My gradual “roll-out” of 2010 “The Best…” lists continues.

This is my annual list for teachers of English Language Learners. I will be posting a separate one for ELL students in a month or two.

You might also be interested in:

The Best Sites For Teachers Of English Language Learners — 2009

Here are my picks for The Best Sites For Teachers of English Language Learners — 2010 (not in order of preference):

Teaching ELL’s The “Unplugged” Way: Jason Renshaw has been writing an excellent series of posts about teaching ESL/EFL/ELL students the “unplugged” way — without a formal textbook, with few materials, focusing on their lives and interests, and making it “conversation-driven.” He’s now putting all of the posts in this series on one page, so I’d encourage you to explore The Road to Teaching Unplugged – Ongoing Archive.

Handwriting & Learning A Second Language: The Wall Street Journal has a somewhat interesting article (and video) titled How Handwriting Trains the Brain. I was particularly interested in what it says about how writing helps the brain learn a new language (over using a keyboard). That makes sense to me. In my teaching ELL’s, computers supplement language learning, but the majority of writing is done by hand.

How Subtitles In Music Videos Teach Literacy: The Boston Globe has a useful article headlined Watch and learn:How music videos are triggering a literacy boom. It’s about the use of subtitles in music videos as a tool to teach native-language literacy, and shares some good stories and research. Many ESL/EFL teachers are very aware of the usefulness of subtitles in second-language instruction, too.

Appropriate Use Of Tech: “The Appropriate Use of Technology in the EFL Classroom” is a nice presentation by Ronaldo Lima, Jr.

ESL Lesson Plans: “The Library Of ESL Lesson Plans: North Carolina Curriculum Guide” is an impressive collection of life-skills lesson plans developed by several local community colleges.

ELT & Technology: ELT and Technology is the title of a wiki created by David Deubelbeiss of EFL Classroom 2.0. It’s chock-full of useful information.

Using Film: Using film and moving image to enrich ESOL teaching and learning is a very nice listing of different ways to use film with English Language Learners. It was written by Cormac Conway and Michaela Salmon.

Speaking: David Deubelbeiss, founder of EFL Classroom 2.0, has just shared an excellent speaking activity he uses with his English Language Learner students. He calls it Pass The Paper, and also shares a helpful PowerPoint.

My New York Times Guest Post: English Language Learners and the Power of Personal Stories is the title of a guest post I wrote for The New York Times website. It provides a good overview of the ideas I shared in my book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work.

More NY Time Resources: 10 Ways to Support English Language Learning With The New York Times is an excellent resource that has just been published on the New York Times website. It’s a must-read for teachers of ELL’s.

Creating A Jazz Chant: Most teachers of ELL’s, especially Beginners, are familiar with the “jazz chants” developed by Carolyn Graham. These are short, musical….chants that can be used very effectively in the classroom. She has written books sharing them, and I, like many other teachers, have created our own. Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto has written an excellent blog post sharing the process Graham uses to develop these chants.

Another Article By Me: Education World published my short article titled “Using A Star Chart to Teach English Language Learners.” (it’s not about astronomy)

Academic Language: Teaching Academic Language to English Language Learners is a PowerPoint from a Webinar presented by Dr. Robin Scarcella, Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine. It has some useful information.

Top YouTube Videos: David Deubelbeiss at EFL Classroom 2.0 has given us all a gift by compiling his Top 100 Youtube videos for EFL.

Writing Exercise: Sean Banville, the man behind Breaking News English and a bunch of other websites used by ESL/EFL teachers all over the world, has written a post in his blog describing a neat Paired And Group Writing Activity.

Getting ELL’s To Thrive: Getting English-Language Learners to Thrive is the title of an article I’ve written for Teacher Magazine. It was published today. You need to register in order to access the entire article, but it just takes a few seconds to do so.

Connect With English: I’ve written before about Connect With English. It’s a video series for English Language Learners by Annenberg Media. It has good supporting materials, is very engaging for my students, and is on The Best Popular Movies/TV Shows For ESL/EFL list. All episodes are available online and for free. We show it once a week to our Intermediate English classes.Though the supporting materials are good, you do have to pay for them. I thought readers might be interested in this one page worksheet that we use instead. Students have to make predictions based on the title of the episode, explain if their predictions were correct, write several questions about the episode that they ask a partner afterwards (who then writes the answers). It’s good listening, speaking, and writing practice. My colleague, Katie Hull, created it for our students to use. Katie and I, by the way, will be writing a book together on teaching writing to English Language Learners.

Teaching Tips: Survival Tips for Teaching Kids English: 30 Tips & Resources is a great post from Shelly Terrell sharing ideas for teaching young English Language Learners.

