Last year, I posted about the Starbucks Love Project. Starbucks was raising money to combat AIDS in Africa by having people from around the world sing “All You Need Is Love” and post it on the site (maybe they were contributing money everytime somebody sang it on the site? It wasn’t quite clear to me how that fundraising part worked). It was a fun excuse to get English Language Learners and other to sing.
An article in today’s Education Week talked about a program called Word Generation that researchers in Boston developed to help middle school students learn academic vocabulary. The program is comprised of a series of daily fifteen minute lessons, and they all appear to be freely available on their site.
They seem like decent lessons, though I’m wary of “parachuting” daily lessons into a classroom that are not connected to the ongoing curriculum. I’m more inclined to using a standard template for short lessons that can be easily adapted and connected to the thematic units that are being used in class. It’s on my “to do” list to write more in-depth about our academic vocabulary lessons in a future post, and it’ll certainly be in a book I’m writing (with my colleague Katie Hull) that will be coming out next year.
That said, however, I also can’t blame busy teachers who might want to use what appears to be a high-quality series of free lessons that are all set to go.
They’ve just launched a new project — the Newseum Digital Classroom. They’re still in “closed beta,” so you have to request a registration key. Even without the key, though, you can check out a lot of their preview resources.
Connect All Schools is a new organization with a zillion education “partners” and describe their purpose this way:
to connect EVERY school in the United States with the world by 2016. Through the Connect All Schools interactive website, schools share stories using text, photo and video about how they are currently connecting their students to the rest of the world through such activities as student and teacher exchanges, global issues curricula, video-conferences and “Exchanges 2.0,” the use of new media and communications technologies to expand, extend, and deepen international cross-cultural exchanges.
I tend to be a bit wary about anybody who thinks they’re going to do something with every school in a few years (I get reminded of No Child Left Behind), but it could be a good place for classes to share some of their activities to an authentic audience.
The site gives the impression it will also help connect schools to other classes around the world, but I couldn’t find any details on that. Assuming they are indeed going to provide that resource, I’ll tentatively add them to The Best Ways To Find Other Classes For Joint Online Projects.
Happily, the Learning Network will be exempt from the new Times paywall. In other words, it will continue to be free and accessible at all times, along with NY Times articles they reference in their lessons.
You can read more about how the paywall will work when it starts next week at this post.
In addition, here are two other posts you might find interesting (I sure did!):
A study by Eric Hanushek claiming that having five “great teachers” in a row can overcome the student achievement gap is used by many school “reformers” to push for unhelpful changes like the elimination of teacher tenure, using value-added assessment for teacher evaluation, and implementing teacher merit pay.
Nicholas Kristof from The New York Times (who I generally like and respect, but he now joins his fellow columnist David Brooks as ones who tend to miss the boat when it comes to writing about education issues) is the latest to bring up this myth.
This “The Best..” list is going to be a very short one. You only have to read two posts to learn why this “great teachers in a row” idea is a myth, with no connection to reality.
Here’s an embedded version of both songs from Playing For Change:
You can do a fun sing along in class with Batlyrics. It shows the lyrics on the side while playing a YouTube video of the song at the same time. Now that we can access YouTube, it’s great to use. Instalyrics is a new site that shows you the lyrics to any song very, very quickly, along with a music video that goes along with it. The lay-out is very “clean” and it replaces Batlyrics as my favorite place for music videos and lyrics.
The Festival of Holi begins on March 19th this year. To quote from the UPI, “Holi, also called the Festival of Colors, is a popular Hindu spring festival observed in India, and many other countries around the world. Holi, is celebrated by people throwing colored powder and colored water at each other.”
Last year, I wrote a post titled Students Annotating Text. In it, I shared how and why we push students so hard to annotate text — both on paper and on the web — and shared their responses to my asking them what they thought the purpose behind it was.
A History of Poverty is an animated world map showing where poverty (and prosperity) have been most present over the past two hundred years. You can narrow it down by continent or county, too. It’s from the Christian Aid charity.
After showing it to students, it could create a wealth of question-asking opportunities.
A related article on a new study was just published headlined Bilinguals See the World in a Different Way, Study Suggests. I was struck by some parts of the article and study, though not by necessarily connecting it to our English Language Learners.
In our mainstream ninth-grade English classes, some of the units we teach including having students review “glossaries” of the slang or language that people speak in the areas we’re studying — New Orleans and Jamaica. We have them do a variety of activities with it, including identifying words they like, writing postcards using the language and developing a dialogue (all this is part of our curriculum from Kelly Young and Pebble Creek Labs). In fact, tomorrow, we’ll be having our students record their short conversations using Fotobabble and post them on our class blog.
Students always love these lessons, and I think parts of this study gives me more insights into their academic value. The study talks about intentionally learning a language, but I would think even a short exposure to one, like we do in our classes, might have some comparable, though limited, benefit. Here are some related excerpts from the article:
As well as learning vocabulary and grammar you’re also unconsciously learning a whole new way of seeing the world,” said Dr Athanasopoulos. “There’s an inextricable link between language, culture and cognition.
“The benefits you gain are not just being able to converse in their language — it also gives you a valuable insight into their culture and how they think…It can also enable you to understand your own language better “
