“At 8:30 PM on Saturday 26th March 2011, lights will switch off around the globe for Earth Hour and people will commit to actions that go beyond the hour” say the organizers of the annual Earth Hour event.
Here’s this year’s promotional video:
Here’s a description of the event from the excellent Breaking News English site:
Millions of buildings around the globe will be dark for an hour….as Earth Hour takes place. The event is organized by the World Wildlife Fund. It started in 2007 as a way of drawing attention to the dangers of climate change. The Earth Hour website says: “For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming.” Organizers hope their message will reach a billion people. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Earth Hour promises to be “the largest demonstration of public concern about climate change ever attempted”.
Here are my picks for The Best Sites To Learn About “Earth Hour” (and are accessible to English Language Learners):
First, of course, is the Breaking News English lesson I mentioned earlier in this post. It’s titled World Prepares To Save Energy Tor An Hour. It’s designed for English Language Learners, and audio support is provided for the text.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve been able to raise some funds to purchase some digital cameras and camcorders for my classes, and have been trying to figure out which ones would work best. In addition to talking with people individually, I’ve been exploring different sites to determine which ones might be particularly helpful.
Based on my search, here my picks for The Best Sites For Learning About Which Consumer Electronics To Buy:
Number four is Amazon. The reviews are great, but I don’t think it’s particularly helpful in narrowing down a search. However, and maybe it’s just because of habit, I still feel most comfortable buying through them. So I’d use the other tools on this list to determine which devices I’d want to get, and then purchase it through Amazon.
Number three is alaTest. It’s similar to Test Freaks in that it gives each product a “score” (they call it an “ala Score”). The reviews themselves are very accessible.
Number two is Wize. I like its interface, which asks you what you are looking for and for what purpose, and gives you choices to pick as answers.
Number one (with an asterisk) is Best In Class. It has an asterisk because right now it only rates digital cameras, but plans to expand to other products. It has a neat interface that asks you questions to help refine your search. It’s like an expanded version of last year’s Pogue-O-Matic Product Finder from The New York Times.
Fixya is the newest addition to this list. Instead of reinventing the wheel by explaining the site, I’d just recommend you read a TechCrunch post about it.
Measy “helps you find the perfect gadget.” It’s the newest addition here. It looks pretty neat. You can read more about the site at this TechCrunch post.
iScoper is a site that asks you a series of questions before they make some recommendations and is worth a look.
As always, feedback and additional suggestions are welcome.
The Washington Post has a very engaging interactive (that’s also accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners) called Sudan In Crisis: The Darfur Tragedy.
Yes, the name of that section is a bit inappropriate. However, for part of the World History class I teach I use a supplemental textbook (that’s very accessible to English Language Learners) that’s about ten years old, and the sections on my World History page use the titles of the chapters in the book. It’s old, but it’s good.
The United Nations has established a list of Days and Weeks that “help focus the world on the issues in which the UN has an interest and commitment.” World Water Day this week is just one example.
These days provide opportunities for teachers to highlight the importance of local and international issues and action, and the U.N. offers a lot of excellent learning resources that can be used in the classroom and online.
Anyvite is a super-simple way to create and send invitations to an event.
Since no registration is required, and you can easily grab images off the web to include in your invite, it’s a good exercise for Beginning English Language Learners. They can create an invitation to an imaginary event and post it on their site or a teacher’s page.
You can create, and use, flashcards very quickly and easily, and grab images and videos off the Web to insert them in the virtual cards.
It’s a German site that has just added the ability to have its site in English, and it appears they haven’t worked out all the kinks yet in that transition. So, one negative is that after you register on the English page (registration, by the way, is quite easy), you are brought to a page in German. Then, you have to go to the bottom of the page and figure out what the word in German is for Language, and then switch it to English. (The bug has been fixed — that was quick!)
I suspect they’ll fix this problem pretty quickly, though.
Post It Draw It is an online pictionary-like game. You’re given the word describing something to draw, and then others gain points by guessing it.
It has a lot of neat features. First, it actually provides a “value-added benefit” by playing online as opposed to playing it face-to-face by giving points to the first, second, and third person to guess correctly — something that would be difficult to do with an in-person game.
