January 29, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
SweetSearch Biographies has an extensive collection of accessible biographies. You can read Joyce Valenza’s post to get more detailed information.
I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Researching & Writing Biographies.
January 28, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
February 1st is the fiftieth anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins. As a local television station describes it:
On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students at N.C. A&T sat down at the segregated lunch counter at the F.W. Woolworth store in downtown Greensboro and demanded service. The protest continued until July, when the counter was desegregated.
This pivotal moment in civil rights history is receiving the attention it deserves.
Here are my choices for The Best Sites To Learn About The Greensboro Sit-Ins:
The National Museum of American History has many resources, including videos and lesson plans, on the sit-ins.
The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement is from National Public Radio, and provides audio support for the text.
February One: The Story of the Greensboro Four is the website for a PBS film and has many resources.
The International Civil Rights Center and Museum doesn’t have a whole of resources, but it’s worth visiting for it’s impressive opening presentation and for the fact that it’s opening its doors next week — on the site of the Woolworth store where the sit-ins took place.
Greensboro Sit-Ins: Launch Of A Civil Rights Movement is a website set-up by the Greensboro local newspaper, and has a wealth of multimedia resources.
New Museum to Honor Power of a Sit-In Protest is the title of a new Voice of America Special English report that provides audio for the text.
The Legacy of The Greensboro Four is a video from CBS News.
A Participant Looks Back is a CNN video.
The New York Times has a slideshow titled Center Of Change and an accompanying article.
Protesters Reflect On Success Of 1960s Sit-ins is an article from CBS News.
A Brief History of the Sit In Movement is a slideshow from TIME Magazine.
Greensboro Sit-In is another site with multimedia resources.
The Smithsonian Channel has a nice video.
You might also be interested in:
The Best Websites For Learning About Martin Luther King
The Best Websites To Teach & Learn About African-American History
Feedback is always welcome.
If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.
You might also want to explore the 400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.
January 28, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
2 Comments
Jonah Lehrer, the writer who produced The New Yorker article on self-control that I use in my lesson (see “I Like This Lesson Because It Make Me Have a Longer Temper” (Part One)), has just written about a new study on self-control that shows it can be “contagious.” In other words, the more people see other people exhibiting self-control, the more they will do the same.
Lehrer writes that the study shows that:
…the spread of self-control is mostly driven by the “accessibility” of thoughts about self-control. When we see someone resist the cookie, we’re cognitively inspired, and temporarily aware that resistance is possible. We don’t have to surrender to impulse.
Of course, this is nothing new to teachers who see when a potentially disruptive student enters a class of focused students, he/she will often tend to be more cooperative.
But it is an interesting study. My students clearly have been impacted by the self-control lessons we’ve done, and have spent time thinking about how they can apply it to themselves. I believe that sharing this study with them might help them see that their discipline can also have a positive effect on others. It might provide a little added incentive as they consider their behavior in class, with their friends, and with their families.
January 27, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
Uptime Robot is a new free service that will automatically let you know if your website goes down.
I’m adding it to The Best Tools For Keeping Your Own Website Or Blog “Healthy,” where it joins several other similar services.
January 27, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
“Auschwitz After 65 Years” is the title of a TIME Magazine slideshow.
I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About The Holocaust.
January 27, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
2 Comments
Two new infographics just came out showing which countries are giving how much to help victims of Haiti’s earthquake.
One is from the British newspaper The Guardian and is quite easy to understand.
The other is from GOOD Magazine and looks far cooler, but the information is not particularly accessible (at least to me). Stephen Downes also points out that Canada’s sizable contribution is not included in it.
I’m adding both to The Best Sites To Learn About The Earthquake In Haiti.
January 27, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
I’ve been having students in both my mainstream ninth-grade English class and my Intermediate English class visualize being great readers, writers, and speakers (and imagine people praising them for it) twice-a-day for thirty or so seconds each. It’s voluntary, though everyone has to be silent and motionless during that time. About forty percent of the students in my ninth-grade class say they’re doing it, while seventy percent in my Intermediate English class say they are. You can read more about it here.
