The Washington Post has a slideshow on the Lighting of the National Christmas Tree.

Santa Makes The Rounds is a series of images from The Sacramento Bee.

A Christmas-related online reading comprehension exercise for English Language Learners.

Renee Maufroid has created several new Christmas exercises for ELL’s.

Chat with a Santa Bot.

Christmas Arrives At The Obama White House is a slideshow from TIME Magazine.

Gift of Christmas Escape is an online video game. Here’s the walkthrough.

No new accounts can be created, and the whole service will close-up by March.

It’s too bad…

I’m adding it to The Best Websites For Learning About Natural Disasters.

Thanks to REMC Ramblings for the tip.

They are going to look through the online collections of various museums, but I had also found a site that shared one person’s view of “The Best” pieces of art ever created. I had shown students images from the site and asked them to share what kind of emotional reaction, if any, they provoked.

That turned-out to be a pretty good lesson, so I thought I’d develop a similar list of sites that provide images of famous pieces of art. Not only will this list help my Theory of Knowledge students, it might also be an intriguing way to help English Language Learners develop a great vocabulary related to feelings and emotions if they tried a similar lesson — plus create opportunities for both art vocabulary and art content knowledge.

In order to make it on this list, a site had to show a number of images or links on the same page of their selected artworks, and allow the ability to click on them to get an enlarged view.

Here are my choices for The Best Collections Of “The Best” Pieces Of Art Ever Created:

The Greatest Works of Art

Another site titled The Greatest Works of Art

Best Works of Art in the World

Famous Paintings

The World’s 50 Best Works of Art (and how to see them)

50 Most Famous Works posters (this is from a site that sells posters, but does provides nice images of famous pieces of art)

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

About.com just completed some research and posted “The Top 25 Web Searches of the Decade.”

Here are their top ten (you can go to their site to learn the rest)

1. Facebook
2. Baidu
3. MySpace
4. World Cup
5. Wikipedia
6. Britney Spears
7. Harry Potter
8. Shakira
9. Lord of the Rings
10. Barack Obama

There are no problems with links leading to resources I blog about, only occasionally with ones that link internally to my blog, and only for Facebook readers and email subscribers.

So please be patient for awhile until my presently scheduled posts finish-up. Now that I know what the problem is, any new posts that I write will not have that problem.

I also have a number of links on The Best Sites To Introduce Environmental Issues Into The Classroom, and won’t be duplicating them here. So you might want to check-out that list, too. You might also be interested in The Best Online Carbon Calculators.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites To Learn About Climate Change (not in any order of preference):

Countdown To Copenhagen is a Wall Street Journal interactive timeline displaying major events related to climate change over the past forty years.

Advancing Emissions is another interactive from the Wall Street Journal charting changes in greenhouse gas emissions over the past forty years.

Breathing Earth is an intriguing visual representation of the effect each country has on climate change.  You move the cursor to a nation on a world map, and then see the number of CO2 emissions that country makes each minute.  It also shows total population, and the birth and death rate of each country. With guidance, English Language Learners could certainly use this website to make some comparisons between countries and draw conclusions from the data.

Tides Of Change is a series of closed-captioned NASA videos related to climate change. NASA also has a site entirely devoted to climate change issues, including many interactives.

A Climate Map from the British newspaper The Guardian shows the impact rising temperatures will have on the world. It’s a little “busy-looking” but would be accessible with some teacher interpretation.

Here’s an infographic showing which countries have lived up to the Kyoto agreement on the environment and which have not.

The Guardian has another interactive titled How climate change will affect food resources.

Copenhagen Challenge is an online game on climate change. It provides audio support for the text, but seemed complicated to me. However, I’m continually surprised at how well my English Language Learner students can figure out how to play and win online games.

The Planet is accessible to advanced ELL’s, and provides a good overview of different environmental challenges facing our planet, including climate change.

The New York Times has an interactive graphic called Sea Ice in Retreat. It focuses on what is going on in the Arctic.

BBC Climate Change: Bloom is an animated, and accessible feature that lets the user view and choose many different actions that can be taken individually to reduce global climate change. It won a Webby Award this year.

National Public Radio has a series of reports on the effects of global warming around the world.

The Denver Post has an exceptional series of photos called Melting Ice: Glaciers and Ice Shelves. It very vividly shows the change in size of various glaciers because of global warming.

What Is Global Warming is a simple and accessible interactive graphic explaining…global warming.

Enhanced ‘greenhouse effect’ causes global warming is an interactive from USA Today.

National Geographic has an excellent map of Global Warming Effects around the world. The map, images, and language is very simple, and accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners. It’s part of a larger feature called The Greenhouse Effect.

The Discovery Channel has a Global Warming Interactive.  It’s pretty “jazzy” looking, with lots of point and click features showing the effects of global warming. It’s probably accessible to high Intermediate and advanced English Language Learners.

The Global Warming Facts and Our Future from the National Academy of Sciences is a very engaging and extensive site, and includes audio support for the text. The vocabulary may be pretty challenging for Intermediate English Language Learners, but it’s worth the attempt.

What Causes Global Warming? is simple series of pictures demonstrating various activities that contribute to global warming.  When you put your cursor on each picture, a short explanation appears.

The Washington Post has a Global Emissions Interactive that shows the amount of carbon emissions from each country has changed over the years.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

“My Best Of Series” has all of them divided by categories (Social Studies, Web 2.0, etc.)

Websites Of The Year has them listed chronologically.

You can also find links to both of these compilations on sidebar of my blog.

It’s now gotten even better.

Teachers can now register their classes and monitor their students’ work — for free.

I just learned about this development from…who else? David Deubelbeiss, who promises a thorough post on this new feature.

I’m now also adding English Central to The Best Sites That Students Can Use Independently And Let Teachers Check On Progress.

“I’m sorry.”

Actually, I try to remember to say more than that, and the best description of the formula I try to use comes from an article about how nurses should make apologies to patients (The power of apology: how saying sorry can leave both patients and nurses feeling better). The writer uses the description:

“regret, reason and remedy”

For example, today I was a bit sharp with two students who were paired-up to do some work in my mainstream ninth-grade English class, but, instead, were just sitting there while everyone else in class was focusing on the task at hand — taking turns reading a passage to one another. A few minutes later I came back to them and simply said, “I’m sorry I barked at you earlier. You’re both excellent students, and I was frustrated that you weren’t doing what I had asked you to do. I could have said so in a better way, and I’ll try to show more patience in the future.”

It was, in effect, a use of the “regret, reason, and remedy” formula — though I hadn’t actually read that article until I started doing a little research later today on the Web about saying “I’m sorry.”

I find that saying sincere “I’m sorry’s” in this way can go a long way in strengthening my relationships with students, and using that kind of three part formula can help communicate that sincerity. I don’t feel a need to extract any kind of admission of fault from the student because I’m just taking responsibility for my own behavior.

These “I’m sorry’s,” I think (hope), can also act as models for students on how they might consider acting in multiple situations. I’m not sure how many adults in the world they see apologizing — especially apologizing to young people.

What has been your experience saying “I’m sorry” to students?