Secondly, it’s a multi-player game. You can create a virtual room with up to ten players. Unlike some of the other games on The Best Online Games Students Can Play In Private Virtual “Rooms” list, though, you can’t create immediately private games. However, students can easily create some rooms and have ten of them sign-up for each — that precludes other unknown players from participating.
Umibozu is a new search engine that is still working out “kinks,” but might very well have potential as a good search engine for English Language Learners.
You can choose to see the results in various formats. I particularly liked the one that showed thumbnail sketches and text descriptions of the results from three search engines (Google, Yahoo, & Live Search) in a matrix. Not only does the visual image help, but the ability to see which sites that are highly-rated by each engine could be a further help to determine which ones are best.
In addition, once you register (which is very easy to do), Umibozu allows you to bookmark your sites with a simple click. However, you can’t tag them or put them in groups yet, though I have emailed that suggestion (they responded and said it’s on their “to do” list). They are, however, automatically tagged by the key words you use to search for them.
Finally, users can also vote for sites they like, and you can choose to see those results, too.
Today he shared two simple reflective questions he’d suggest that teachers ask themselves to evaluate their work:
If I were a student, would I want me as a teacher?
If yes, list the reasons.
If no, list the reasons.
Short, sweet, and effective…assuming that the teacher has at least a limited sense of self-awareness. One would hope that most teachers would pass that threshold…
It’s described as “a great way to understand retrograde motion.” I don’t have a clue what that is, and I’m not sure how accessible it is to English Language Learners (though I think, perhaps, that someone more versed in science might be able to use it with ELL’s).
I have to say that I completely agree with her conclusions (this excerpt is only a small part of what she writes):
You don’t always get what you pay for. Much of what you get for a fee from NetTrekker for elementary students, can be obtained elsewhere simply by adding the term “children” to your search. There are other bells and whistles on NetTrekker, but some of them (the text to speech) do not work well with low memory computers, such as the ones in my lab. I think the visual previews (from free services like MelZoo) are more useful.
Especially in light of the budget crisis, it seems to me that districts might want to consider spending their money elsewhere.
I’d be interested in hearing if people agree or think differently.
Seventeen years ago, the United Nations designated March 22nd as World Water Day. It’s designed to bring attention to the fact that over one billion people in the world are without access to adequate water, and focuses attention on the growing issue of “water privatization” — forcing many people to pay private companies exorbitant prices to obtain the necessary water to survive.
In addition to events that took place yesterday, many more are scheduled throughout the world during this coming week.
Here are my picks for The Best Resources For Teaching & Learning About World Water Day, and are accessible to English Language Learners:
World Water Day is the title of a series of photographs from the Sacramento Bee.
Safe Drinking Water is a site developed by the Academy of Sciences to highlight worldwide water issues. It has several good videos that are closed-captions, along with an atlas showing which countries have less or more access to water resources. It’s definitely accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.
Here are some games designed to help people learn how to conserve water:
The Bonneville Environmental Foundation has very engaging carbon and water calculators to determine your environmental impact. In addition, their suggestions for how to reduce them are equally well-done.
Find Water Polluters Near You is an interactive from The New York Times. You can type in your zip code and then learn about nearby companies cited for polluting local water.
Save Your Water is a neat interactive from Underwriters Laboratories. It’s designed to help you identify your water usage and ways to reduce it, and lets people make a pledge on what they will do. For each of the first 15,000 pledges received, UL will donate one dollar to Water for People.
Water Economics is the title of a neat infographic on water use around the world.
“Stop Drinking Bottled Water” is a fairly accessible infographic on the environmental consequences of using bottled water. I’m pretty confident that the information is accurate, but I wish they had toned down the rhetoric a bit.
Rain Words is a fascinating twist on a crossword puzzle. It’s hard for me to explain, but, basically, images of objects fall from the top and then the player has to move them to any number of places on the puzzle that have the correct number of places.
There are a number of good online resources to help people reflect on their own hidden bias and prejudice. I have several posted on my mainstream Social Studies page under Prejudice.
Project Implicit, a series of quizzes, is from Harvard, and may the most well-known online resource for discovering hidden bias. It’s probably accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.
