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Teachers can write lesson plans in a more efficient manner. The Lesson plans are then stored in one safe area where they can be accessed later.

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Are you a teacher looking to sign into Planboard or Chalk Gold?

Streamline Classrooms with A Set of Digital Lesson Plans

Create lessons with a modern and intuitive editor. Add files, photos, and videos to bring your lessons to life. Build lesson templates to cut prep time and get right to instruction.

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Share lesson plans using the Schoology Learning and Google Classroom integrations.Attach your lesson plan to an announcement, assignment, question, or as material for your class.

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Chalk Gold and Planboard will provide you powerful features that enhance lesson planning and grading workflow.

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When working as teams students can create a board where all of their ideas go. From there students then vote of which ideas they want to keep.

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Students can create a digital mind map for their writing, or project they are working on. This can also be done in a collaborative setting

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This site keeps Educators up to date on the latest research for teaching ELL students. It also includes practices on how to help these students.

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Provides tools and supports for educators who are trying to supplement curriculum, or create social engagement. This site also focuses on social justice and creating an anti-bias classroom.

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This site provides an overview of what ESOL education looks in our country. It also provides educators with practices, tools, research, content, and any other information an educator may be looking for when teaching ELL students.

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Within this site an educator can become a member of this association. This site also provides the latest new on what is happening politically in ESOL education.

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Larry Ferlazzo is a blogger who creates posts about the latest information in ESOL education. Ferlazzo also includes articles and resources that educators may find helpful.

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On this website students can create videos or images that express what they are trying to communicate. This website not only helps students their communication skills, but it also fosters real life learning.

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On this website students can create their own mind maps of words they are learning. Through mind mapping students are able to see how words are connected, and may have similar meanings.

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In this website students can create flashcards of words or phrases they are trying to learn. Students are able to create multiple sets of flashcards. This helps students organize vocabulary words for different subject areas.

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Flashcard Stash :: Flashcard games and study tool optimized for vocabulary

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Flashcard matching games and vocabulary studying.

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PBS Kids is a great website for educational games for students. Oh Noah! is a fun game where students can practice using grammar.

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Join Noah for adventures in Spanish! Check out OH NOAH!, the PBS KIDS! web series and games at https://pbskids.org/noah.

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On this website students can look up different newspapers from across the world. Students can read these newspapers in the county's native language.

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Newspaper Map | find and translate all newspapers in the world

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Students can create their own story boards through this website. Students are able to choose the pictures and then add in the text after.

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This is another website where students can create their own comic strips. However, on this website students can take those comic strips and turn them into a book.

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On this website students can create comics with or without words. Students can also use this website in the classroom or at home for fun.

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Pixton is an online comic making tool used by millions that empowers anyone to create unique, expressive comics without having to draw.

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On this website students type in a word and then can find rhyme for that word. Students can also use this tool to find words that sound similar, have a similar meaning, or even words that are related to one another.

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Duolingo is a way where students or educators can learn another language of their choosing. Individuals learn the new language through reading, writing and speaking.

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Through Duolingo students are able to try and learn a new language at their own pace. Students can choose the language they want to learn, and the teacher is able to track each students progress individually.

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This blog provides different maps of where certain languages are spoken throughout the world. Some maps include statistics in them, and others only include the language

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This is going to be a very short "The Best..." list of online maps that show the geographical locations of what language is spoken where.

These accessible maps can be used as an engaging way to also promote learning about geography. I'm sure there are other ways to utilize them in the classroom. Please your ideas in the comments section of this post.

There are really only two "language maps" that I'm including in this list (I've since added several more to bottom of this post). I'm also adding two other supportive resources.

The Modern Language Association Language Map: A Map of Languages in the United States is an incredible site. That link will lead you to the map itself, while this link will take you to an explanation of everything that can be done with it.

The Cyberjournalist site wrote a good and short description of the the MLA site, and I'm just going to quote it here:
"Want to know how many people speak Yiddish or Creole in your neighborhood? The Modern Language Association's new Language Map displays the locations and numbers of speakers of the 30 languages most commonly spoken in the United States. You can search by language and state and the tool produces a map of how many people speak that language by county or zip code."
The second site on this short list is an excellent world map of languages created by the language-learning site Bab.la.

As I mentioned, I'm also including two other language map "related" resources here.

One is a Voice of America report (that includes audio support for the text) on the MLA language map of the United States.

The other is a simple chart representation showing the actual number of people who speak specific languages worldwide.

Here are some new additions:

The UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger very quickly and easily shows you the numerous language in danger of disappearing, along with details about each one.

This world map shows which countries have English as their official language.

The Lexicalist is a "demographic dictionary." It shows you who is using which words, including slang. It's pretty intriguing. Thanks to Katherine Schulten for the tip.

The Linguistic Diversity Index is an interactive map showing the diversity of languages in each country.

The Language Olympics is a neat infographic showing the languages spoken on each of the continents. Once you go to the link, you have to scroll down to get to it. You'll pass another infographic related to world languages that I personally find rather incomprehensible, but it might just be me.

"Language Families:Their Popularity, Spread and Longevity" is the title of an interesting infographic.

Planet English is an infographic from Voxy.

Here's a map of North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns

Disappearing Languages is an interactive map from National Geographic showing endangered languages around the world.

Here's a map that shows the Number of Endangered Languages by Country.

The World Atlas of Language Structures looks pretty intriguing.

