Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

Monthly Archives: March 2011

March 31, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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Refugee Resources

Here are some new additions to The Best Sites For Learning About World Refugee Day (it’s not until June 20th but, obviously, the resources can be used at any time):

Faces of the displaced is a series of photos from The Boston Globe’s Big Picture. They’re of refugees fleeing the violence in Libya.

United Nations Refugee Agency Teacher’s Corner and Lesson Plans

Flight and Expulsion is an impressive interactive map showing the refugee flow from and to all parts of the world. You can go and check it out directly, or you might want to read and see this short description from Fast Company first.

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March 31, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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March’s “The Best…” Lists

Here’s my monthly round-up of new “The Best…” lists I posted in March (there were quite a few):

The Best Sites For Seeing “Pictures Of The Year International” Winners — March, 2011

The Best Resources Documenting The Effectiveness of Free Voluntary Reading — March, 2011

The Best Articles & Sites For Teachers & Students To Learn About Phonics — March, 2011

The Best Posts Responding To Bill Gates’ Appallingly Clueless Op-Ed Piece — March, 2011

The Best Ways For English Language Learners To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — March, 2011

The Best Learning Games For Intermediate English Language Learners — March, 2011

The Best Ways For Advanced ELL’s & Non-ELL’s To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly (For Their Classmates & Teacher To See) – March, 2011

The Best Resources On The Importance Of Building Positive Relationships With Students — March, 2011

Part Sixty Of The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly — March, 2011

The Best Sites For Learning About The Japan Earthquake & Tsunami — March, 2011

The Best Sites For Learning About The Japan Earthquake & Tsunami, Part Two — March, 2011

The Best Sites To Learn About Tsunamis — March, 2011

The Best Websites For Learning About Bob Marley — March, 2011

The Best Learning Games For Advanced ELL’s & Non-ELL’s — March, 2011

The Best — And Easiest — Ways To Use YouTube If, Like Us, Only Teachers Have Access To It — March, 2011

The Best Posts Debunking The Myth Of “Five Great Teachers In A Row” — March, 2011

The Best Resources For Learning About Schools Providing Home Computers & Internet Access To Students — March, 2011

The Best Resources For Learning About What’s Happening In Libya — March, 2011

The Best Resources For Learning About The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire — March, 2011

The Best Articles Providing An “Overall” Perspective On Education Policy — March, 2011

The Best Posts & Articles About The Importance Of Teacher (& Student) Working Conditions — March, 2011

The Best Resources For Learning About The New York Times Paywall — March, 2011

The Best Ways To Make A Map Showing Your Facebook Friends (& Twitter Followers) — March, 2011

The Best Posts & Articles About “Erase To The Top” — March, 2011

The Best Posts & Articles To Learn About “Fundamental Attribution Error” & Schools — March, 2011

The Best (& Easiest) Ways To Record Online Video Interviews — March, 2011

The Best Online Virtual “Corkboards” (or “Bulletin Boards”) — March, 2011

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March 31, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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Not Everything Will “show up in each semester’s test scores and statistics” — A Must-Read NY Times Column

What I Learned at School is an op-ed in today’s New York Times. It’s written by novelist Marie Myung-Ok Lee. Here’s an excerpt:

I can now appreciate how much courage it must have taken for those teachers to let me deviate so broadly from the lesson plan. With today’s pressure on teachers to “teach to the test,” I wonder if any would or could take the time to coax out the potential in a single, shy student.

If we want to understand how much teachers are worth, we should remember how much we were formed by our own schooldays. Good teaching helps make productive and fully realized adults — a result that won’t show up in each semester’s test scores and statistics.

That’s easy to forget, as budget battles rage and teacher performance is viewed through the cold metrics of the balance sheet. While the love of literature and confidence I gained from Ms. Leibfried’s class shaped my career and my life, after only four short years at Hibbing High School, she was laid off because of budget cuts, and never taught again.

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March 30, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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New Marzano Study On “Effort & Recognition”

The Marzano Research Laboratory has just published a “meta-analysis” of twelve studies on the impact of “effort & recognition” on student achievement.  It says it results in a very substantial gain.

This is their definition of “effort and recognition”:

Effort and recognition involves reinforcing and tracking student effort and providing recognition for achievement.

