"Larry Ferlazzo's Monthly Website Newsletter" - 5 new articles
Larry Ferlazzo's Website Newsletter -- November, 2009I hope you're having a great Fall! There's a lot to share this month.... PARENT ENGAGEMENT BOOK Building Parent Engagement In Schools, my first book (written with Lorie Hammond), was published earlier this month. You can learn how readers of this blog can get a discount by reading this. You can read two “previews” of the book: One is an article I wrote for Public School Insights in April titled Parent Involvement or Parent Engagement? The other is one I wrote for the Library Media Connection. It was published last month and is titled Family Literacy, English Language Learners, and Parent Engagement. You can read the first review of the book at The Tempered Radical by Educational Leadership columnist Bill Ferriter. In September, Joyce Epstein and I were guests at Education Week’s “edchat” on engaging parents. If you’re interested, you can read the chat transcript. I was interviewed on the Parents as Partners webcast a few weeks ago, and you can read about about the conversation at Irritate or agitate – what’s your parent engagement like? You can also listen to the webcast at the EdTechTalk site. I have also begun a blog, Engaging Parents In School, directly in support of this book. SUBSCRIBING TO BLOG You can also subscribe to my blog for free and get updates as they are published instead of wating for a monthly newsletter. You can subscribe here: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/about/how-to-subscribe-to-this-blog/ LATEST "THE BEST..." LISTS
The Best Websites For Learning About Multiple Holidays & Anniversaries
The Best Resources To Learn About World Teachers Day
The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2009
The Best Online Resources For Drivers Education & Car Information
The Best Websites To Learn About The Hmong
The Best Resources For Using Puppets In Class
The Best Sites To Learn About The Nobel Peace Prize
The Best Resources To Learn About The Loma Prieta Earthquake
The Best Online Personality, Career, Political & Just Plain Fun Quizzes
The Best Sites To Learn About Robots
The Best Sites For Learning About Diwali
The Best Sites For Students To Create & Participate In Online Debates
Part Forty Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Planet Quest is a pretty amazing multimedia timeline of space exploration that begins at 500 B.C. In addition, it provides audio support for the text. .I’m tentatively adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About Planets & Space. The reason I’m only doing so “tentatively” is because even though it’s a wonderful site, the vocabulary is a bit advanced — perhaps too advanced for many English Language Learners. Great Picture Book MakerWith Picture Book Maker, you can easily create a…picture book (including text). It can be saved online or printed out. It’s super-easy to use, plus no registration is required. The url of your creation can be posted on a student/teacher blog or website. “Funniest videos about teaching / learning English”If you teach English, and if you have a sense of humor, you must go to David Deubelbeiss’ post Funniest videos about teaching / learning English and watch the videos. You may have seen some of them before, but I suspect that some might be new to you. And even if you’ve seen them all, they’re worth watching again… Linklist Is A WinnerLinklist lets you make lists of links with no registration required. You can decide on your topic, write a short description, and then develop an ordered or non-ordered list. After you’re done, you’re given an embed code and url address for it. What’s really neat about it, though, is that once you paste a url address into your list, the name of the link actually shows up as an active link. For example, as I was creating a list of my favorite books, all I did was search for them on Amazon, paste the url addresses of each book on the list, and the link that showed up was the name and author of the book. This kind of ease makes it very easy for students to use. Linklist would really be great, though, if and when they add the ability to write additional descriptions next to each list item. Then it could be used more effectively for higher-order thinking skills like categorization. You can see The Best Social Bookmarking Applications For English Language Learners & Other Students for how and why I think this ability is so important. Incredible New Site On Cave Of LascauxMany people are familiar with the French government’s useful website on the famous cave of Lascaux and its ancient paintings. Recently, though, they have created a new site that is out of this world! You've got take a virtual 3D tour of the site… You Need To Check-Out “English Central”I’m “mad” at David Deubelbeiss. I’ve been trying to get a little ahead on my posts, and had “finished” my “The Best Internet Sites For English Language Learners — 2009″ when he sent me an email earlier today telling me about a new site called English Central. Now I have to revise my list because English Central is great! David has just posted a very thorough post about the site titled English Central – Bringing “voice” and output to learning English. I’d strongly encourage you to read it — I don’t feel any need to “reinvent the wheel.” A quick description is that it’s a free video site for English Language Learners, lets users listen to parts of the video, then lets them repeat what the characters says and compares it to the original. You get graded on how well you do. It has even more features, but you can read David’s post or check out the site directly. The other great thing about it is that the videos are all appropriate for the classroom, unlike several other ESL video sites that have come online recently. Best Halloween Resources ReminderI just wanted to reminder readers that I’ve been updating The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween since I originally published it last year. You might find it useful. “I Know My Brain Is Growing…” Slideshow Of Student WorkRegular readers are familiar with my recent series of posts about my “growing your brain” lessons. These are ones where students learned why physically happens to their brains when they learn. I just made a very “quick and dirty” slideshow of a few examples of my students’ culminating activity — showing how they perceive the brain when it’s not learning and when it is learning using either literal or figurative language. I’m putting together an article that will probably run in “Teacher Magazine” to summarize the whole series of what we did. You can also read about its progression in these four posts:
“Now I Know My Brain Is Growing When I Read Every Night” “This Is Your Brain On Learning” “What Would You Tell You’re Parents You Learned In Class This Month?”
