Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

Monthly Archives: August 2010

August 16, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

Fascinating Video Explaining How Google Translate Works

I have written a lot in my blog and in my book on teaching English Language Learners on how I use inductive learning in the classroom. Teaching “inductively” generally means providing students with a number of examples from which they can create a pattern and form a concept or rule. Teaching “deductively” is first providing the rule or concept and then having students practice applying it.

This two-and-one-half minute video below explains that this is how Google Translate learns, too. It’s definitely worth watching.

By the way, Google Translate is on The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners list.

Share|

August 16, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

“Learning Goals” versus “Performance Goals”

I‘ve previously written about how I encourage my students to emphasis “learning goals” instead of “performance goals” and another study has come-out validating that approach.

First, I’ll reprint what I have said previously for some background, and then share information on the new study.

Here’s what I wrote In June:

Another study reinforced what I do in my classroom — having students primarily focus on setting “learning goals” (learning how to categorize information better, to work better in groups, be more disciplined about reading a book for a half-hour each night or to read a more challenging book), with a lesser priority (though we definitely include them) on “performance goals” (increased assessment scores). The study says that M.B.A. students who focused more on learning goals ultimately ended-up with a higher G.P.A. than those students who had only set a G.P.A. goal.

It’s similar to my community organizing experience. Our organizations were often more effective in building affordable housing than groups that just focused on affordable housing development and in getting people into jobs that paid a living wage with benefits than job training agencies. The primary reason for that success was that we were focused on helping people learn to become leaders, and then used housing and jobs campaigns as tools to help people develop leadership skills.

The idea is to help people become life-long learners, and then the performance outcomes will come. In our organizing campaigns, though we were more effective in the long-run, our ultimately very successful efforts did take what some might consider too long of a time to bear fruition. Our school emphasizes building life-long learners and not teaching to the test. We are making slow, but very steady, improvement. Nevertheless, we are in Program Improvement Status as defined by No Child Left Behind.

And now, for today’s study that reinforces this perspective:

Sarah D. Sparks writes over at Education Week about a review of 100 studies that determined that:

…two parallel motivations drive student achievement: “learning orientation,” the drive to improve your knowledge and competency; and “performance orientation,” the drive to prove that competency to others. Watkins found the highest-achieving students had a healthy dose of both types of motivation, but students who focused too heavily on performance ironically performed less well academically, thought less critically, and had a harder time overcoming failure.

No matter — let’s just keep focusing on those test results so that a local paper like the L.A. Times won’t label you as an ineffective teacher.…

I’m adding this post to My Best Posts On Students Setting Goals.

Share|

August 16, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

More On The L.A. Times Article

Corey Bunje Bower has written a more detailed analysis of the L.A. Times piece on evaluating teachers using student test scores, which I posted about yesterday (L.A. Times Prints Cheap Shot At Teachers). His post is worth reading.

Also related to the LA Times article:

Saul Alinsky, the father of modern-day community organizing and the founder of the organization I worked for during my community organizing career, once said:

“The price of criticism is a constructive alternative.”

I have always tried to keep that in mind, and I believe you’ll be able to read my thoughts on what works for teacher evaluation very soon in The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.

In addition, you’ll be able to read an even more detailed analysis in a report that a group of teachers (including myself) are putting together for the Center For Teaching Quality. I believe that report will be issued sometime in the fall.

Share|

August 15, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment

“Investigate A Book”

Yesterday I shared “Bloom’s Taxonomy Book Review Questions,” and described how I would have students use them in their independent book discussion groups.

I also explained that I wasn’t thrilled with them, and that I hoped to find better ones.

I’ve just discovered another useful list called “Investigate A Book” by K.Torrisi. It combines Bloom’s, Gardners Multiple Intelligences and De Bono’s Six Hats to list potential book assignments for students.

Here’s a link to a downloadable Word document. You can also find it on Scribd.

I’ll be adding this information to yesterday’s post, which I’m also adding to The Best Resources For Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy In The Classroom.