A more expansive description of what they actually mean by that can be found here. Much of it relates to practices I cover in my upcoming book and in The Best Resources For Learning How To Best Give Feedback To Students. Part of the recommendations, though, relate to rewards and “tokens” and seems to fly in the face of an abundance of other research on the dangers of incentives (see My Best Posts On “Motivating” Students).

I would hope they take another look at that aspect of their studies.

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March 30, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
2 Comments

The Best Posts & Articles About “Erase To The Top”

The Washington, D.C. testing scandal, and Michelle Rhee’s clumsy (she eventually called it “stupid”) attack on U.S.A. Today’s discovery of it, has been in the news the past few days. Robert Pondiscio has come-up with a catchy phrase to describe it — “Erase To The Top.”

Here’s how Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post describes its importance:

It’s important not only because Rhee has become a national education celebrity largely but not entirely based on her record of improving test scores in the District, and because she has enormous influence among policymakers. She was, after all, chosen from all of the school leaders in the country to be the star of “ Waiting for Superman. ”

Standardized tests have become the currency of modern school reform across the country, used to grade students, schools and teachers. Somehow reformers have got it into their heads that high-stakes standardized tests measure real learning. Assessment experts say they don’t.

Cheating scandals have been reported across the country ever since former President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law ushered in the era of high-stakes testing. It is not exculpatory to say that the high stakes of the tests drove some teachers and principals to cheat, but it is explanatory. Such behavior won’t go away as long as standardized tests are used in high-stakes ways they never were designed to be used.

Here are my choices for The Best Posts & Articles About “Erase To The Top”:

Erase to the Top by Robert Pondiscio

Michelle Rhee’s Cheating Scandal is by Dana Goldstein at The Daily Beast

Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword Redux by Liam Goldrick

When standardized test scores soared in D.C., were the gains real? is the USA Today report

D.C. officials to review high rates of erasures on school tests is another USA Today article reporting on Rhee’s initial response to the scandal

Rhee calls her remarks on test erasures ‘stupid’ is by Jay Mathews at The Washington Post

Subpoena everyone in D.C. cheating scandal — including Rhee is by Valerie Strauss at The Washington Post

Shame On Michelle Rhee by Diane Ravitch

Cheating in DC: What Accountability Hath Wrought is by Justin Baeder at Ed Week.

Feedback is 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.

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March 30, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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The Best (& Easiest) Ways To Record Online Video Interviews

I’ve been thinking about doing online video interviews — for this blog, and also in the classroom. For either one, it would be important to be able to record them. Obviously, Skype (learn about Skype In The Classroom here) is an obvious choice. However, it appears that the only way to record Skype calls is through a separate software that would need to be downloaded, and that might be problematic for schools.

So, I started exploring other options, and I didn’t come up with that many. I hope others will offer additional suggestions and/or suggest a super-easy way to record Skype calls.

Here are my choices for The Best (& Easiest) Ways To Record Online Video Interviews:

WeToku is a neat online app that lets you interview someone via webcam, and records it for later viewing. You can read more about it at Nik Peachey’s blog. This seems to be the best option — by far.

VYou lets you record an introductory video, and then people can leave you text questions which you can then answer via video — that’s why they call it “conversational video.”

Intervue is a brand-new site that lets you post questions for people to answer.

It’s not a particularly strong list, but WeToku is a really great application.

Feedback is 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.

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March 30, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
3 Comments

The Best Posts & Articles To Learn About “Fundamental Attribution Error” & Schools

I had vaguely heard of the concept “fundamental attribution error” in relation to schools in the past, but then my valued Accomplished California Teachers colleague David B. Cohen wrote about it yesterday (by the way, if you are not subscribing to his/our ACT blog, InterAct, I’d strongly encourage you to do so, even if you don’t live in California). The same day, David Brooks referred to it in his New York Times column highlighted it in his column and explained it meant “Don’t try to explain by character traits behavior that is better explained by context.”

Justin Baeder described it this way in his Education Week blog:

…the idea that we tend to erroneously conflate actions (and our interpretation of them) with personal characteristics. Instead of concluding that a teacher isn’t very good, perhaps we should look at how many different subjects the teacher has to prepare for, how much planning time they actually have, how many reforms and disruptions they have to deal with, and so on.