Movie Clips: Movieclips has immediately become an indispensable website in my “teachers’ repertoire” of links.
It has thousands of short video clips from movies and they’re not blocked by our content filter! And they’re available without registering — except for clips that have “mature” content. That in itself makes it a wonderful resource. But that’s only part of why I like this new site so much. What makes it a real winner is that that clips are categorized by theme, character, setting, mood, and more. They’re incredibly detailed.

Improvisation: I wrote a post about using improvisation in the classroom. It’s titled Improvisation In The ESL/EFL Classroom — At Least In Mine.

Great Teacher Blog: “Frenchfrog’s Little English Pond” is the name of a blog written by Laurence Haquet. She creates great interactive books that are exceptional learning tools.

Make Your Textbook Come Alive: Animating your Coursebook is the title of an amazing post, and slideshow presentation, by EFL teacher Marisa Constantinides. If you have to use a textbook in your class, it’s chock-full of great ideas on how to make it come alive. It’s designed for an ESL/EFL class, but the strategies can be used by any teacher and for any textbook. And, heaven knows, so many textbooks are dead and can use a little re-animation!

Using Metacognition: A Pretty Darn Good Lesson — If I Say So Myself is a humbly-titled post I wrote about what I think is a pretty good lesson we did in our Intermediate English class.

First Day: Resources For The First Day Of Intermediate English Class is another one of my posts.

Student Blogging: “What advice would you give for blogging with ESL/EFL students?” is a post by Sue Waters. In it, she shares advice I have offered, and asks for more suggestions.

Feedback is welcome, including additional suggestions.

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You might also want to explore the 530 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

As regular readers know, I teach an International Baccalaureate “Theory of Knowledge” class. Our school structures our IB program a bit differently from many others by having a whole lot of students take individual IB classes and we have relatively few who are taking all IB classes in order to get the IB diploma. I really like this set-up, and it opens up my TOK class to a lot more students.

As I’ve said before, I can’t think of a high school class that would be more fun to teach or more fun to take…

I’ve also been able to adapt a number of my TOK lessons for my Intermediate English class.

Since I know quite a few TOK teachers subscribe to this blog, I thought I’d put together a “The Best…” list of related resources for this year.

Here are my choices for The Best Theory of Knowledge Resources — 2010:

A Gazillion TOK Resources: Well, a “gazillion” might be a bit of an exaggeration. Actually, I’ve bookmarked nearly 300 new resources for International Baccalaureate’s Theory of Knowledge class on my Delicious account. This link will take you to everything that is tagged as TOK. You can then see how each of them are then also tagged with a specific Ways of Knowing or Areas of Knowledge label. I have even more resources divided on our Theory of Knowledge class blog. I just haven’t gotten around to adding these nearly 300 new resources there, though there is a link to them. Until I get around to integrating all these new resources into my curriculum (I’ve been collecting them for several months now), I’ll try to periodically give students an opportunity to choose one from the different sections as we study them and have small groups prepare their own lessons to teach to the class.

Student Evaluations Of TOK: I’ve written a post sharing how my students evaluated last year’s TOK class — How My Theory Of Knowledge Students Evaluated The Class And Me.

NY Times article on IB: The New York Times published an interesting article on the IB program titled International Program Catches On in U.S. Schools. What I’m most excited about, though, is that the article contains a link to a website run by opponents of the program (they have many objections, including believing that it’s too closely aligned with the United Nations). Some opponents have left comments on my previous posts that you can read (and which I shared with my students). I think that site is a great source of material for a lesson or two — not as a focus of ridicule, but as a resource for students to investigate and come to their own conclusions.

Looking At History: Larry Cuban published a very useful and thought-provoking post titled How History Is Taught In Schools. In it, among other points, he contrasts “heritage” pedagogy (“cultivating a national identity, patriotism, and a faith in one’s nation”) with “historical” pedagogy (“not a single account of the past but many accounts”). He continues:

History is an interpretation of the past, not a fax that yesteryear has wired to the present.

It’s an interesting way of looking at it, one that is worth discussing in TOK class.

TOK Class Schedule: For those of you who are TOK teachers, or for those who are curious about TOK, I have posted the class schedule on our Theory of Knowledge class blog.

Art: I’ve posted two “The Best…” lists related to art that I use in my TOK class. With The Best Examples Of “Unusual” Art, students can debate if they are art, and if so, why. With The Best Sites For Learning About Famous Art Thefts, they can explore why people would buy a stolen piece of art that they could never show to anyone else.

Political Ads: The Wall Street Journal just published a great (in the sense they’re useful to TOK; they are a sad commentary on our public life) compilation of Attack Ads from this fall’s political campaign. Then you vote on them in a poll. Students can analyze them in the context of their use of language, reason, emotion, and perception — the four “Ways of Knowing” as categorized by TOK.

Additional contributions are welcome!

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You might also want to explore the nearly 500 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.