Filed under
school reform
Edit This
Blinded by Reform is an exceptionally well-balanced and reasonable critique of some of the questionable strategies Education Secretary Duncan and the Obama administration is pushing on schools.
It’s written by Mike Rose, who is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and the author of
“Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us.”
“I Like This Lesson Because It Make Me Have a Longer Temper” (Part One)http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/10/22/i-like-this-lesson-because-it-make-me-have-a-longer-temper-part-one/This is a link to a lengthy post I wrote about a lesson I did in class on developing self-control
Larry Ferlazzo's Website Newsletter -- October, 2009
I hope the new school year is going well for everybody! Before I share the latest resources, I'd like to let people know that my first book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, will be published by Linworth Publishing on September 30th. You can read a preview of it here: http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/LarryFerlazzoParentEngagement It's available at all online booksellers, and you can read here how to get a special discount: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/09/12/how-to-get-a-discount-when-ordering-my-book/ Linworth will also be publishing my second book next year titled "Teaching English Language Learners: Strategies That Work." You can also subscribe to my blog for free and get updates as they are published instead of wating for a monthly newsletter. You can subscribe here: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/about/how-to-subscribe-to-this-blog/ And now, here are the latest "The Best..." lists, followed by other posts that I think are particularly useful:
Part Thirty-Nine Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly
( http://tinyurl.com/ksharl )
The Best Online Learning Games — 2009
The Best Online Carbon Calculators
The Best Sites To Learn About The September 2009 California Wildfires
The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis
The Best Sites Where Students Can Plan Virtual Trips
The Twenty Blogs I Read First…
The Best Resources For Learning About Homework Issues
The Best “Fun” Sites You Can Use For Learning, Too — 2009
The Best Resources For Learning About Mexico’s Independence Day
The Best Sites To Learn About Georgia’s Floods
The Best Online Resources To Teach About Plagiarism
The Best Resources For Learning Research & Citation Skills
The Best Web Resources For Learning About HIV & AIDS
Here are a few other posts I think might be particularly useful: These are three links to a series of posts I wrote about lessons I did in class about what happens to the brain when it learns. They went over exceptionally well, and the posts are getting a fair amount of attention: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/09/24/this-is-your-brain-on-learning/ http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/09/21/now-i-know-my-brain-is-growing-when-i-read-every-night/ Teacher Magazine just published an article I wrote sharing my thirteen favorite websites for English Language Learners and their teachers. It requires free registration to read the entire article, but it only takes thirty seconds to register: ELL 2.0: How to Make the Most of the Web Job Voyager Is Very Cool!Job Voyager is a very cool intergraphic infographic that is certainly going to end up on one my year-end “The Best…” lists. Fast Company describes it as: …a nifty interactive graph that charts a stacked time series of reported occupations in the US from 1850 to 2000, normalized by percentage That sentence, however, doesn’t begin to give it justice. It’s worth checking out both the Fast Company article and the application itself.