It seems to me it also connects a lot to the tendency by some school “reformers” to say that any mention of the role of poverty in education challenges is just an “excuse.” They place the lion’s share of responsibility for student achievement on teachers, instead of learning about the research listed on The Best Places To Learn What Impact A Teacher & Outside Factors Have On Student Achievement.

So, I thought I’d pull together a few useful resources.

Here are my choices for The Best Posts & Articles To Learn About “Fundamental Attribution Error” & Schools:

Fundamental Attribution Error by David B. Cohen

Collecting the Wrong Data: Fundamental Attribution Error in Teaching Quality by Justin Baeder at Ed Week.

Attribution Error and the Quest for Teacher Quality by Mary Kennedy.

The comment at Attribution Error and the Quest For Teacher Quality

And, for some useful thoughts on how we teachers can apply this concept to working with students, check-out The Construction Zone.

Feedback is 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.

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March 30, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
2 Comments

Three Good Questions For Teachers To Ask Themselves (& Answer Them Here If You Feel Like It)

We ninth-grade English teachers had another great day of professional development with our school’s instructional consultant, Kelly Young at Pebble Creek Labs.

He started off the day asking us three questions:

What have you gotten better at this year?

What do you still need to figure out or work on?

What’s keeping your kids from making big time gains (that are within our control)?

It seems to me that these are good questions to ask ourselves at this time of the year (or, in fact, at anytime).

I thought I’d briefly share my responses, and invite readers to share yours in the comments section. I’ll compile everyone’s responses into a post in mid-April. Please leave your comment by April 15th. I’ll elaborate more on my responses in that post.

My responses:

What have you gotten better at this year?

I’ve gotten a lot better at teaching writing; identifying tech-related activities for our mainstream students that bring a value-added (the use of that term for discredited teacher assessments really makes me wary of using it) benefit to their academic work; showing more patience in classroom management; and differentiating instruction for students with challenges.

What do you still need to figure out or work on?

I need to do a better job at “transfer” — helping students see how they can apply what they are learning in our class to others classes and in their lives; differentiating instruction for students who have an appetite for bigger challenges; making relationship-building time for students who seem to be doing well and not have it all eaten up by those with the biggest needs; and I’ve always got to be conscious about talking less.

What’s keeping your kids from making big time gains (that are within our control)?

Our Small Learning Community (twenty teachers and three hundred students) has organized a mentorship program where a number of juniors (most are in my Theory of Knowledge class) are mentors to our ninth-graders. It’s had a tremendously positive impact on our ninth-graders, and I think it would be great if we could figure out a way to expand it in our SLC and throughout the whole school. Our SLC Lead Teacher, Rachel Schultz, has done an excellent job organizing it. Years ago, our school had was called an “Advisory” where we created time for teachers and students to do something like this, but had to end it for a variety of reasons.

Okay, now it’s your turn. How would you answer these three questions?

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March 30, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment

Memidex Is A Great Dictionary…And More!

Memidex is a very impressive dictionary, and a lot more. Jim Burke just shared it on Twitter. It tells you just about anything you want about a word. I particularly like its word origins.

I don’t think it’s particularly useful for English Language Learners, so I won’t add it to The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners. But I’ll certainly be using it, and recommending it to my Theory of Knowledge students.

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March 30, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment

Today’s Collection Of Useful School Reform Posts & Articles

Here is a “round-up” of the latest useful school reform posts and articles:

Choice schools not outperforming MPS is the headline of a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning Why School Vouchers Are A Bad Idea.

The misleading data and debate on class size is by Joanne Yatvin and appeared in The Washington Post. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About How Class Size Does Matter.

Déjà vu all over again: A lesson from the history of school reform is by Mike Rose and appeared in The Washington Post. I’m adding it to The Best Posts & Articles Explaining Why Schools Should Not Be Run Like Businesses.

Michelle Rhee’s Cheating Scandal is by Dana Goldstein. I’m adding it to The Best Posts On How To Prepare For Standardized Tests (And Why They’re Bad).

‘Value-added’ teacher evaluations: L.A. Unified tackles a tough formula is from The Los Angeles Times. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation.

Thoughts on the Failure of Merit Pay is by Diane Ravitch. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning Why Teacher Merit Pay Is A Bad Idea.