Share|

August 15, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
2 Comments

August’s Best Tweets — Part One

Every month I make a short list highlighting my choices of the best resources I shared through (and learned from) Twitter, but didn’t necessarily include them in posts here on my blog. Now and then, in order to make it a bit easier for me, I may try to break it up into mid-month and end-of-month lists.

I’ve already shared in earlier posts several new resources I found on Twitter — and where I gave credit to those from whom I learned about them. Those are not included again in this post.

If you don’t use Twitter, you can also check-out all of my “tweets” on Twitter profile page or subscribe to their RSS feed.

Here are my picks for August’s Best Tweets — Part One (not listed in any order):

Michelle Rhee from Washington, D.C. (and our mayor’s future wife) declares that schools need “radical change” in….Sacramento. Uh oh…

Speaking of Rhee, she confesses to taping her students’ mouths shut during her first year of school. (Thanks to Alice Mercer for the tip).

“The Power Trip” is a Wall St Jrnl essay on the nature of power

Unlocking the debate on immigration in America

Benjamin Franklin and deliberate practice

“when to use i.e in a sentence” infographic

Teaching philosophy with Spider-Man, BBC

Video of “Words,” a story about a world without words

US school road marking spelt wrongly, BBC

Infographic(s) of the Day: How We’ve Mapped Time Through the Ages

Thoreau reminds us to use technology well, The Atlantic

“In silhouette,” amazing photos from The Boston Globe’s Big Picture

Color Photos from The Depression

“People are generally good and will do the right thing when given the chance” interesting Sacramento Bee article

Poligraft gives you a visualization of political influences affecting any news article, limited but useful

New World Heritage sites, BBC slideshow

You might also be interested in seeing a list of favorite tweets at Shelly Terrell’s blog.

Share|

August 14, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
2 Comments

“Bloom’s Taxonomy Book Review Questions”

I’ve written about the independent book discussion groups that my students organize in the second semesters of my English classes (see “Book Discussion Group Guidelines”).

I’ve found a list on the Web titled Bloom’s Taxonomy Book Review Questions. To tell you the truth, the questions aren’t the greatest, but the idea of giving students a list of questions related to Bloom’s and giving them their choice of which ones they discuss is a good one. I’m going to revise this list, but also wanted to know if anybody knew of better ones already out there that are specifically related to books.

If you do, please leave a comment.

UPDATE: I’ve just discovered another useful list called “Investigate A Book” by K.Torrisi. It combines Bloom’s, Gardners Multiple Intelligences and De Bono’s Six Hats to list potential book assignments for students. Here’s a link to a downloadable Word document. You can also find it on Scribd.

I’m adding this information to my original Book Discussion Group Guidelines post which, in turn, is on My Best Posts On Books: Why They’re Important & How To Help Students Select, Read, Write & Discuss Them.

Share|

August 14, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
13 Comments

L.A. Times Prints Cheap Shot At Teachers

The Los Angeles Times today published what I think is an incredibly “cheap shot” at teachers today headlined “Grading The Teachers: Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids?”

The paper collected data from student test scores on teachers in the district, put them in a data base on the newspaper site, and identified the supposed “value-added” increase each teacher provided. The article itself also highlighted — by name and photo — supposedly “effective” and “ineffective” teachers.

The Times could have chosen to write an article examining the complexities inherent in teacher evaluations, looking at what research has identified as useful and accurate. They could have spoken with teachers and others with extensive education experience to identify what are some commonly agreed characteristics of effective teachers. They could have asked teachers what kind of evaluation process has been most helpful to them, or what they think might be most useful (that is the topic of an extensive post I’m concidentally just finishing up today).

And, they could have highlighted the two teachers who they consider “effective” based on test scores, flawed assessments that they might be (see The Best Resources For Learning About Effective Student & Teacher Assessments and The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation).

But to publicly label countless hardworking teachers as ineffective based on such flawed data really is a cheap shot that is insulting, not to mention demoralizing, to many.

I wonder how the reporters would feel if the Times listed on their website the number of “hits” reporters get on the stories they have written, and publicly labeled the reporters who got the most as their most effective reporters and based hiring, firing, and compensation decisions largely on those statistics?