“The Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes”The Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes is an excellent post by by Richard M. Felder, North Carolina State University and Rebecca Brent, Education Designs, Inc. It’s geared towards college-teaching, but much that’s discussed in applicable to K-12. “How Much Is A College Degree Worth?”I wrote a post about this chart and information quite awhile ago, but thought it might be useful to share with newer readers. It’s a summary and chart sharing the income differences among people based on their educational attainment. Here’s a quote: “How much is a bachelor’s degree worth? More than $25,000 a year, according to a March 2007 report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Adults aged 18 and older with a bachelor’s degree earned an average of $54,689 in 2005, while high school graduates earned $29,448. A two-year associate’s degree brings an average annual premium of $8,500 over a high school diploma.” I’ve made this chart into a poster which I share with my students each year. Kathy Schrock also recently shared a link to educational materials the U.S. Census has developed. I wasn’t too impressed by them, but one excellent page they do have is an even better version of that chart, plus a short summary of educational attainment by ethnic group. Sharing that information, and then having a discussion about it eliciting from students the reasons for the disparities, would be very useful. Shamans In Hospitals — Wow!The New York Times published an article today titled A Doctor for Disease, a Shaman for the Soul. It’s accompanied by a slideshow. It’s about a new policy by Mercy Medical Center in Merced, CA, recognizing the role of traditional healers. The hospital is inviting Hmong shamans to perform nine approved ceremonies. The policy is the first of its kind in the country. I’m adding links to both the article and slideshow to the Hmong section of my website. Scribble Maps
Scribble Maps is a neat application that lets you create maps — with markers and images that can be grabbed off the Internet — and you can draw on it, too. Plus, no registration is required. I’m adding it to The Best Map-Making Sites On The Web.
Use Storybird To Create A StoryStorybird is a neat new site where users can choose artwork from a specific artist and then add text to create a storybook. Susan Stephenson from the excellent Book Chook blog has written a post about it, and I’d encourage you to go over and read her description. I’m adding the site to The Best Places Where Students Can Write Online.
Great New Website From The BBC For Math, English & ScienceThe BBC has just announced a new website in their exceptional “Bitesize” series. This one is called KS3 Bitesize. It includes activities for Math, English and Science. What makes it truly exceptional — at least for English Language Learners — is that all the neat exercises listed as an “Activity” on the site not only are very engaging and informative, but have subtitles which make them more accessible to English Language Learners. Various parts of this site are going to make it on a number of “The Best…” lists this year.
The United States (& The World) As A 100 PeopleUSA Today has an article about a book and school curriculum that portrays the United States as one hundred people. I especially like the graphic that accompanies the article that illustrates that concept. If you’re interested, here’s a similar chart for the entire world. I’ve posted in the past about the best site for this kind of demonstration. Miniature Earth is a slideshow that uses statistics to reduce the world to 100 inhabitants, and shows how that plays out demographically, who uses what resources, etc. They periodically update the statistics.
“Data-Driven” Versus “Data-Informed”Two very talented educators — Ted Appel, the extraordinary principal we have at our school, and Kelly Young, creator of much of the engaging curriculum we use at our school through his Pebble Creek Labs — brought-up the same point in separate meetings with teachers at my school this week: The importance of not being “data-driven” and, instead, to be “data-informed.” These conversations took place in the context of discussing the results of state standardized tests that came out last week. Here’s the point made by Ted: If schools are data-driven, they might make decisions like keeping students who are “borderline” between algebra and a higher-level of math in algebra so that they do well in the algebra state test. Or, in English, teachers might focus a lot of energy on teaching a “strand” that is heavy on the tests — even though it might not help the student become a life-long reader. In other words, the school can tend to focus on its institutional self-interest instead of what’s best for the students. In schools that are data-informed, test results are just one more piece of information that can be helpful in determining future directions. I’ve been thinking about these conversations. Here is an example of how the perspective of being data-informed plays-out in my own teaching practice. Typically, students in my classes show high-growth in state test results. This growth comes without “teaching to the test” (in fact, that is strongly discouraged at our school) and, instead, by focusing on developing life-long learners (again, which is our school-wide policy). I typically will spend thirty minutes or so teaching test-taking strategies, but that’s