web just by inserting its url.

5. Book Goo. It’s a new tool that lets you upload documents or webpages and then annotate and share them. Others can also then annotate the same document. You can draw on the documents as well. I have students use the notes to demonstrate reading strategies on webpages.

6. Flowgram, an amazing screencasting, link-sharing tool. Flowgram lets you show one or multiple pages on the Web, and, when you’re making this screencast, you can move the screen up-and-down to focus on particular areas on the page. You can show videos or images. You can provide an audio commentary, and people can leave comments.

7. Mozy gives me peace-of-mind by never having to worry about backing-up anything ever again. It automatically backs-up everything on my computer every few hours.

8. Imagination Cubed is a free web application that has an incredible number of uses. Students can create original designs, do scientific work (my students have drawn models of the solar system), write text, draw pictures for inclusion in online stories. The urls can then be emailed and posted, and remain hosted at Imagination Cubed. Even better, when you visit the design, you see it as it was being created (in fast-motion), so can almost see the student's thinking process.

9. Bookr:  It would be difficult to create an easier application to make slideshows with captions on the web.  The only drawback to it is you can only use images off Flickr, and not others on the Web, but that’s a small price to pay for such an accessible application.

10. The Search Me search engine. It’s an excellent search engine that shows snapshots of the webpages in addition to text information, which makes it very accessible to English Language Learners. In addition, you can create “stacks” of categorized sites, images, and videos; embed them in a blog or website; and/or email them to a friend or teacher.

Larry's Top 10 Tools as at 2 January 2008

1. Edublogs is a great free blog-hosting site for teachers and students alike. It's specifically designed for educational use and is incredibly responsive to user needs, suggestions, and problems.

2. Google Reader: RSS seems like magic to me, and I recently switched to Google Reader because it seems so much more reliable than other RSS readers out there.

3. FeedBlitz makes it incredibly easy for people who don't use an RSS aggregator (which make-up the majority of people using the Internet -- by far) to receive blog updates via email.

4. VoiceThread: You can upload pictures and create an audio narrative to go along with them.  In addition, audio comments can be left by visitors.  VoiceThread also provides a great deal to teachers by allowing them to get their premium services for free, including allowing them to create a zillion VoiceThreads for free.  Happily, they’ve finally incorporated the feature of allowing you to include images off the web just by inserting its url. 

5. Scribd is one of the best tools for English Language Learners to use for language development. They can write a few sentences, a story, or an essay; easily upload it to Scribd, and, then, within seconds, have its text-to-speech capability read it back to them. Plus, it's hosted there for free.

6. Mozy gives me peace-of-mind by never having to worry about backing-up anything ever again. It automatically backs-up everything on my computer every few hours.

7. Imagination Cubed is a free web application that has an incredible number of uses. Students can create original designs, do scientific work (my students have drawn models of the solar system), write text, draw pictures for inclusion in online stories. The urls can then be emailed and posted, and remain hosted at Imagination Cubed. Even better, when you visit the design, you see it as it was being created (in fast-motion), so can almost see the student's thinking process.

8. Bookr:  It would be difficult to create an easier application to make slideshows with captions on the web.  The only drawback to it is you can only use images off Flickr, and not others on the Web, but that’s a small price to pay for such an accessible application.

9. Dvolver MovieMaker.  Students can easily and quickly make short animated films and write dialogue for their characters.

10. Daft Doggy.  It allows you to create website tours — a series of websites where you also leave your own descriptive text or instructions on each page.  You can use it to create Internet scavenger hunts.   Visitors can also leave comments.  The site’s creator has a different part of his site where you can easily make voice recordings, and plans to connect that ability up to the webtours soon so visitors can leave audio comments.

Larry's Top 10 Tools as at 21 July 2007

1. Edublogs is a great free blog-hosting site for teachers and students alike. It's specifically designed for educational use and is incredibly responsive to user needs, suggestions, and problems.

2. Bloglines is an aggregator of RSS feeds with an easy-to-use interface. I like it a little better than Google Reader, but that may be because I'm just too lazy to change.

3. FeedBlitz makes it incredibly easy for people who don't use an RSS aggregator (which make-up the majority of people using the Internet -- by far) to receive blog updates via email.

4. Imagination Cubed is a free web application that has an incredible number of uses. Students can create original designs, do scientific work (my students have drawn models of the solar system), write text, draw pictures for inclusion in online stories. The urls can then be emailed and posted, and remain hosted at Imagination Cubed. Even better, when you visit the design, you see it as it was being created (in fast-motion), so can almost see the student's thinking process.

5. Scribd is one of the best tools for English Language Learners to use for language development. They can write a few sentences, a story, or an essay; easily upload it to Scribd, and, then, within seconds, have its text-to-speech capability read it back to them. Plus, it's hosted there for free.

6. Mozy gives me peace-of-mind by never having to worry about backing-up anything ever again. It automatically backs-up everything on my computer every few hours.

7. Singshot, like Scribd, is another incredible free tool for English Language Learners. It's a karaoke site that allows students to hear instrumental music for a song; see the words to the song highlighted at the appropriate time to sing it; and then records the student singing. All levels of English Language Learners can use it -- songs range from nursery rhymes to the most recent music.

8. VoiceThread allows you to easily create an online slide-show with narration from one or multiple voices, which is then hosted on the site. Another great educational tool

9. Screencast-0-Matic allows you create a video recording of your screen, with audio; upload it, and then be hosted. It's another good tool for English Language Learners -- for example, they can show a series of pictures and describe them or play an online video game and say what they're doing.

10. Mixercast lets you make an online slideshow. There are obviously many slideshow web applications around. What makes Mixercast different is that it's very easy to import online Creative Commons content from around the web, as opposed to having to upload it from your computer. In addition, it's easy to write text with your graphics. These advantages make it easy for students to use.