CRAAP: An acronym to guide web research

The CRAAP Test for assessing appropriacy of web resources popped up on my radar in a Pinterest suggestion of a graphic:

The CRAAP Test

gleaned from the Daytona State College Library:

• https://library.daytonastate.edu/reliable/CRAAP,

which in turn apparently adapted content from a library guidance page at California State University, Chico:

• http://libguides.csuchico.edu/LiteratureReviews?p=2822716.

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The Beaufait Collaboratoire: A Google Site

A Google Site that I'm using to reconstitute bits and pieces of new and previous online endeavours, the Beaufait Collaboratoire, grew new pages and subpages today.

Home page snapshot, 2019.07.12

Most notable was a new Educators' Corner, now a ProDev subpage. Other additions included a couple of Google Forms for surveys of EnglishCentral (EC) users that I have embedded in EC subpages. I'd linked to the forms previously from the Tech. Tools page to replace old wiki resources.

Please feel free to browse the Collaboratoire, and let me know in comments on this post if you have any questions or discover any incipient web rot (faulty links).

As I continue to build and update that site, I'm seeking a communication interface to include there. Something like the threaded comment functionality of Blogger blogs might be ideal. In the meantime, I welcome your suggestions in comments here.

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The Common Sense Media website: Goodies for parents and educators

Last Saturday, at a monthly gathering (2019.01.12), I mentioned a blog post I'd read recently:

• 5 Ways to Block Porn on Your Kid's Devices
• Topics: Cellphone Parenting, Healthy Media Habits, Internet Basics, Screen Time, Sex in the Media

In that post, one of the main points that Caroline Knorr (2019), Common Sense Media's parenting editor, made was that technological interventions work best in conjunction with ongoing conversations with young learners.

That post is just one of the Must Read items displayed in the For Parents section of the Common Sense Media website, which you can personalize to suit your family or the ages of students you teach.

There also is a For Educators section of the website that is worth exploring for additional age-appropriate recommendations and resources as well.

References

• Common Sense Media. (2019, January 14). Common Sense MediaⓇ. Retrieved from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/
• Knorr, Caroline. (2019, January 7). 5 Ways to Block Porn on Your Kid's Devices [weblog post]. Retrieved from: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/5-ways-to-block-porn-on-your-kids-devices

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New presentation resources on the LTD Project Wiki

Here are two of three of today's additions to LTD Project Wiki, SpeakingPresenting page:

Prezi. (2017.07.05). Harvard researchers: Prezi is more engaging, persuasive, and effective than PowerPoint [weblog post]. Retrieved January 17, 2018, from https://blog.prezi.com/university-study/

• This weblog post summarised Harvard researchers ... findings (Moulton, Türkay, & Kosslyn, 2017; above).

Prezi. (2018 [n.d.]). The science of effective presentations [webpage]. Retrieved January 17, 2018, from https://prezi.com/the-science/

• This infographic-style web page represented Prezi-related findings summarised in Harvard researchers ... (Prezi, 2017.07.05; above).

The third addition was the research paper by Moulton, Türkay, & Kosslyn (2017).

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The PIGATE Diigo Group: A social bookmarking venue

The screenshot below shows three websites I've earmarked recently for PIGATE by tagging them and sharing them in Diigo, a social bookmarking service. The list on the ... [right] side shows the top ten tags in use since May 2015.

For example, a few days before Mr. Kobori's presentation on September 9th, 2017, I discovered a homepage offering a free, open source typeface designed to help "make reading easier for [people with] some symptoms of dyslexia" (https://opendyslexic.org/faq/, ¶1).

The PIGATE Diigo Group, 2017.09.18
Source: https://goo.gl/XfudJW

Though the PIGATE Diigo Group currently is private, anyone can find and use bookmarked website links in an RSS feed on the PIGATE Blog sidebar (Diigo Bookmarks: Group PIGATE's best content).

PIGATE members are more than welcome to join. I'd love to see what websites other little piggies recommend for each other.