UPDATE: Here’s a comment from LA teacher Kathie Kienzle Marshall:

“The most disappointing part, Larry, is two-fold:

1) It comes as the district is just initiating a teacher evaluation reform movement that requires trust and buy-in from all teachers, something this article shredded to bits.

2) At least one of the authors of this report was at the LAUSD two-day district convocation on teacher evaluation, where s/he/they SHOULD have gained enough understanding of the complexity of teacher evaluation to have thought long and hard about this “expose”.

Share|

August 14, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

Part Fifty-One Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly

The first part of this post is my usual introduction to this series. If you’re familiar with it already, just skip down to the listing of new sites…

Here’s the latest installment in my series on The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly. As you may remember, in order to make it on this list, the web tool has to:

* be easily accessible to English Language Learners and/or non-tech savvy computer users.

* allow people to create engaging content within minutes.

* host the user’s creation on the site itself indefinitely, and allow a direct link to be able to be posted on a student or teacher’s website/blog to it (or let it be embedded). If it just provides the url address of the student creation, you can either just post the address or use Embedit.in , a free web tool that makes pretty much any url address embeddable.

* provide some language-learning opportunity (for example, students can write about their creations).

* not require any registration.

You can find previous installments of this series with the rest of my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year. Several hundred sites have been highlighted in these past lists. You might also want to take a look at the first list I posted in this series — The Best Ways For Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly, and Painlessly.

You might also want to look at The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — 2009.

I’ll also be publishing an “all-time best” list later this year.

Here are the newest additions:

USE ICONS TO CREATE A WORD OR PHRASE: I learned about Iconscrabble from Angela Maiers, who writes a blog I would strongly recommend you subscribe to if you don’t already. It lets you write a word or short phrase using popular icons.

MAKE A JACKSON POLLOCK PAINTING: Drips let you paint like Jackson Pollock, and you can save it online. And you don’t have to register for it. Even cooler, it gives you a choice of painting it with either your mouse or your webcam and computer microphone. With your webcam, you can use your cellphone light or something else as a brush and your voice to change the color.

CREATE OR COMPLETE A MADLIB: There is a new site called…Madlibs that lets you easily create your own. It could be a fun little filler if you have a few minutes leftover in the computer lab some day. You can then post the links on a teacher/student blog or website for others to complete. I could see creating them, and completing ones your peers made, could be a good activity. A caveat, however, is that it appears the most recent mad libs done on the site are posted on the homepage, and some might be a little off-color. However, the site’s owner tells me he is working to develop a way to deal with that issue.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 490 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

Share|

August 13, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

The “Smell Test” & Education

Corey Bower has written a good post on the issue of schools with high teacher turnover. He comments that there isn’t a whole lot of research out there documenting its impact on student learning, but suggests that in this case — and in other educational policy discussions — we start using the “smell test”:

Would you want your kids to attend a school with such a teaching force? Why or why not?

That sounds like good advice, especially for researchers who have the heads up in the clouds.

It reminds me of a similar “smell test” suggested by Marvin Marshall. He recommended that teachers evaluate themselves by asking this question:

If I were a student, would I want me as a teacher?

If yes, list the reasons.

If no, list the reasons.

Any other ideas for school-related “smell tests”?

Share|

August 13, 2010
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

The Best Sites For Learning About Meteor Showers

The annual Perseid meteor shower peaked last night, and I thought I’d pull together a few related resources.

Here are The Best Sites For Learning About Meteor Showers (and are accessible to English Language Learners):

MSNBC has a very good interactive on meteor showers.

Perseid meteor shower lights up the night sky is a Washington Post slideshow.

The Christian Science Monitor has a slideshow on meteor showers.

The Los Angeles Times has a series of photos of the Perseid meteor shower.

The Discovery Channel has a number of videos about meteors and meteor showers.

Meteors In The Night Sky is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal.

Perseid meteor shower puts on a spectacular show is a slideshow from The Guardian.

All About Meteors comes from Space.com.

Kidipede gives a simple explanation of meteors.

Perseid meteor shower in pictures is a slideshow from The Telegraph.

Please let me know if I’m missing some sites.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at the 480 other “The Best…” lists and consider subscribing to this blog for free

Share|