Aug 31 2009
Our Intermediate English classes will be sharing a class blog with various assignments, though eventually each student may get their own individual one.
I thought readers might be interested in seeing the first few assignments.
Aug 31 2009
WebKruz Search Engine is a pretty nifty new search engine. After submitting your query, it shows large images of each webpage that comes-up in the results, and will automatically scroll through them in a speed you choose.
In addition — and this is a feature I really like — it will show you results in related categories at the same time.
Both of these elements make it very useful to English Language Learners.
The only negative is that they also have an obnoxiously large advertisement on their main page.
I’m adding it to Search Engines on my website.
Thanks to Alt Search Engines for the tip.
Aug 31 2009
Katrina: After The Storm is an incredible feature from CNN. It has tons of resources about what is happening in New Orleans.
I’m adding the link to The Best Websites For Teaching & Learning About New Orleans.
Aug 31 2009
Education Week, which already has a number of resources on The Best Ways To Keep-Up With Current Education Issues, has just created another one I’ve added to that list.
Ed Week Update: Daily News and Insight is a free daily email newsletter highlighting education news. You can subscribe to it here.
Aug 31 2009
Math and Science Literacy For English Language Learners is the focus of the most recent issue of “Accellerate:The quarterly newsletter of the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition.”
You can subscribe for free to the NCELA listserv here.
Aug 31 2009
Words Move Me is a neat site from Sony where users add short book passages that have…moved them. Others can leave comments on the quotes.
I’m adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience.”
Aug 31 2009
As I’ve mentioned before, our mainstream ninth-grade English classes uses a brilliant curriculum designed by Pebble Creek Labs.
Many of our ninth-grade students also take a class in basic computing, and their computer teacher has agreed to have our students work on English projects for one-day each week. It’s great — it’s like having an extra class period each week.
I thought readers might be interested in seeing what kinds of projects they’ll be doing during their computer time. Our first unit is on Natural Disasters, and you can see the assignments at our ninth-grade English Class blog.
When I get around to it, I’ll shift the blog content to the Edublogs Campus site we’re setting-up, but for now this one will do.
Aug 31 2009
The United Kingdom newspaper The Guardian just wrote an article listing “The 50 most-viewed Wikipedia articles in 2009 and 2008.”
The top ten are:
1) Wiki (131,383 page hits per day)
2) The Beatles (111,896)
3) Michael Jackson (79,734)
4) Favicon.ico (78,077)
5) YouTube (72,318)
6) Wikipedia (52,542)
7) Barack Obama (49,401)
8)Deaths in 2009 (48,758)
9) United States (46,545)
10) Facebook (42,679)
You can go to the article to see the rest of the list.
Wikipedia itself has a continually updated list (hourly) of its most popular pages.
Thanks to Read Write Web for the tip.
As I’ve explained in earlier pieces, I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) 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.”
Aug 31 2009
This post contains a listing of the most popular posts in this blog during the month of August. These are the ones that have been most “clicked-on,” and are different from my Websites Of The Month. Those are the posts that I personally think are the best and most helpful.
Because of the popularity of my “The Best…” lists, it should be pointed out that often the most clicked-on posts are not necessarily ones that I wrote that month. Instead, they might have been written earlier, but then one of these older ones has just been highlighted elsewhere and all of a sudden become popular.
You can see previous reports on my Most Popular Posts here.
THE TOP TEN “THE BEST…” LISTS:
1. The Best Twitterers For Sharing Resource Links
2. The Best Teacher Resources For “Foldables”
3. The Best Collections Of Online Educational Games
4. The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”
5. The Best Resources For Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy In The Classroom
6. The Best Collections Of Web 2.0 Tools For Education
7. The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2008
8. The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers
9. The Best Sources For Advice On Using Flip Video Cameras
10. The Best Resources To Learn About Copyright Issues
THE TOP TEN POSTS THAT WERE NOT “THE BEST…” LISTS:
1. Answers To “What Do You Do On The First Day Of School?”
2. What Do You Do On The First Day Of School?
3. What Do You Do When You Have A Few Minutes Left In Class?
4. “Fifty Stimulating Classroom Starters”
5. What Do You To Make Sure Small Groups Work Well In Class?
6. Have You Ever Taught A Class That “Got Out Of Control”?
8. “Top 15 Most Popular Web 2.0 Websites”
10. Good Intro & Overview Of New Web 2.0 Tools
TOP TRAFFIC SOURCES TO THIS BLOG (not including sources like Stumbleupon, Delicious, Twitter, etc):
2. Free Technology For Teachers
3. Lexiophiles
4. TEFL.net
6. Middleweb
8. TechCrunch
10. The Edublogger
Aug 30 2009
Masher is a super-easy free web application that lets you mix-and-match clips, music, photos and more to create online videos. You can read more about it at Richard Byrne’s excellent blog.
