May 10, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
It’s getting to be that time, and I thought I’d remind readers about two of my most popular posts from last year:
What Do You Do To Keep Students (& You!) Focused Near The End Of The School Year?
What Do You Do On The Last Day Of Class? (Part Two)
I hope the last few weeks go well for all of us!
May 10, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Here are more additions to The Best Sites To Learn About The U.S. Supreme Court:
Elena Kagan, In Photos is a Wall Street Journal slideshow.
Meet The U.S. Supreme Court Justices is an interactive from MSNBC.
The Associated Press has an interactive on Kagan and the Supreme Court.
Who Is Elena Kagan? is a video from CNN.
ABC News has a video on Kagan.
May 10, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
I’ve just updated The Best Web Resources On Darfur.
Suggestions for additions to the list are welcome.
May 10, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Here are today’s additions to The Best Sites To Learn About The Gulf Oil Spill:
The Miami Herald has a very good interactive graphic on Methods To Control The Leak.
The Herald also has an interactive on marine life in the Gulf.
Relief Well Reaches 8000 Foot Depth is an infographic from BP.
Here’s an update on the oil spill from MSNBC.
CBS News has a slideshow titled Gulf Oil Spill Threatens Wildlife.
May 9, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
The New York Times has an interactive timeline of Elena Kagan’s life. She is going to be President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court.
I’ve added it to The Best Sites To Learn About The U.S. Supreme Court, and I’ve also updated the entire list.
May 9, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
Guzzle is a new web application that lets you create your own personalized online newspaper. It looks good, but be sure to click on the “extended mode” to display it — the other ways are not particularly visually attractive. The only negative is at this point it does not appear you can make your “newspapers” public.
I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Creating Personalized “Newspapers” Online.
May 9, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Save The Children has developed a report titled “State Of The World’s Mothers 2010.” You see how countries rank by how they treat their mothers here. You can access the entire report here. Here’s an excerpt from a news article summarizing the report:
The United States has scored poorly on a campaign group’s list of the best countries in which to be a mother, managing only 28th place, and bettered by many smaller and poorer countries.
Norway topped the latest Save the Children “Mothers Index”, followed by a string of other developed nations, while Afghanistan came in at the bottom of the table, below several African states.
But the US showing put it behind countries such as the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and eastern and central European states such as Croatia and Slovenia.
Even debt-plagued Greece came in four places higher at 24.
One factor that dragged the US ranking down was its maternal mortality rate, which at one in 4,800 is one of the highest in the developed world, said the report.
“A woman in the Unites States is more than five times as likely as a woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece or Italy to die from pregnancy-related causes in her lifetime and her risk of maternal death is nearly 10-fold that of a woman in Ireland,” the report said.
It also scored poorly on under-five mortality, its rate of eight per 1,000 births putting it on a par with Slovakia and Montenegro.
“At this rate, a child in the US is more than twice as likely as a child in Finland, Iceland, Sweden or Singapore to die before his or her fifth birthday,” the report noted.
Save The Children also has an eCard you can send. (Thanks to Brainspin for the tip)
The Dish On Mom is a New York Times slideshow where four artists draw the meal that reminds them most of their mothers.
I’m adding all these resources to The Best Sites For Learning About Mother’s Day.
May 9, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
I’ve just revised and updated The Best Visually Engaging News Sites.
Some of them are pretty creative.
May 9, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
In the Learning Experience Approach, students do an activity and then used the shared experience to develop a group written description of what just happened, as well as a good speaking, listening, and reading opportunity. It’s a great language learning activity.
Making origami can be a good task for students to do, with students either all doing the same thing or choosing different ones. I know my students love doing origami.
The Origami Club, I think, may be the best site on the web for origami instructions. Both a diagram and animation is provided for each model, and they’re divided into leveled activities.
Anybody else ever use origami in class?
May 9, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Here are today’s additions to The Best Sites To Learn About The Gulf Oil Spill:
A timeline of the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a slideshow from Newsweek.
Here’s a CNN video on problems with the containment dome.
The Wall Street Journal has a similar video.
The Associated Press has an interactive on the environmental impact of the spill.
Here’s another AP interactive, this time on past oil platform accidents.
Gulf oil spill cleanup and containment efforts underway is a slideshow from The Washington Post.
Oil Rig Leak is an infographic from Reuters.
May 8, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Celebrate: Save a Mother is a column from the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff.
He writes:
So if one way to mark Mothers’ Day is to buy flowers for that special mom, another is to make this a safer planet for moms in general. And since we men are going to be focused on the flowers, maybe mothers themselves can work on making motherhood less lethal.