I had given my ELL students a cloze (fill-in-the-blank) a couple of months ago when we first started, and just scored the results of a new cloze they took yesterday. I’ll have the results from my mainstream ninth-grade class tomorrow.
The first cloze was fairly easy for students, so I made this one a little harder. Even with that increased difficulty, the students who had been visualizing English success daily had an average score of exactly the same both times — 78%.
The four students who say they had not been doing the visualizing scored 70% the first time around. They only scored an average of 43% in this second one — a drop of 27 percentage points.
Of course, this drop might very well just be a correlation, and not have anything to do with not doing visualization. The students doing the visualization might be harder workers in general than those who are not, or some of the students not doing visualization might have been feeling ill yesterday — there could be many factors at play.
Better research than mine, though, has documented that this kind of exercise can provide a positive benefit to English Language Learners in particular.
I’m certainly going to continue doing it in my Intermediate English class — it can’t hurt. And, visualization or no visualization, I need to pay more attention to those students whose scores dropped.
January 27, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
I posted yesterday about the South Carolina Lt. Governor’s idea to have benefits such as food aid yanked from families if they didn’t attend PTA meetings.
Mr. Layman in South Carolina sent me a link to a column their local paper published that I thought was incredibly thoughtful and insightful. It was written by a local professor and was titled Bauer’s comments reflect our own misconceptions.
It does a great job of looking at how schools often work in low-income communities.
January 27, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
I just finished reading the First Semester Final Projects from my mainstream ninth-grade English class, and am just incredibly impressed and touched by the caliber of their reflections. You can see it here
I spend a lot of time in class encouraging students to reflect on what they’re thinking and doing; what they’ve thought and done; and what they’re going to think and do. The final slide in the presentation I posted last week (see Update on My ELL Book) says “No Cockroaches” with an illustration representing Kafka’s Metamorphosis. That’s because one of the reasons I think the main character in that novel turned into a cockroach is because of his functioning in the world without any kind of reflection on the world and his role in it. It’s something we emphasized a lot in my community organizing career, too.
I talk at length about using reflection in the classroom in my upcoming book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work. In fact, there’s an entire chapter devoted to it.
One of the best parts (in my opinion) of the final project entails students completing this section:
________________________________ was my best moment in class because ________________________________. I helped
make it my best moment by _______________________________________.
_______________________________was my worst moment in class because ______________________________. I could have
made it better by _____________________________________.
Two answers particularly struck me tonight:
One student wrote:
Seeing my first grade was my best moment in class because I had never got an A before. I helped make it my best moment by studying and turning in all my work.
Another wrote this (some background: each Friday I highlight a student and share reasons why I’m glad he/she is in the class — everyone gets this “Student of the Week” designation during the year):
Standing up to get a sucker was my best moment in class because I got to hear some good things about myself. I helped make it my best moment by working hard all week.
One of the other questions on the Project asked students to reflect on some of the “experimental” lessons we’ve done so far this semester – on the brain, self-control, goal-setting and visualizing success (by the way, my upcoming third book will be sharing a lot more ideas and lessons like these).
The ones on the brain, self-control and goal-setting were all quite popular (the visualizing success one — not so much). Here’s what one student wrote about the goal-setting exercise:
I liked the goal settings because when you set goals it seems like it makes me work harder to accomplish my goal.
In addition to this final project, this week students wrote an essay response to a writing prompt, completed two clozes, and each of them read to me to assess reading fluency (all are done several times a year to measure growth) . Most of the ninth-grade English teachers at our school use similar assessments.
I believe that these kinds of assessments provide an accurate measurement of student academic growth and their increased ability and willingness to be life-long learners — much more so than multiple-choice standardized tests.
It would be nice if the Obama administration’s supposed national competition to identify better assessments would take this sort of thing under serious consideration, but I’m not holding my breath.