about it. This past year, most of my students continued to demonstrate high-growth in the state test results. That is, everywhere except for my ninth-grade mainstream English class. It was a hard class. Regular readers might remember this class by having read my post about it titled Have You Ever Taught A Class That Got “Out Of Control”? The first semester was very difficult. Lots of student transience, family problems, economic issues — the works. Finally, I was able to get things under control at the beginning of the second semester. I thought their subsequent work was good, but in the spirit of being data-informed, I can see that it’s possible that I might have lowered my standards. Perhaps I was just thrilled that everybody was doing their work, seemed engaged, and was getting along that I “settled” for that. I don’t think that was the case, but it’s possible. In addition, the fact that the first semester was so chaotic meant that they received a full semester of less than high-quality instruction. Reviewing the test results sparked this kind of reflection — on my own. I certainly have not received any kind of pressure from our data-informed administrators. As a result of this reflection, which was informed by data, I’ve made two decisions: * I’m going to begin the classroom management program that I shared in my previous post from day one in my ninth-grade class. If it took six weeks to move from extrinsic to intrinsic after a semester of chaos, I suspect it will take far less time at the beginning of the year. * I’m going to make visits to the homes of most, if not all, of my ninth-grade students. I usually make a lot of home visits, but the past two years they’ve been primarily to the home of my ESL students. This year, I’m going to switch the focus. Other than these two actions, I’ll continue to do what I’ve always done in my class — though I also believe I just become a better teacher each year with more experience. Something tells me that a “data-driven” culture would have resulted in pressures to do something considerably differently. What about you — is your school culture data-driven or data-informed? Larry Ferlazzo's Website Newsletter -- September 2009
This monthly email newsletter contains only a few of posts that appear on my blog. You can subscribe for free and receive daily emails here.
(By the way, you might be receiving two identical copies of this email because of a mistake I made. Sorry if that's the case)
I'll first list the most recent "The Best..." lists (you can access all three hundred of them at that link), and then share a few other sites that I think readers might find particularly helpful.
Here are the most recent "The Best..." lists:
The Best News/Current Events Websites For English Language Learners — 2009
( http://tinyurl.com/nz78bw )
Part Thirty-Eight Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly
( http://tinyurl.com/m7rdcz )
And here are some other posts you might find helpful:
I just wanted to remind people that last month I began a new blog called
Engaging Parents In School
. Feel free to visit and subscribe if you’d like.
It will be supporting a new book I’ve written (with Lorie Hammond) titled Building Parent Engagement In Schools that will be published by Linworth Publishing in the fall.
I’m posting over there about once a week or so.
To get a sense of what I mean by “parent engagement,” you might want to read an article I wrote earlier this summer for Public School Insights titled
Parent Involvement or Parent Engagement?
I was pleased to see a number of thoughtful responses criticizing the idea, and disappointed to see what people said in support.
I couldn’t say it any better than Bob Peterson (from one of my favorite magazines, Rethinking Schools) did:
Yes, motivation is a key to learning. I see that every day with my fifth graders, but motivation should flow from the quality of curriculum, the nature of the learning activities, the connectedness of the curriculum to the lives of the students, and the overall school experience.
I suggest that districts that have so much money that they can have programs to pay students for higher test scores, instead spend the money on making sure that all students have a full complement of physical education, visual arts, music, drama, dance, and library instruction as well as classroom teachers who are skilled at creating engaging learning activities.
The League of Scientists offers a number of science-related games whose difficulty level can be adjusted. In addition, you can start your own games and have up-to-eight people compete in “your” race. It’s not as simple as it is in other game sites to create games that only include your classmates, but if you set it up that the people you want to compete against all sign-in at the same time, it seems to me that you should be able to make that happen. Also, unlike in some of the sites, you have to log-in before you play (registration is simple, though).
Even with some of those drawbacks, I’m still adding The League of Scientists to The Best Online Games Students Can Play In Private Virtual “Rooms”.
I was searching for something else on the Web today, and happened to instead find a nice short PDF called “Fifty Stimulating Classroom Starters” for ESL/EFL classes. It was put together by Jack Bailey and Marit ter Mate-Martinsen.
It’s well worth a look.
“What Do You Do To Make Sure Small Groups Work Well In Class?’ is the next topic of my “What Do You Do?” series.