Kristoff goes on to suggest ways to do that. The text isn’t accessible to ELL’s, but parts could be modified. It’s a good take on Mother’s Day.
I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About Mother’s Day.
May 8, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
3 Comments
Vicki Davis has just shared some excellent classroom management advice in her post, Teacher Appreciation: Teachers Must Appreciate Their Own “Nobility.”
I’d strongly recommend you read her entire post. Here are couple of particular quotes I like:
when I lose my temper — EVEN WITH REASON – I literally shave off a piece of my nobility. The nobility of teaching.
You’ll notice that nine times out of ten when parents complain about a teacher it is about what the teacher DOES not the CONTENT knowledge. Why then, do so many education programs spend so much time on content knowledge and lesson plan creation instead of classroom management and psychology.
It isn’t about revenge it is about IMPROVEMENT. Proving your “authority” over a helpless child is not noble. What is noble is being humble enough to help the child improve and not do it again.
Vicki also quotes from a book that is new to me titled What Great Teachers Do Differently: 14 Things That Matter Most by Todd Whitaker. I’ll have to check it out.
May 8, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Arabic in First Non-English Web Addresses is a great new lesson from English Language Learners from Breaking News English.
I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Learn About The Internet.
May 8, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Here are even more additions to The Best Sites For Learning About Mother’s Day:
Mothers Day Dates around the world is an interactive graphic.
Mother’s Day: Inside the Numbers is a neat infographic.
Send a video to your Mom naming her “Mom Of The Decade.”
May 8, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
Take a look at yesterday’s For Better Or For Worse comic strip.
It illustrates — much better than any academic treatise can — we ESL/EFL teachers have to be very, very careful with error correction.
May 8, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
I’ve found that receiving feedback from my students about the class and my teaching style has helped me become a better educator, and I’ve written several posts about it. I’ve also written extensively about it in my book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work.
Today, the Boston Globe ran an article about how a similar process is going to be incorporated district-wide in Boston schools, School Committee OK’s student feedback on teachers.
That article got me thinking that readers might find it useful if I gathered all my related posts in one place.
I’d also love to hear from teachers who use similar formal feedback systems.
So, here are My Best Posts On Students Evaluating Classes (And Teachers):
The Right (& Wrong) Ways To Get Student Feedback On Our Teaching
Results From Student Evaluation Of My Class And Me
Results From Student Evaluation Of My Class And Me (Part Two)
Results From My Year-Long U.S. History Tech Experiment
Mid-Year Results Of My “Experiment”
Student Evaluations Of Summer School Class
How Students Evaluated Me This Year — Part One
How Students Evaluated Me This Year — Part Two (Intermediate English Class)
How My Theory Of Knowledge Students Evaluated The Class And Me
What My Students Told Alice Mercer About Our TOK Class
How Students Evaluated Our Class & Me This Semester
How Intermediate English Students Evaluated Our Class This Past Semester
How My Ninth-Grade English Classes Evaluated Me This Year
Follow-Up To “How My Ninth-Grade English Classes Evaluated Me This Year”
How My U.S. History Students Evaluated Me This Semester
SPECIAL ADDITIONS:
What Teachers Can Learn from English-Language Learners is a nice post from Lesli Maxwell, who is now posting at Ed Week’s Learning The Language blog. It’s about a survey another teacher did with students.
Gates Foundation Minimizing Great Tools For Helping Teachers Improve Their Craft
Videotaping teachers the right way (not the Gates way)
Feedback is 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 450 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.
May 8, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
I’ve just written a post in my other blog, Engaging Parents In School, titled ”The problem is that the teachers don’t have to listen to us.”
It’s a about a pretty scary article in today’s Boston Globe about the privatization of schools in the Third World.
I thought readers of this blog might be interested in it.
May 8, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Here are the latest additions to The Best Sites For Learning About Mother’s Day:
Mother’s Day By The Numbers is a great infographic.
Here’s an MSNBC video of a Mother’s Day event at the White House. CNN has a video of the the same event.
Meet The Founder of Mother’s Day is an interactive timeline from MSNBC.
A Mother’s Day Tribute to Moms is a video from ABC News.
May 8, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
It didn’t require much revising, but I have slightly updated The Best Map-Making Sites On The Web.
Feel free to make other suggestions.
May 8, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
“Amazing Moms Of The Animal Kingdom” is a cute slideshow from TIME Magazine.
I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About Mother’s Day.
While I’m at it, I’m also adding a short piece on Mother’s Days from the Census Bureau that provides audio support for the text.
