Oct 31 2009
Here are some more additions to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween:
Halloween At The White House is a slideshow from The Washington Post.
Not-so scary sights is another slideshow from The Washington Post.
Oct 31 2009
Sacramento has hit the big time! The New York Times today has published a slideshow and article titled A Weekend In Sacramento.
I need to get around to making a “The Best…” list about Sacramento. I already have:
Oct 31 2009
Find My Crowd is a great tool to find demographic information on any neighborhood or city in the United States. It has some unique data that I haven’t found accessible in other similar sites.
I’ve added the link to my website under Student Neighborhood Maps. You’ll find a lot of neat research tools in that section — I have to get around to writing a “The Best…” list about them. My students use them in a research project culminating in a persuasive essay about the best neighborhood. It’s a great project that I’ve written about in my upcoming book “Teaching English Language Learners: Strategies That Work” that will come out next year. I’ll try to summarize the lesson in an upcoming post.
Thanks to Interesting Pile blog for the tip on the site.
Oct 31 2009
At professional development trainings at our school, Kelly Young shares pictures of classrooms that he visits. One of the features he often highlights are images of students “leaning-in” at their desks working on a project and/or speaking with other students in small groups.
I used this concept in a short lesson earlier this month that seemed to work well.
First, I asked students to think of an important event in their life, and why it was important. They then jotted down a few notes.
Then, I had students divide into pairs and move their desks so they were facing each other. I asked one student to lean back — a lot. We had a lot of fun modeling and competing how far back a student could lean back in their seat without slipping through to the floor.
Next, the other student told their story to the student leaning-back. Then we reversed roles.
Then, students repeated their stories to each other, but this time, instead of leaning back, each student “leaned-in” on their desks.
I then asked students if they were listening more attentively when they were leaning-back or when they were learning forward. I didn’t get the answer I wanted (which was when they were leaning forward), and everybody said they were listening the same in both positions. However, I then asked in which position the listener was in did they feel most “listened to” when they spoke, and several students said when the other person was leaning-in. I asked students in which position they felt most alert, and practically everybody said when they were leaning-in.
We talked a bit about what advantages there might be to people feeling more listened-to — both in class and outside of school. We also talked about our natural tendencies to lean back when we’re feeling tired or sleepy, and how learning-in might help wake us up.
It wasn’t a “home-run” lesson, but since that time I’ve included “Lean-In’ in instructions for all small group activities, and it seems to me that it’s made a difference — more students seem to be “leaning-in.”
Any ideas on how I could improve it?
Oct 31 2009
Maybe most people know that there’s a “Smithsonian Channel,” but I certainly didn’t. And it has lots of great online video clips.
I’m adding it to The Best Sites For News & History Videos That Won’t Get Blocked By Content Filters (At Least, Not By Ours!).
Thanks to US History Teachers Blog for the tip.
Also, I’m happy to say that this school year CNN’s videos aren’t blocked by our filters, so I’m adding that site to the same list.
Oct 31 2009
London’s Olympic Park progress is an interactive from The Guardian showing progress being made on facilities for the 2012 Olympics.
I’ve added it to The Best Sites To Teach & Learn About The Olympics.
Oct 31 2009
Each month, I publish a feature where I “look back” at posts I’ve made one and two years ago (at about this time). I share ones that I think people might still find useful.
Here are some from one year ago:
More Great Resources From Oxford Press
An Exceptional Reading & Writing Site
What A Great Way To Write A Book Review!
The Best Web Resources On Darfur
The Best Places Where Students Can Write Online
And here are some interesting ones from two years ago:
Oct 31 2009
Just a reminder to readers that I’ve been continuing to update The Best Sites To Teach and Learn About Thanksgiving that I published last year.
You might find that list useful.
Oct 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 October:
Oct 30 2009
Here are some more additions to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween:
Happy Halloween is a series of images from The Sacramento Bee.
Holidays for Dressing Up, and for Remembering is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal.
Ghostscape 2: The Cabin is an online video game that is probably too scary for very young children, but adolescents should love it. The walkthrough isn’t posted yet, but should be soon at this site. It has a lot of language development opportunities.
Oct 30 2009
You can look through a ton of old Halloween advertisements here.
I’ve added that link to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween.
Thanks to The English Blog for the tip. You can also find a slideshow sharing more recent Halloween-related ads there.
Oct 30 2009
Sorry, I just discovered that the Hidden Word Game I just posted about is no longer available, so I’ve deleted that post. I wrote it a couple of weeks ago. Things change fast!
Oct 29 2009
Halloween – 10 activities for the computer room, connected classroom and classroom is a not-to-be-missed post by Kyle Mawer.
I’m certainly adding it to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween.