I hope you’ll share your experiences in dealing with this question — just leave a comment on this post, and I’ll include it in my post on the topic. The deadline for sharing your ideas will be September 15th.
You might also want to check-out previous posts in this series:
What Do You Do When You’re Having A Bad Day At School?
What Do You Do To Keep Students (And You!) Focused Near The End Of The Year? What Do You Do On The Last Day Of Class (Part Two)? What Do You Do When You Have A Few Minutes Left In Class? — Part Two Answers To “What Do You Do On The First Day Of School?”
Some (though certainly not all) people who advocate for progressive education issues or for increased use of educational technology in schools complain a lot about how difficult it is to get people to “agree” with their priorities. I‘ve shared a few of my thoughts on this issue reflecting my nineteen year career as a community organizer.
An opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today shares some similar perspectives. It’s titled “How Obama Can Build Influence” but the points can be applied to anybody who wants to make change.
The author refers to a popular business book called Influence: Science and Practice. In it, Robert Cialdini, the author, describes what he thinks are six key factors towards building influence: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. I haven’t read the book, or even heard of it before today (I just ordered it), but it sounds like there is some similarity to community organizing principles. Organizers, though, might say that building relationships and reciprocity are the two most important ways.
Check-out the column. It gives ideas on effective things to do for those who now spend time whining and complaining about how people won’t listen to them even though they’re “right.”
Jason Renshaw has posted an interesting three minute screencast sharing why he thinks it’s best to teach vocabulary words after English Language Learners have read a text. It’s definitely worth a visit (in fact, all his posts are worth reading!).
When I’m teaching Beginning ELL’s, I tend to teach vocabulary prior to reading. With any class above that level, including native English speakers, I use a technique I learned from Kelly Young of Pebble Creek Labs, who has designed the extraordinary curriculum we use in our mainstream classes.
It’s called a Word Splash.
Prior to beginning a unit, I’ll write about twenty words on large sheet of paper that’s in front of the class. I’ll put it there a few days prior to starting that unit so students have been exposed to the words for awhile. Then, I have students copy the words down and write what they think it means — guesses are fine. Students then go into small groups and share their definitions. Next, we have a class discussion.
In that discussion, I don’t tell students if they’re correct or not.
The point is to help students become aware of the key words they’ll need to know to understand important parts of the unit. During subsequent lessons, I’ll ask students to highlight words from the Word Splash that they see in various texts. At some point I might ask them to revisit their definitions, or have each student take a word and draw and define it in a poster.
This process certainly helps students see how much they have learned from the beginning of the a unit to a later time.
Please share your throughts — either here or at Jason’s blog — about how and when you think vocabulary is best taught.
I recently shared a number of resources related to What Kind Of Feedback Should We Give Our Students?
Here’s another piece in the same vein that’s worth a look. It’s a blog post titled Stick-to-it-tiveness, and it’s a commentary on a Boston Globe article called The truth about grit: Modern science builds the case for an old-fashioned virtue – and uncovers new secrets to success.
Jason Renshaw was generous enough to share on his blog about a nifty tool he’s come-up with called The Wizard English Grid.
That link will take you to the direct PDF download. You’ll see it’s a simple sheet laid out in a grid. You might be thinking, “Big deal!”
Don’t stop there, though. Go to Jason’s blog post Wizard English Grids for “Finding Out” to learn how he uses it. After reading it, I immediately printed out the Wizard English Grid for use in my own English Language Learner classroom.
Jason promises to write about more ways he uses the grid, so, if I were you, I’d subscribe to his blog to not miss them! He’s also going to keep all of his “Wizard” ideas in one place on his blog.
Teacher Magazine has just published an article I’ve written about teachers making home visits to parents. It’s part of a series written by members of the Teacher Leaders Network.
You have to register (for free) to read the entire article, but it’s a quick process.
You might also be interested in my new blog, Engaging Parents In School.
I’m doing some research on what is the most effective kind of feedback on what we as teachers can give to our students. I’ve been somewhat familiar with Carol Dweck, who has done great research on how to help students develop a “growth mindset” instead of a “fixed” one. Very simply put, we should praise effort instead of intelligence.
Daniel Sadicario on Twitter suggested an article about her work titled How Not to Talk to Your Kids.