I’m adding it to The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Videos (Using Someone Else’s Content).
Aug 30 2009
When Reading Becomes Work is an excellent article challenging the use of textbooks as the main reading material in the classroom.
It’s well-worth reading.
Thanks to Susan Ohanian for the tip.
Aug 30 2009
As regular readers know, I’ve recently begun a second blog called Engaging Parents In School. It’s designed to support my book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, which will be published next month.
I thought I’d share the titles and links to a few recent posts at that blog:
Boston Schools Begin Parent Program
Aug 30 2009
I regularly share my picks for the most useful posts of each month. I also publish a list of the month’s most popular posts, based on the number of times they are “clicked-on.”
I also share a list of Post Rank’s analysis of each month’s top posts. Post Rank uses a variety of ways to measure level of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts. I have a constantly updated “widget” on my blog’s sidebar that lists these posts, but I thought a monthly post would be helpful/interesting to subscribers who don’t regularly visit the blog itself.
Here are their rankings for the month of August:
Aug 29 2009
Marvin Marshall reflects on how just asking students or others one question can prompt increased effort:
“Can you do better?”
Not a bad question to ask…
Aug 29 2009
Gail Desler has written an excellent post titled Five Tips for Helping Students Become Better Bloggers.
I’m adding it to The Best Sources For Advice On Student Blogging.
Aug 29 2009
Lingt Language lets teachers create virtual classrooms with assignments — specifically for students learning a second language.
The element that really makes it stand-out is the ease of use for creating and doing verbal assignments.
It’s particularly useful, it seems to me, for online classes. I don’t think I’d be interested in making time to do it for students who I see everyday. However, I could see it being a neat way for students to create assignments other students to complete.
What do you think of it?
Thanks to Peter Vogel for the tip.
Aug 29 2009
One of my favorite bloggers, Anthony Cody, has a great post that is largely written by famed education writer Herb Kohl. It’s called Herb Kohl: The Perilous Road We Must Take.
It’s his response to the often cited conflict between inquiry based instruction and direct instruction.
Here’s an excerpt:
“To expect that children who do not have rich learning environments to perform in a way that is comparable to those who bring more “educational” sophistication to the testing table is probably foolish. The impatience to equalize test results through drill and practice, narrowing the curriculum, and inhibiting teachers’ creativity is counterproductive. The best possible case is that students will do well on the test and then discover, in college and later in life, that they learned nothing in school. The worst case is to intensify the gap and the humiliation and frustration it causes. We have to dare to take issues of equity seriously and fight for resources and opportunities for all of our students.”
Aug 29 2009
The INDEX Award winners for this year have just been announced. It’s a Danish-based effort that provides large cash prizes for “designs to improve life.” You can also read more about it at this San Francisco Chronicle article.
It’s really a neat idea, and a great site. If you click on any of the categories at the top of the Index page — Body, Home, Work, Play, Community — it will bring you to very short multimedia presentations on each invention, and they’re very accessible to English Language Learners.
I’m adding the site to The Best Sites Where Students Can Learn About Inventions.
Aug 29 2009
Here’s my monthly round-up of “The Best…” lists I’ve posted in August (of course, you can find all 300 or so of them here):
The Best Sources For Free & Accessible Printable Books
The Best Sites To Teach & Learn About Ramadan
The Best Sites For Learning Online Safety
The Best Resources For Learning About The Warsaw Uprising
The Best Resources For Learning About The Atomic Bombings Of Japan
The Best Resources To Learn About Copyright Issues
The Best Teacher Resources For Online Student Safety & Legal Issues
The Best Resources For Finding And Creating Virtual Field Trips
The Best Websites For Learning About Labor Day
The Best News/Current Events Websites For English Language Learners — 2009
The Best Sites For Students To Record Audio By Phone
Not “The Best,” But “A List” Of Ways To Convert PDF & Word Documents
Part Thirty-Eight Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly
Aug 28 2009
New Orleans, Then and Now is a good slideshow from the Wall Street Journal.
I’m adding it to The Best Websites For Teaching & Learning About New Orleans.