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La grotte de Lascaux (Lascaux cave): Daizaifu exhibition

A special exhibition on the Lascaux Cave will be at the Kyushu National Museum in Daizaifu (Fukuoka, JP) until Sunday, September 3, 2017. If you have time to spare, this is an exhibit not to miss!

Lascaux: Cave Paintings of the Ice Age

(2017.08.22 ticket stub)

For an in-depth, audio-visual and text presentation of the cave, its history, and its preservation, please visit the French Ministère de la Culture website:

• http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/ (Flash enabled)

The site directory and language options (flag icons) appear if you mouse-over the left margin.

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Flashback: Introducing Hap Palmer to Japan (Yoneoka, 2015.01.09)

This post is a follow on to Prof. Judy Yoneoka's guest speaker presentation last January (2016.01.09). The converted slideshow below includes active links to numerous musical resources that she used to demonstrate classroom activities.

As a newsletter write-up explained:

[She] is a professor in the Department of English and American studies at Kumamoto Gakuen University. Her major research theme is world Englishes.

(PIGATE Newsletter, 268, p. 4)

Introducing Hap Palmer to Japan (Yoneoka, 2015.01.09 [converted])

A few additional musical resources are listed in a previous post, along with a call for more resource suggestions: Music for children: Online resources (2016.01.22).

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Did Ford.ca get your farther–further grammar goat?

Should Ford have used the word farther instead of further for promotional displays at the Women's World Curling Championships? They definitely needn't have capitalized the F-word in their tagline, and missed out sentence final punctuation as well.

Word-choice arguments, as you might imagine, can go full circle. For starters, an Oxford Dictionaries' grammar and usage resource made no distinctions, when talking about distance; it argued, "[B]oth are equally correct."

But isn't that like arguing two stones are equally close to the center of the house? If you watched the end of semi-final play between Japan and Russia yesterday (relative time), you may recall that the Japanese team quickly conceded a second point for closeness in the house on the 10th end, and won outright with two points of their own in the 11th.

Thus, perhaps, the Oxford Dictionaries' site conceded, "... [except] in various abstract and metaphorical contexts" (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/farther-or-further).

Cambridge Dictionaries Online's argument included similar nuances: "There is no difference in meaning between them," when talking about distance. However, "[t]here are some occasions when we can use further[,] but not farther. / We use further before a noun to mean 'extra', 'additional' or 'a higher level'"
(http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/farther-farthest-or-further-furthest).

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary Online called farther a "var[iant] of further …" (2005, inaccessible after first viewing), but wouldn't reveal the definition of further without a purchase or subscription. The definition of one word isn't much of a sample to preview, eh?

Grammar Girl surmised, "The quick and dirty tip is to use 'farther' for physical distance and 'further' for metaphorical, or figurative, distance. It's easy to remember because 'farther' has the word 'far' in it, and 'far' obviously relates to physical distance" (http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/further-versus-farther).

Grammar Monster concluded, "If you're unsure which to use[,] because it's difficult to make a distinction between physical and figurative distance, opt for further" (http://grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/further_farther.htm).

You don't think Ford marketeers were unsure, do you? 

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Music for children: Online resources

Image source: Pixabay
Creative Commons CC0

At present, this post is a work in progress inspired by Prof. Yoneoka's presentation of Hap Palmer's music for children at the PIGATE gathering 9 January 2016. 

The songs Prof. Yoneoka played and the activities she led to accompany them reminded me of another musician I'd met years ago in British Columbia, Canada, named Matt Maxwell.

Sort of like Santa, I'm making a list and checking it twice. It would be a pleasure to hear of other resources like these:

Maxwell, Matt

How C'est l'Halloween songwriter Matt Maxwell wrote the ...

'C'est l'Halloween': the story behind the greatest French ...

Palmer, Hap

Educational Children's Song (YouTube channel)

iTunes Preview

WatchKnowLearn.org

English as Second Language

Subcategories

...