I also found a good online recorded interview with Ms. Dweck that Will Richardson did with her and posted on his blog.
Both are worth checking-out.
The New York Times just published a fascinating infographic titled How Different Groups Spend Their Day.
Here’s how they describe it:
“The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.”
It actually shows what people did every hour of everyday — sleeping, watching TV, eating, etc. And the numbers are divided by ethnicity, age, education-background and more.
I could easily see having my students first do a similar analysis of their days and then comparing it to this infographic.
Scott McLeod has written a good post on the ridiculous idea some schools have about purchasing technology that would allow them to jam cellphone transmissions from students. He invited readers to share their thoughts about student cellphone usage.
I’ve written about this before, but I thought I’d share the comment I left on his post:
“Jeez, talking about overkill!
I’ve posted about why I support our school’s banning the use of cellphones during school hours (not banning bringing them to school, though). Our large inner-city school’s ban on cellphones (and iPods), I believe, has contributed positively to improving our school climate. It has reduced the likelihood of students using them to organize and/or escalate fights, and has helped eliminate yet one more tempting distraction from our students already chaotic lives.
If a student has a cellphone out between classes, a monitor confiscates it until the end of school. If a student has it out during class, a teacher can do the same, but usually only keeps it until the end of class.
However, confiscations really don’t seem to happen that much — students generally respect the rule. We have what I would call a very “relational” discipline system at our school. Explaining, and reminding, students why we have the ban in place generally makes sense to them. And those times include hearing their feedback. Of course, these conversations are done in the context of a strong teacher/student relationships, which are also emphasized heavily at our school.
Umm, building relationships…That might be an idea schools could consider before they buy high-tech devices that students will figure out a way around anyway.”
You might also be interested in visiting the post I wrote about our iPod ban, too.
All feedback is welcome!
Larry Ferlazzo's Website Newsletter -- August 2009
This is the second newsletter in the new format. I'd appreciate any feedback -- positive or negative -- you might have on it. You can send a message to me via this contact form.
This monthly email newsletter contains only a few of posts that appear on my blog. You can subscribe for free and receive daily emails here.
I'll first list the most recent "The Best..." lists (you can access all three hundred of them at that link), and then share a few other sites that I think readers might find particularly helpful.
Here are the most recent "The Best..." lists:
The Best Sites To Help ELL’s Learn Idioms & Slang
The Best Images Of Weird, Cool & Neat-Looking Buildings (& Ways To Design Your Own)
The Best (& Most Thoughtful) Blogs On “Big Picture” Education Issues
The Best Guides To ESL/EFL/ELL Terminology
The Best Sites To Learn About The Apollo 11 Moon Landing
The Best “Language Maps”
Part Thirty-Seven Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly - June, 2009
Here are other sites:
Map Battle is a very easy-to-use tool to create geography games online. It’s like a less-fancy The Traveler IQ Challenge game. I recently received my invitation to join Google Voice, Google’s new phone tool. You can read all about it at Lifehacker’s guide. In terms of teaching, I could see it as an easy way for English Language Learners, particularly those with no Internet access, to practice speaking “homework.” They can call my Google Voice number, leave a message, and I can then access both their audio and an automatically generated written transcript of what they said. I can then easily embed both on a classroom blog.
PinDax is a new web tool that lets you “pin” virtual “Post It” notes on a virtual bulletin board. It’s very, very similar to a tool I like a lot called Wallwisher. I have to admit that I didn’t spend a whole lot of time looking around PinDax, but my quick impressions was that it has a lot more “bells and whistles” than Wallwisher. That additional complexity (and I have to admit, it doesn’t seem that much more complex — it just seems to have a lot more options) doesn’t necessarily make it more attractive for classroom use. I’m going to take this opportunity to reprint my review of Wallwisher. My description of how to use it would be the same for PinDax: Wallwisher appears to me to be one of the most useful Web 2.0 sites I’ve found in awhile. It can be a great place for students to use higher-order thinking by creating categories of images (and descriptions) or short texts they copy and paste (or write themselves). It can also be used as a site for social bookmarking of websites if you just right-click the website you put inside the sticky-note and then click on “open in a new window.” I’ve explained in The Best Social Bookmarking Applications For English Language Learners & Other Students more details on how a site like Wallwisher can be used by English Language Learners for categorization and website bookmarking applications, and I’d encourage you to take a look. The other sites listed there can be used for similar purposes, but Wallwisher appears to be the easiest and most user friendly of the bunch. What Do You Do On The First Day Of School?As regular readers know, I’ve been writing a monthly “What Do You Do” post s focusing on specific classroom issues. Next week, Teacher Magazine will be publishing my article on “What Do You Do When You Have A Few Minutes Left In Class?” and a few days later I’ll be following that up with an extensive “Part Two” on the same topic. You can see many comments left by readers in my original post.
