Here’s the latest installment (a short one) 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.

* 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.

Here are my latest picks:

SEND A WILDLIFE E-CARD: The National Wildlife Federation has quite a collection of  E-Cards you can send. Students can send them and get the url address of what they’ve composed. The card appears to be hosted on the Federation’s server indefinitely, so the url can be posted on a student or teacher website or blog.

CREATE A DATA VISUALIZATION:The New York Times Visualization Lab looks like it’s going to be a fascinating place to visit periodically.   It provides data the newspaper gathers (it looks like they are adding new information regularly) and then users can choose from a variety of different options to “visualize” it. You’re then provided a link and an embed code for your creation. Students could then post it on their own website and describe it.   Not only can this be a neat place for English Language Learners to gain a better understanding and analysis of current events through the use of visuals, but it can also offer them higher-order thinking opportunities to try and identify which form of visualization portrays a more accurate perspective.

CREATE AN INFORMATIONAL MAP: Show/World & Show/USA (which are on The Best Map-Making Sites On The Web list ) lets you create visual representations of information using maps. Students can then embed their creations on their blog/website and describe what they’ve done.

As always, feedback is welcome.

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