Organize Those Websites

It’s time for the Wednesday Website suggestion!! For two years, I was the Technology Specialist at a school in Georgia. During that time, I amassed a large collection of websites that I use with my students. If you want to search through some of them, you can check out my IKeepBookmarks site. Or, you can check back here each week for the Wednesday Website suggestion.

Okay guys, I know it’s Thursday, but moving is kicking my butt!!  I think we are almost organized, now just to convince Maroc Telecom (the phone company here in Morocco) that telling me they will be turning the internet on in 48 hours means that my silly American self thinks the internet should be on sometime in that 48 hour window.  (It’s been 72 hours now and no internet – no that I’m counting!  Thank goodness for wifi cafes.)
Anyways, today’s Website suggestion isn’t actually for your students, but your students will benefit from these 3 websites, because all 3 are ways to get all these awesome websites you’ve been collecting into one place and organized enough that students can access them – both at school and at home!  By using one of these sites, you can easily send your students to the computer and expect them to get to the correct site quickly enough to get done what is expected of them BEFORE the end of the center rotation.  (Come on guys, we’ve all had students who have spent their entire computer center getting to the website and zero time actually doing the cool activity you had planned!)  It also makes it easy to supply “additional help” sites to those parents that ask for them, or even assign websites as homework, if you teach in a district where it can be expected that all students have computer access.



1.)  The website organizer I have been using for year and years is: 
www.ikeepbookmarks.com. It’s great because it allows you to put all of your websites into folders with labels of your choosing.  If you go to my I Keep Bookmarks site, you will see that I have mine organized by subject, and this is because when I created it, I was creating it for an entire school.  Also, if you go into any of the folders, you will find additional folders, and sometimes more folders inside the second folder.  This allows you to separate websites by class (if you have more than one), or by project.  You could even have a folder for each of your groups and put the specific sites inside the folder that you would like that group to use for their project or computer center.  Another benefit to Ikeepbookmarks is that you can hide folders, so that students only see what you want them to see when you want them to see it.
Two downfalls I have experienced with Ikeepbookmarks are: it is completely text based, so if you have non-readers, or struggling readers, it can be hard for them to find the correct site AND many of my students have difficulty typing ikeepbookmarks.com/hles correctly – often leaving off the s or misspelling mark.



2.)  Another bookmarking site I was introduced to a few year’s back is Sqworl.  Rather than giving you text links, sqworl creates a thumbnail of the website and displays these thumbnails for students to choose from.  For younger students and non-readers, these visual clues are a great way to build independence at your computer center.  You can also create folders in Sqworl, but I’ve never seen a feature where you can hide folders. 



3.)  This last resource is not one I have used personally – yet.  I keep hearing about LiveBinders and how amazing it is as a way to organize your resources – both websites and pdf’s or documents.  When you organize your links, they become tabs in your binder.  What I like most about this is that you can put information on each tab, which means you can describe each website on the tab – or even better, give center or project directions, with the link right there!  And, if I’m understanding correctly, you can also have a page the kids can download!  I have to get in and play with this one a little more, and when I do, you can be sure I’ll pass that information on to you.  (If you use LiveBinders, I’d love if you’d leave us a comment so we can all share from you!)

Disclaimer Note – All of these sites have additional features available for a fee, but the features I discussed are based on the free versions, because let’s face it – I’m too cheap to pay for something if there’s a way around it!

How do you organize websites for students to use?

TESOL Teaching Tip #30 - I Promise–You Know This!

My class this year consisted of 20 students, of which only 1 spoke English only in his household, and even he began his life in a bilingual environment. The other 18 spoke at least one, if not two other languages in their homes, and go to school in English, although they don’t live in an English speaking country. Due to my unique teaching position, I have had some readers ask for tips on teaching English Language Learners. Here’s this week’s Tuesday TESOL Teaching Tip:

ELL Teaching Tip #30: Tell Them How it Connects

****  Sorry I’ve been so absent lately, my family has been busy getting moved.  Check out pictures of our new place on my personal blog – Journey to Morocco.  ****

When you are teaching English language learners, it is really easy for them to think they “don’t know anything”.  However, every English language learner comes to you with at least SOME background knowledge.  Many come with a lot of background knowledge, they simply may not have the word in English for the concept you are discussing.  Rather than holding this lack of 

vocabulary against them, we need to try to connect what they already know to what they are learning.  

Here are some tips to doing this:
1.  Activate prior knowledge with images and stories.  Before you even start talking about vocabulary words – give your students an image to hold on to – whether it is a physical image (a picture on the projector, or a page from a book) or a mental image (read a story or poem that builds that image in their head) doesn’t matter.  Once students have that image in their head, they begin to give it labels in their home language.  They start to think about the concept.  This way, as you start handing out labels in English, they are able to connect their home language label with the English label and build a stronger understanding.

2.  Encourage students to discuss their connections.  When you are working on vocabulary, encourage students to say aloud the word in both English and the home language.  Not only will this help them make the connection stronger, but it may help other students of the same home language make connections they wouldn’t have made otherwise.

3.  Talk about home.  Make it a point to talk to students about what is going on at home.  This will help you know what your students know, thereby giving the ability to make more connections with what is going on with them and what you are teaching about.  (It’s also a great way to work on spoken English!)

4.  Revisit content you have already covered.  In addition to making connections to what is going on in your students’ lives, or what they learned at home, help students make connections with what they have learned with you.  English language learners often only grasp 40 – 60 % (or less) of what we say.  But, if we can connect what we say today with what we said yesterday, they are more likely to grasp it and remember it.  (It will also help you know if they understood what you taught yesterday.)


Do you enjoy the weekly TESOL Teaching Tips? Would you like to view an hour long presentation on this topic? I recently presented on Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners at the Everything’s Intermediate Expo. Now you can grab the presentation for just $3.95 from Teacher’s Notebook.


Find more TESOL Teaching Tips here, and come back every Tuesday for a new tip!