Previous posts in this series have included:
What Do You Do When You’re Having A Bad Day At School? What Do You Do To Keep Students (And You!) Focused Near The End Of The Year? The next question I’ll be tackling is “What Do You Do On The First Day of Class?”I’m eager to hear what readers do. I’ll, of course, highlight your ideas (with credit) in the post. Please leave a comment with how you handle your first day of class each year. The “deadline” for comments will be August 15th.I’ll look forward to learning a lot! “Rooh It!” Looks Good For Webpage AnnotationAs regular readers know, I constantly have my students interact with text in many ways both in the classroom and in the computer lab. In the classroom, Post Its are my favorite tool of choice if students are reading something they can’t actually write on. For use with the computer, I have one of my favorite “The Best…” lists — The Best Applications For Annotating Websites. You can read more how I use these tools at that link I’ve recently added some to that list, so I’m not quite sure which one I’ll have students use next year. And now, there’s one more I like. It’s called Rooh It! . Since the Make Use of blog has written a good post describing it, I’m going to encourage you to read their explanation. I’d like to highlight a couple of great features, though. One, you don’t have to register for it. And, two, all you have to do is put “roohit.com/” before any web URL address and you can start highlighting and leaving notes about it. “Newsy” Is Neat!Newsy is a site that — in short videos — compares how major news events are covered by media throughout the world. I’m adding it to The Best Tools To Help Develop Global Media Literacy list. In some ways, it’s similar to Link TV , which is also on the list. Newsy, though, isn’t quite as interactive, though you can leave comments if you’re registered. For that reason, I’m also adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”. The speaking is pretty fast and relatively high-level, so it’s probably only accessible to advanced English Language Learners. It does provide a transcript to the audio, but it’s not actually closed-captioned. That doesn’t make it particularly useful to ELL’s.
Exceptional New History Site The BBC has just unveiled a exceptional new History site . It’s targeting primary learners, and, to quote their description: “It covers 6 primary history topics - Ancient Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Children in Victorian Britain and Children of WW2 - with a photo and video library and an interactive timeline, plus quizzes, activities and games.” It’s very accessible to English Language Learners, and the games have audio support for the text. The only disappointment is that the videos aren’t available to watch if you’re in the United States.
Ideas For Good Student ActivitiesPilgrims is a UK-based EFL/ESL teacher-training organization that — among other things — publishes one of my favorite online journals, “Humanising Language Teaching.” Their main site, where you can access past (as well as current) issues, is on The Best Resource Sites For ESL/EFL Teachers list. Ozge Karaoglu, whose blog is on The Best ESL/EFL Blogs list, recently attended a Pilgrims training and wrote two great posts sharing lots of ideas she learned about student activities. You probably already know many of them, but there certainly were some new ones to me. Larry Ferlazzo's Website Newsletter -- July, 2009This is the first newsletter in the new format. I'd appreciate any feedback -- positive or negative -- you might have on it. There are other formats and services I can try if this one doesn't work out. You can send a message to me via this contact form. This monthly email newsletter contains only a few of posts that appear on my blog. You can subscribe for free and receive daily emails here. I'll first list the most recent "The Best..." lists (you can access all three hundred of them at that link), and then share a few other sites that I think readers might find particularly helpful. Here are the most recent "The Best..." lists:
A Beginning List Of The Best Resources For Learning About Facebook
The “Best” Blog Carnivals
The Best Teacher Resources For “TED Talks”
The Best Websites For Learning About The Fourth Of July
The Best Sources For Advice On Using Flip Video Cameras
The Best Teacher Resources For “Foldables”
The Best Sites Where Students Can Learn About Inventions
The Best ESL/EFL Blogs
The Best Sites For Learning About The Protests In Iran
The Best Sites For Learning About World Refugee Day
Here are other sites:
Most Popular Education Articles On The Web
ASCD SmartBrief
is on
The Best Ways To Keep-Up With Current Education Issues
. This very widely-circulated daily newsletter is published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), a national organization of educators. It consistently provides thought-provoking articles from around the country. You can see a regularly updated list of
its “most-clicked-on” stories here
.