Languages of Europe is an interesting color-coded map.

The Speech Accent Archive is pretty amazing - just check it out.

The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English In North America looks intriguing.

World Languages Mapped by Twitter comes from The Atlantic.

The world of Wikipedia's languages mapped comes from The Guardian.

Our Mother Tongues is a very impressive site that's designed to support and preserve Native American languages. It's very engaging, and includes a "language map," videos and more. One of its very neat features is that it allows you choose a virtual audio postcard with a Native American greeting that you can send to someone. You can also write a personalized message on it. You're given a unique url address, and it can be posted on a student/teacher website or blog.

22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other is a fun and informative sampling from an extensive new series of visualizations that have just been published (here's another sampling from The Wall Street Journal). And if that sample isn't enough for you, then you can find all the rest of them here.

From The U.S. Census:
The U.S. Census Bureau released an interactive, online map pinpointing the wide array of languages spoken in homes across the nation, along with a detailed report on rates of English proficiency and the growing number of speakers of other languages. The 2011 Language Mapper shows where people speaking specific languages other than English live, with dots representing how many people speak each of 15 different languages. For each language, the mapper shows the concentration of those who report that they speak English less than "very well," a measure of English proficiency. The tool uses data collected through the American Community Survey from 2007 to 2011.
Mapping where English is not the language at home is a somewhat similar map from The Washington Post.

Feel free to additional suggestions.

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.

How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk is a cool interactive from The New York Times. Here's the subtitle:
What does the way you speak say about where you're from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.
Soda vs. Pop vs. Coke: Mapping How Americans Talk is from The Atlantic.

There is not a red America and a blue America. There is a "y'all" America and a "you guys" America. is from The Washington Post.

Dan Pink shared this cool translator map on Twitter. It uses Google Translate to translate English into any major European language and then shows the word on the geographical location where the language is primarily spoken.

You can read more about it at Business Insider.

What We Mean When We Say Hello: The curious geography of American greetings is from The Atlantic.

Slate has created some maps showing the first and second most common languages of immigrants in each state. I'm adding it to The Best "Language Maps."

Slate has also created maps showing the first and second most common language other than English spoken in each of the states.
Please include attribution FreePeopleSearch.org with graphic.
, an infographic from FreePeopleSearch.org

Researchers Discover "Superdialects" Through Twitter Study is from Read Write.

The "You Say Potato" accent language map has people all over the world saying the word..."potato."

You can easily add your own voice to it.

23 maps and charts on language is from Vox

Type any word into Word Map and it will tell you how that word is spoken in many other languages and show you where those languages are spoken.

The audio worked fine for me in Google Chrome, but not in Firefox.

The amazing diversity of languages around the world, in one map is from Vox.

25 maps that explain the English language is from Vox.
Check Out 6400 Languages With This Interactive Map
23 maps and charts on language is from Vox.

The Washington Post has just published a very interest series of infographics titled The world's languages, in 7 maps and charts.

Yale has created the Grammatical Diversity Project to document varieties of grammar usage across the United States. You can explore it with an interactive map on its site.

You can also learn more about it at this Slate article: Documenting the Diversity of American English.

Bansi Kara shared a Guardian story headlined Metaphor map charts the images that structure our thinking. It's about a wild-looking Glasgow University project that has mapped "metaphoric connections" over the past 1,300 years (yes, that's one thousand three hundred years). I haven't quite figured out how to use it, and nor have I figured out its practical purpose, but I suspect the former might have something to do with the latter.

Did The Language You Speak Evolve Because Of The Heat? is an interesting map from NPR.

Writing Systems and Scripts of the World shows a map of the world and displays the writing systems practiced in those areas.

22 fascinating maps that show how Americans speak English differently across the US is from Business Insider.

The Quartz website has developed The great American word mapper.

Type in words and, based on their usage on Twitter, you'll be shown a map highlighting where that particular word is used most and least in The United States.

How Well is English Spoken Worldwide? is from Voice Of America.

Local Lingual is a cool interactive language map. Click on any location in the world, and it plays recordings of the local language, along with the national anthem and other info. You can read more about it at G oogle Maps Mania.

Say These 9 Words, and We'll Tell You Where You Grew Up is from Readers Digest.

Categories: best of the year, social studies, teacher resources | Permalink

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This is going to be a very short "The Best..." list of online maps that show the geographical locations of what language is spoken where. These accessible maps can be used as an engaging way to also promote learning about geography. I'm sure there are other ways to utilize them in the classroom.

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This source provides more detailed information about what language is and how it is tracked. This site also focuses on showing students how certain languages are going endangered, and what that means.

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Students can be assigned different formative assessments through already pre-made assessments, or assessments that were made by the instructor. Students growth can then be charted, and patterns can be seen overtime.

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Students can practice the material they have learned through an interactive quiz. This quiz is set up more as a game where students compete with one another on who can get the right answer in the shortest amount of time.

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Students or teachers can set up learning sets of either vocabulary words or phrases. Students can practice these learning sets through games, flash cards, or creating tests.

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I believe technology is a great tool for the classroom if done correctly. Technology can provide us with information that textbooks can't, and can keep us informed on the latest changes in our world. It is also a great way to get students engaged in learning information they may have not initially been interested in. For emerging bilingual students technology can help bridge the language gap, and create an environment in which they feel apart of. I also believe that technology should not be used only individually. Instead it should be used in a collaborative way, where students are still engaging with one another.