Wee Sing: Learning through Music (YouTube channel)

If you know of any similar resources, please spell them out in comments on this post, and I'll be happy to look them up and add them to this growing list.

The PIGATE Blog and kindred sites–rites of passage

It has been a remarkable and stimulating yet tumultuous year.

The JALT NanKyu Chapter's Blogger blog passed away on Dec. 5th at the early age of one year, two months, and 14 published posts. So I've removed its RSS feed from The PIGATE Blog sidebar and replaced it with a new RSS feed from JALT NanKyu's recently established website. 

That removal followed on the heels of a similar removal of the disused NanKyu Chapter's Google calendar from The PIGATE Blog Calendar of Events page display and its replacement with a generic Japanese holiday calendar feed.

Previously invisible in The PIGATE Blog sidebar, but now growing slowly, is a list of cross-links to Other PIGATE Favo(u)rites. There now are two links there to sites from which feeds don't seem to be available (8-(:

1. PIGATE on Facebook (a closed group), and
2. JALT NanKyu Chapter on Facebook (no longer a closed group).

If you have any other favo(u)rite sites that you'd like to share publicly on The PIGATE Blog, either as RSS feeds or cross-links, please shout them out in comments [on this post]–OR, better yet, volunteer to lend a hand in fostering The PIGATE Blog, which was a year and 33 published posts old on Sunday, Dec. 13!

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Thank you messages from Rob Peacock and Keiko Willhite

Dear Pigate members,

Thank you so much for inviting us to join your meeting last Saturday. It was a pleasure to meet with so many enthusiastic, dedicated teachers and trainee teachers from a variety of backgrounds. I hope that the teaching ideas and materials which we presented on the day were useful and that everybody found some interesting concepts to bring into their classrooms.

Teacher group meetings are always a great chance to share ideas and experiences with other educators, and I certainly enjoyed being able to do so during the discussion sections of the workshop and during the break.

Thank you once again for such a warm welcome. I hope to have a chance to meet with you all again sometime soon.

All the best,
Rob Peacock

=====================


Dear PIGATE members,

Thank you very much for attending Rob’s presentation and taking a look at OUP books.

I had such a great time talking to everyone and hope that I will get a chance to meet you all again soon!

There are many links I would like to share with you that I hope will be helpful. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or requests.

Oxford Teachers' Club: By becoming a member you will get to download various handbooks and worksheets for free.

• https://elt.oup.com/teachersclub/

「英語の授業を英語で行う」ための教室英語と授業例

• https://oupjapan.co.jp/ckt

Graded Readers: You can find worksheets and handbooks on graded reading here:

• https://elt.oup.com/teachersclub/subjects/gradedreading/

For further information on graded reading, also check out the Extensive Reading Foundation:

• www.erfoundation.org

With warmest regards,
Keiko Willhite
Contact me at: keiko.willhite@oup.com

=====================

Grammar Monster

Looking for a site to point out to a student who had waited almost a year to inform me that (s)he didn't know what "title case" meant, I found Grammar Monster with a quick web search. Interestingly enough, the lesson page topped the glossary page for title case in the search and in ease of understanding.

The main entry began with a Quick Answer, and then a brief explanation that used a few words like articles and prepositions. Learners at first might want but not need explanations, because the both the lesson and glossary pages for title case gave examples of those parts of speech. 

The explanation on the lesson page could be simpler than it is, so I sent these suggestions to the site owner: "When writing a name or a title, it is . . . common . . . to . . . use capital letters [only] to start the . . . [main] words." (2015.02.15). Following the brief explanation, there were plenty of annotated examples of titles in title case–plus more notes in a sidebar to the right.

The site itself features five pages in a navigation bar on the home page:

1. Common Grammar Errors, 
2. Easily Confused Words, 
3. Free Grammar Tests,
4. Grammatical Terms, 
5. Punctuation Lessons.

Grammar Monster also has a search page with cross-links to the most popular pages on site. So the site may be quite useful. That is, if you know what to look for, and if you are able to ignore the ads here and there, and the video clips playing over and over in the side bar.

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