Teacher Magazine Update and EdWeek Update
are also on the same “The Best…” list. Though they don’t have specific pages highlighting their most popular stories, you can go to the
Teacher Magazine
main page and the
Education Week
main page and see a regularly updated “Most Popular Stories” box near the bottom of each.
As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post
“most popular” lists of websites
that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and find it interesting to see which ones might be particularly “popular.”
The Discovery Channel has come-up with just about the most creative way imaginable to help students remember the names of the planets in our solar system. It’s called the Solar Symphony Game. I really can’t explain it — you have to check it out for yourself. It also has relatively accessible nuggets of information about each planet, too. I’ve placed the link on my website under Planets and Space. Raising Walls is an intriguing feature from The Wall Street Journal highlighting famous….walls in history and around the world. The interactive graphic is supplemented by a slideshow, video, and article focused on walls being built around slums in Rio de Janeiro. “Does Slow and Steady Win the Race?” Does Slow and Steady Win the Race? A Conversation with Top Researcher Russ Whitehurst offers an exceptionally well-balanced perspective on school reform — one that’s well-worth reading. “Interesting Ways” Series On Using Web 2.0 Apps In Schools Tom Barrett has created a bunch of great presentations on “Interesting Ways” to use various Web 2.0 applications with students.Here are some of them: Interesting Ways to use Voicethread, Wordle and the Nintendo DS Interesting Ways* to use your Pocket Video Camera in the Classroom Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the Classroom
Interesting Ways to use Google Earth in the Classroom
I’ve added all of them to The Best places to learn Web 2.0 basics list. I posted about PhotoPeach, an online slideshow creator, earlier this year. In that post, I explained how impressed I was with it, and how easy it was to use. My only reservation was that, at the time, you could only upload images and not grab them off the web. Nevertheless, I had added it to The Best Ways To Create Online Slideshows. They’ve now added the ability to use images off the web by using their url addresses, plus you can also now create quizzes within your slideshow. I’m now very, very impressed by the application. The 200 Most Popular Museum Websites Here’s a list of the two hundred most popular museum websites, including links to them. It’s based on the number of visitors to their online sites. I’ve posted about specific activities on many, but by no means all, of them. It’s a list to keep one busy — that’s for sure. “Welcome To The Web” Is An Exceptional Site Welcome To The Web is really quite an exceptional site that acts as a guide for students to learn how to use the Internet. Audio support is provided for the text and users can save their progress in the tutorial. It’s super-accessible. I’m adding it to The Best Eleven Websites For Students To Learn About Computers, and will also be adding it to some future “The Best..” lists I have planned related to cyber-safety and research strategies. LIFE Magazine has just unveiled newly discovered color photographs of Adolf Hitler. They’re pretty amazing. LIFE actually has divided these color photos into several slideshows: You can learn the story behind them by watching this online CNN video. I’ve added the photos to my United States History Class blog. You can find an entire year’s curriculum there. Hypercities is a neat “mashup” of what various cities have looked like over the past several hundred years. By using a “slider,” you can choose a year, and then various images of that city from that time are shown. It’s pretty ingenious, and certainly the basics are accessible to English Language Learners. Yarp is a new web tool that very,very easily lets you create a simple online invitation or survey. I’m particularly interested in the survey aspect, and I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Creating Online Polls & Surveys. It has a lot of benefits: no registration is required; you can quickly type a question in and choosed various responses (a or b; true or false, yes or no); and those who respond can also write their own comments. This is a stand-out application for English Language Learners who want to use a simple survey for an in-class project or, even better, with sister classes in other places. It provides wonderful and accessible opportunities for reading and writing. |