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March 30, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
5 Comments

The Best Online Virtual “Corkboards” (or “Bulletin Boards”)

Wallwisher was the first online application that let you easily place virtual post-it notes on a virtual corkboard or bulletin board, and allow you to post text, images, and/or videos on them.

This kinds of apps have many uses. I particularly like them for easy social bookmarking (my students, for example, post their favorite language-learning games on them so their classmates can try them out. I also have students use them to supplement inductive data sets (a series of pieces of information about a topic( they have categorized in the classroom. Once they categorize the information, they write a summary sentence about each category and find an image that goes with it. You can see many examples on our class blog of how they used Wallwisher to create one of these on Nelson Mandela.

Several similar sites have followed in Wallwisher’s wake, and they have been helped by periodic technical issues Wallwisher has seemed to have (recently, though, they seemed to have fixed them). I thought I’d make a list of these newcomers. I have not included any that do not allow inserting of photos or video, though. Without that ability, I don’t really think they bring much value-added benefit, but leave a comment if you think I’m wrong. I also have not included any services that charge for creating more than one bulletin board.

Here are my choices for The Best Online Virtual “Corkboards” (or “Bulletin Boards”):

Wallwisher, the granddaddy of this kinds of apps, lets you, with very, very minimal registration, create a “wall” where you can place virtual sticky-notes. You can allow others to also place notes on the board, or keep it so that only you can do so (which is what I would recommend for students). The sticky-notes can include images you grab off the web, videos, or websites, and you can add text to them (you can also just include text without adding anything else). Each sticky has a 160 character limit for text.

Corkboard Me, my personal favorite these days, is an easier and more functional Wallwisher-like tool. The site has just announced the ability to embed your virtual bulletin boards, which you are unable to do with Wallwisher. Other features include real-time collaboration and a chat room for the people collaborating. You can post images, but not videos. No registration is necessary.

Popplet is like Wallwisher on steroids. You can make an online “bulletin-board” with virtual “post-its” (called “popplets), just like in Wallwisher. And, except for the fact you have to register to use it, Popplet is just as easy and, in some ways, easier to use with a lot more functionality. With Popplet, you search for images and videos on the Web directly within the “popplet” instead of copying and pasting the url address (as you need to do in Wallwisher). You can draw within the “popplet” and it doesn’t appear to have an limit on the number of characters you can use. You can connect the “popplets.” You can also embed the whole thing.

Spaaze is similar to the others on this list, with registration is required. Everything is free now, but they say after they move from beta that they will charge for more than one bulletin board. So, I don’t know how long they’ll last on this list.

Several readers have suggest linoit. It has many of the features that the other listed ones have, though you have to register in order to use it. I didn’t include it originally on this list because the only way you can post photos from the Web is by adding a bookmarklet, which can be problematic in some school sites. But because of the obviously positive experience some readers are having with it, I’m adding it now.

Group Zap joins a long list of online virtual “corkboards.” It has some nice features, including the ability to convert your board to a PDF and being able to “drag-and-drop” images and documents from your files. You can’t add photos by their url addresses, unlike some other similar sites, and there’s a limit in the number of photos and files you can upload for free.

Feedback is 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.

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March 29, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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Do You Use An “Innovative Practice” With English Language Learners?

The National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition has announced the Innovations for English Learners series. Here’s how they describe it:

In this series, NCELA will highlight innovative practices from the field which show promise for advancing the education of English learners. The purpose of this series is for the community of EL educators to have a platform to exchange ideas and connect with other educators who have met similar challenges. We welcome submissions from schools, districts, universities or colleges, community or parent organizations, and students. Submissions will be reviewed by a panel of NCELA staff.

You can find out more information here.

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March 29, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
3 Comments

Which Neighborhood Is Better?

One of my favorite lessons each year is one where our students compare our school neighborhood with the most wealthy section of Sacramento, the “Fabulous Forties.” I’ve written extensively about this lesson of highlighting assets instead of deficits in A Lesson Highlighting Community Assets — Not Deficits. I also have the complete lesson plan, including hand-outs, in my upcoming book.

I believe that every student I’ve ever had has decided that ours school neighborhood is better. One of the elements of the lesson is writing persuasive essays about which neighborhood is better. Here are a couple of examples from this year (we’re in the middle of the unit plan).

I’ll also be publishing a slideshow soon of student-designed “perfect” neighborhoods.

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