Larry Ferlazzo's Monthly Website Newsletter
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
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