January 27, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Here’s my monthly round-up of “The Best…” lists I’ve posted in January:
The Best Sites To Learn About Los Angeles — January, 2010
The Best Sources For Interactive Infographics — January, 2010
The Best Sites To Learn About The World’s Tallest Buildings — January, 2010
The Best Sites For Learning About Weird-Looking Creatures (And For Making Your Own!) — January, 2010
The Best Sites For Online Photo-Editing & Photo Effects — January, 2010
The Best Sites To Learn About The Vancouver Winter Olympics — January, 2010
The Best Resources For Learning About Human Trafficking Today — January, 2010
The Best Sites To Learn About The Earthquake In Haiti — January, 2010
Part Forty-Four Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly – January, 2010
The Best Places To Learn About (And View Video Clips Of) Teachers In The Movies — January, 2010
The Best Sites For Learning About Nutrition & Food Safety — January, 2010
The Best Online Collections Of PowerPoints For Teachers — January, 2010
The Best Sites To Learn About Australia — January, 2010
January 27, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
The posting yesterday of The Best Sites To Learn About Australia brought the total of “The Best…” lists to 400…on the dot!
You can find them in chronological order at Websites Of The Year, and divided into categories at My Best of Lists.
Though you’ll certainly find a dead link periodically in some of the older ones, I’m pretty conscientious about both adding new links to lists and getting rid of dead ones. If you do find some dead links, please let me know.
January 26, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
Today is Australia Day, which commemorates the first convict ships that brought immigrants to the continent to start the country. I thought I’d bring together a quick list of links about the country that would be accessible to English Language Learners.
I suspect that Australians might have some great suggestions to add to this list, so please include new links in the comments section of this post.
Here are my choices for The Best Sites To Learn About Australia (not in order of preference):
A Good Day To Be An Australian is a Wall Street Journal slideshow showing how today is being celebrated in that country.
English Listening Lesson Library Online has a ton of activities about Australia specifically designed for ELL’s.
Barnaby Bear Goes Under gives an introduction to the country.
Passport Australia comes from Channel One.
National Geographic has an Australia section.
Here’s a simple online presentation on the country.
Enchanted Learning has a page on Australia.
Dust Echoes and Stories of The Dreaming share aboriginal stories from the continent.
Discovery has a video of the Great Barrier Reef.
Mr. Nussbaum has a number of activities related to Australia.
Only In Australia is the title of a slideshow from The News in Australia. It shows images of places and things that make Australia unique.
Australia’s Deep-Sea Creatures is a slideshow from TIME Magazine.
ESL Holiday Lessons has a nice resource on the holiday.
How Stuff Works has many videos about Australia.
Aussie English For The Beginner is a fun interactive from the National Museum of Australia.
Thinkquest has several student-created websites about Australia.
Here’s a relatively accessible overview of the country from World Info Zone.
The Telegraph has a slideshow on Australia Day celebrations.
Australia’s Hidden Gems is a beautiful slideshow.
The Great Barrier Reef – in pictures is a slideshow from The Guardian.
Darcy Moore suggested I add some resources that offer a different perspective on that Australia Day, and I invited him to write a piece that I would add to that list. Darcy is a blogger, photographer & Australian deputy principal. He has a keen interest in collaborating with students and educators around the world.
Australian history has been fiercely contested by historians and politicians in recent decades. ‘History Wars’ have been fought over the various interpretations of ‘our past’. The two major opposing views have been pejoratively described as, ‘The Black Armband’ and the ‘Three Cheers’ version of our history. One interpretation emphasises Australia’s march to nationhood and progress, the other, acknowledges the destruction of both the environment and Aboriginal culture. Past government policies, including removing Aboriginal children from their homes (‘The Stolen Generations’) were particularly contested. The central position of the ‘ANZAC legend’, the positive story of Australia’s armed forces, is also questioned. To understand Australian History it is important to understand this debate. You
can read more here.
Australia Day on the 26th January is a good example of the debate about our shared history. How can Aboriginal Peoples, dispossessed of their land, celebrate the European founding of a colony on this date in 1788? Here are some important questions about Australia Day posed at the ‘official page’ suggesting Australians are often working positively to reconcile the challenging, disturbing aspects of our shared past. Many people applauded former Prime Minister Rudd’s apology to ‘The Stolen Generations’ after his predecessor, John Howard, had refused to do so for more than a decade.
Thank, Darcy! These issues are similar to some of the ones I’ve raised in posts on Columbus Day and Thanksgiving here in the United States.
