English With Jennifer: A Blog for Teachers
[Pearson Longman (914) 287-8000]

         A blog for teachers has met the EDDIES judges' most stringent requirements: The first blog ever entered into any of our awards, English With Jennifer (Jennifer Recio Lebedev) has breadth and depth of educational content, high quality information, and is extremely useful to its target audience, ESL instructors and teachers.
         A straight-forward, easy to use blog, English With Jennifer is loaded with ideas, lesson plans, and tips, broken down into 13 categories which include Classroom Tips, Conversation, Grammar, Methodology, Vocabulary, and more.  Links to her English Language instructional videos on YouTube and elsewhere are exceptionally helpful and can be streamed directly into the classroom.
         English With Jennifer is a unique tool for ESL teachers, and is well-deserving of this year's ESL Website Blog award.         

Educationcity.com
[Education City (800) 995-5410]             

         How often have we heard, "Kids learn best when they're having fun." Educationcity.com is a subscription-based website that provides countless fun-filled learning activities for children from pre-kindergarten through 6th grade, and is adaptable to special needs children and home schooling. Curriculum-mapped modules incorporate standards-based lessons in Language Arts, Math, Matematicas and Science.
         After signing in at the appropriate level, a child is presented with colorful screens populated with large, child-friendly activity buttons, cartoon characters, sounds and animations. For children studying K-2 Language Arts, there are 25 activity buttons which launch interactive lessons (Bongo Beat, Hatching Eggs, Meet an Alien, Snowman, Row Boat, Tea Party, Farm Friends, Fix the Bus, and more) that teach the ABCs to sentence construction. Whole language and phonics are employed to boost reading skills, and results are immediate when the child gives a correct or incorrect response. Perhaps the most important design feature is the friendly adult voice which reads words and  sentences aloud, guiding the child throughout - even lesson activity buttons are identified for the nonreader!
         EducationCity.com offers many excellent tools for teachers, including downloadable standards maps/spreadsheets; topic tools to assist in introducing new concepts on a whiteboard; Success Tracker, which monitors students' progress; a Homework module to set homework activities which are accessible from home; and Tests modules. The program merited awards in this year's EDDIES in the categories Early Learning Multi-Subject Website and Early Elementary Multi-Subject Website.

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