Oct 29 2009
Here’s my monthly round-up of “The Best…” lists I’ve posted in October (of course, you can find all 340 or so of them here):
The Best Websites For Learning About Multiple Holidays & Anniversaries — October, 2009
The Best Resources To Learn About World Teachers Day — October, 2009
The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2009 — October, 2009
The Best Online Resources For Drivers Education & Car Information — October, 2009
The Best Websites To Learn About The Hmong — October, 2009
The Best Resources For Using Puppets In Class — October, 2009
The Best Sites To Learn About The Nobel Peace Prize — October, 2009
The Best Sites For Images Of Fall Foliage (& For Teaching About The Season) — October, 2009
The Best Sites To Learn About World Food Day — October, 2009
The Best Resources To Learn About The Loma Prieta Earthquake — October, 2009
The Best Online Personality, Career, Political & Just Plain Fun Quizzes — October, 2009
The Best Sites To Learn About Robots — October, 2009
The Best Sites For Learning About Diwali — October, 2009
The Best Sites For Students To Create & Participate In Online Debates — October, 2009
The Best Ways To Back-Up Your Computer & Online Work — October, 2009
Part Forty Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — October, 2009
Oct 29 2009
Here are some more additions to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween:
Halloween 2009 is a neat resource from National Geographic (thanks to Interesting Pile for the tip)
Detroit Fights Devil’s Night is a TIME Magazine slideshow about a tragic tradition of arson in Detroit.
ESL Courses has good resources on Halloween and on The Day Of The Dead.
Happy Halloween Escape is an online video game that has potential as a language development activity, especially if it’s used with a walkthrough.
Oct 29 2009
“How Should Teacher Effectiveness Be Assessed?” is a question recently asked at the National Journal, and there are twenty-five responses from people in the education community. Several are pretty good, while I think others are pretty useless. It’s worth checking -out.
Oct 29 2009
All Our Stock has a bunch royalty-free images, and looks pretty good to me.
I’m adding it to The Best Online Sources For Images.
Thanks to the Make Use of blog for the tip.
Oct 29 2009
I’ve just written a post in my other blog, “Engaging Parents In School,” titled Parents & Schools In Los Angeles. It shares some reflections and questions I have about a recent decision the District made to let parents decide if they want their schools to become private charters.
I’d be very interested in hearing people’s comments on what I wrote, and perhaps sharing additional information you might have about what is going on there.
Oct 29 2009
I don’t consider myself too much of a “worry-wart,” but I figure I’ve spent a lot of time into developing my website, many materials stored in my computer, and my various blogs and, even though I have a lot of confidence in the webhosts and my computer hardware, anything can happen. And given that possibility, it doesn’t hurt to “play it safe.”
I particularly like these services that provide automatic back-up for all my work. I don’t have to even think about it, and just receive daily, or even more often, reports from them confirming that my materials have been backed-up. I’m sure that there are others, though, so please leave your suggestions in the comments section of this post.
One is Mozy, which backs-up everything on my computer. And I’ve barely used half of the capacity you get for a free account. And it costs peanuts to upgrade, if necessary.
For my blogs, I use Blog Backupr.
For Twitter, I use Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feed of my Twitter account. Surprisingly, though, I haven’t been too impressed with the ability to search my “tweets” though Google Reader’s search function.
There’s also another different kind of back-up site called BackupURL.
BackupURL lets you enter a website address and then it immediate creates a backup copy of the site with it’s own url address. All the links remain live, and when I tried it with my website I was pleasantly surprised to find that it actually copied all the pages of my site and not just the one page address I had entered.
It’s different from the other online back-up programs in that they will create a copy of a site that you can access and then “re-launch” if you lose all your data, and you have to register for them. Those also automatically update new addition.
BackupUrl sort of “takes a picture in time” and makes it immediately accessible. If you want to update it, you have to enter the site address again and get a new url address for that updated site.
It could definitely come in handy for me since very infrequently my website (with 9,000 categorized links accessible to English Language Learners) might go off-line temporarily. Having a back-url will be useful because students could just use that instead.
Feedback, of course, is always welcome.
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.
Oct 28 2009
I regularly highlight my picks for the nine or ten (or several more) most useful posts for each month — not including “The Best…” lists. I also use these in a more extensive monthly newsletter I send-out. You can see back issues of those newsletters here and my previous “Top Ten” picks at Websites Of The Month.
These posts are different from the ones I list under the monthly “Most Popular Blog Posts.” Those are the posts the largest numbers of readers “clicked-on” to read.
Here are the posts I personally think are the best, and most helpful, ones I’ve written during this past month (not in any order of preference):
Great Picture Book Maker
“I Like This Lesson Because It Make Me Have a Longer Temper” (Part One)
Update On My Books
“Funniest videos about teaching / learning English”
Interview Of The Month: Claus von Zastrow From The Learning First Alliance
What Would Paulo Freire Do If He Was A School Superintendent?
Linklist Is A Winner
“I Made My Agreement With Mr. Ferlazzo And Kept It…”
Want To Talk About Classroom Management Issues?
“I Was Disappointed With What Happened Yesterday…”
Getting Our Students & Their Families Thinking About College
Incredible New Site On Cave Of Lascaux
“Audience Sounds”
You Need To Check-Out “English Central”
When Are Teenagers In The “Flow”?
“One Survivor Remembers” Available For Free
“What Would You Tell Your Parents You Learned In Class This Month?”