You might also be interested in The Best Sites To Learn About The Fires In Australia and The Best Sites For Learning About The Australian Floods.
Feedback is always welcome.
If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.
You might also want to explore the 400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.
January 26, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Tomorrow is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I just updated The Best Sites For Learning About The Holocaust.
It might be worth a look.
January 26, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
2 Comments
An article in Educational Leadership is a year-old, but it’s new to me and certainly worth sharing. It’s called The New Stupid, and has the subtitle “Educators have made great strides in using data. But danger lies ahead for those who misunderstand what data can and can’t do.” It’s written by Frederick M. Hess.
It’s an article worth reading (though I do have concerns about some of its points), and relates to what I’ve written about being “Data-Driven” Versus “Data-Informed.”
Here are a couple of excerpts:
…the key is not to retreat from data but to truly embrace the data by asking hard questions, considering organizational realities, and contemplating unintended consequences. Absent sensible restraint, it is not difficult to envision a raft of poor judgments governing staffing, operations, and instruction—all in the name of “data-driven decision making.”
and…
First, educators should be wary of allowing data or research to substitute for good judgment. When presented with persuasive findings or promising new programs, it is still vital to ask the simple questions: What are the presumed benefits of adopting this program or reform? What are the costs? How confident are we that the promised results are replicable? What contextual factors might complicate projections? Data-driven decision making does not simply require good data; it also requires good decisions.
I’d love to hear the perspectives of others…
January 26, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
There’s a new book out that’s getting a fair amount of attention. It’s called Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago, and was published this month by the University of Chicago Press.
Education Week just ran an article on it, but it’s only accessible to subscribers. One of the authors has written a blog post, though, that provides a good summary of the book. You can also access an excerpt at Google Books.
The author’s conclusions sound good to me, but, I have to say, the first thing that came to my mind when I read about them was, “Doesn’t everybody who works in schools know this already?”
They describe the importance of five “essential supports”:
The key ingredients, which we call the “essential supports,” are school leadership, parent and community ties, professional capacity of the faculty, school learning climate, and instructional guidance. Schools that measured strong in all five supports were at least 10 times more likely than schools with just one or two strengths to achieve substantial gains in reading and math
Of course, knowing something and having the political will and support to get it implemented are always two different things.
I was struck, though, by what the authors wrote about parent-community ties, and have written more about that in my other blog, Engaging Parents In School.
January 26, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
I just wrote a post in my Engaging Parents In School blog about the worst idea to promote parent involvement ever — just proposed by South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer.
You might find it interesting…
January 26, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
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:
The Best Collections Of Educational Links
The Best Sites That Use Movie Trailers To Teach English
The Best Resources About President’s Day
The Best Sites To Learn About Valentine’s Day
Mel Zoo Is An Excellent Search Engine
And here are some interesting ones from two years ago:
The Best Websites For K-12 Writing Instruction/Reinforcement
The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers
The Best Websites For Beginning Older Readers
The Best Websites For Intermediate Readers
The Best Music Websites For Learning English
January 25, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
I’ve revised and updated “The Best Sites Where ELL’s Can Learn About The Super Bowl.”
Of course, I’ll be adding more resources there over the next two weeks…..
January 25, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
Earth.org is an online travel guide that makes it easy to find information about places around the world and, more importantly, makes it quite easy to add info, too.
Because of that, I’m adding it to The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience.”
January 25, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
A Look At Haitian Art is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal. I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Learn About The Earthquake In Haiti.
WP Clip Art has a whole lot of attractive clip art that “…may be used for commercial as well as personal projects without attribution or linking.” I’m adding it to The Best Online Sources For Images.
Pixlr looks like a free and neat photo editor. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Online Photo-Editing & Photo Effects.
I’ve written about 1 Cast, a “one-stop shop” for online video news. I discovered that it’s not blocked by our school’s content filters, so 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!).
The TED Talks blog has an excellent interview with the head of TED, Chris Anderson. It’s very interesting, and includes him sharing his favorite Talks, including links. I’m adding it to The Best Teacher Resources For “TED Talks.”
Educational Origami has created Six Quick Sheets For Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy In The Classroom. Thanks to Diana Dell for the tip.
