Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

Monthly Archives: May 2011

May 7, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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Next ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival

Eva Buyuksimkesyan, who’s hosting the next ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival on September 1st, has just announced that the theme for that Carnival will be “Warmers, Fillers and First Week Activities.” Great timing!

You can contribute a post to it by using this easy submission form. If the form does not work for some reason, you can send the link to me via my Contact Form. You can also communicate directly with Eva.

Shelly Terrell recently posted The Young Learners Edition (23rd) of the ESL/EFL/ELL Carnival and, of course, she’s done an excellent job. You definitely want to take a look at it.

The November 1st edition will be hosted by Berni Wall. Let me know if you might be interested in hosting future editions.

You can see all the previous editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival here.

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May 7, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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“U.S. Warns Schools Against Checking Immigration Status”

“U.S. Warns Schools Against Checking Immigration Status” is the headline of a New York Times article this morning. Here’s how it begins:

Federal officials issued a memorandum to the nation’s school districts on Friday saying it was against the law for education officials to seek information that might reveal the immigration status of children applying for enrollment.

Civil liberties advocates and others have complained in recent months that many school districts are seeking children’s immigration papers as a prerequisite for enrollment. Some state and local officials have also considered bills to require prospective students to reveal their citizenship or immigration status.

It was clearly necessary for the federal government to issue this memorandum. And that is sad….

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May 6, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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Today’s Collection Of Good School Reform Posts

Here are some good recent school reform-related posts:

Mathematical Intimidation: Driven by the Data is by John Ewing, president of Math For America. He provides a good critique of value-added assessment. Here’s an excerpt:

Whether naïfs or experts, mathematicians need to confront people who misuse their subject to intimidate others into accepting conclusions simply
because they are based on some mathematics. Unlike many policy makers, mathematicians are not bamboozled by the theory behind VAM, and they
need to speak out forcefully. Mathematical models have limitations. They do not by themselves convey authority for their conclusions. They are tools, not magic. And using the mathematics to intimidate—to preempt debate about the goals of education and measures of success—is harmful not only to
education but to mathematics itself.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation.

The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System appears in Forbes. I’m adding it to The Best Resources To Learn About Finland’s Education System.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote a letter to American teachers this week. Aaron Pallas, in return, wrote a brilliant piece in The Washington Post titled What Arne Duncan was (maybe) thinking in his letter to teachers.

Value-Added Evaluation & Those Pesky Collateralized Debt Obligations by Karl Hess appeared in Education Week. The comments are a “must-read,” too. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation.

Is Poverty the Key Factor in Student Outcomes? is from The Texas Observer. I’m adding it to The Best Places To Learn What Impact A Teacher & Outside Factors Have On Student Achievement.

Free-Market Think Tanks and the Marketing of Education Policy is by Kevin Welner and appeared in Dissent. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About The Role Of Private Foundations In Education Policy.

Three Cups of Cynicism is by Nancy Flanagan, and appeared in Education Week. It’s a “must-read” with great insight.

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May 5, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
3 Comments

Interview Of The Month: James Farmer, Founder Of Edublogs

As regular readers know, each month I interview people in the education world about whom I want to learn more. You can see read those past interviews here.

Today, James Farmer, founder and CEO of Edublogs, has agreed to answer a few questions. This blog (and all my class blogs), along with hundreds of thousands of other education-related blogs, are hosted by Edublogs. As regular readers know, I’m a big fan.

Can you tell us a little about yourself — where you live, how and why did you start Edublogs, and anything else you’d like to share?

I’m based in Melbourne, Australia where I’ve lived since January 2000 having grown up in Birmingham UK, gone to Uni at Hull (also UK) and taught for a year and a half in Tokyo.

We’re now based in Albert Park, Melbourne, where I’m also moving to in about a month with my partner Lol, step-daughter Ibby and my daughter Emi.

Oh, and I’m 35 and a bit too obsessed with football (I’m a goalkeeper).

But enough about me…

I started Edublogs back in 2005 – here’s the earliest archive.org homepage, we’ve come a bit since then :)

Basically I was setting up and hosting blogs for lots of different educators, as part of my interest in using blogs in education and separately from my work as a lecturer in education design at Deakin University (they not only wouldn’t help, I even got an official warning that I should not be encouraging their use!)

Naturally I was using WordPress – and then this amazing product called WordPress MU (now Multisite) came onto the scene, I’d bought the domain edublogs.org a few months earlier, just as it seemed like a cool domain… so I put them together… and the rest, as they say, is history.

Edublogs is actually the oldest MU site on the web – predating WordPress.com by a few weeks :)

It’s also the second largest too – along with Edublogs Campus we host well over a million blogs.

What would you say are the three most important things you’ve learned since you’ve begun Edublogs?

It’s been a while :)

I guess in terms only of Edublogs, they would be, in no necessary order:

- Doing something that you are passionately interested in is a great start for any project, I honestly don’t think I could really have gotten anything done or, in fact, do anything in the future that I didn’t really care about. Of course there comes a point where your interests shift (for example, I’m no longer a teacher) but at that point you better hire some folk who are passionately interested in it! Sue and Ronnie are the backbone of what we do now, they both rock out and I’m very lucky to be able to work with both of them.

- You’ve got to be generous, and you’ll receive what you give back, but you cannot be utopian and there comes a point where you need to recognize the value of what you offer in order to make it sustainable.

I was utterly committed to providing a platform that gave people the world for basically nothing (apart from generous ‘supporter’ donations by committed users, for a very long time – essentially paid for by institutions using Edublogs Campus and my other work at Incsub.

But it became apparent that this just wasn’t manageable $s wise and so I did a bit of a backflip, reducing features and introducing some advertising for non-paying users – albeit at the cost of a coffee p/month for a whole class of blogs – but it was that that’s really made Edublogs what it is today, as it gave us the ongoing financial resources to not just carry on but improve and expand.

It was a bloody hard decision, and I got roundly panned by a lot of folk, but I believe that we offered and have consistently improved upon since then a great product for very little cost that really meets the needs of educators the world over.

Basically, you’ve got to give, give and give again – help people, teach them and care for them… but at the same time recognize your value and and how, without a sustainable financial model, you’re not going to be able to do the good which was you main intention in the first place.

Goodwill and fresh air only goes so far :)

What’s been your biggest success and your biggest mistake since you began?

I think one of my biggest successes was figuring out how to set up hosting, install WordPress MU and start Edublogs… I hadn’t even touched a server until under a year prior!

But realistically, I think the biggest deal was leaving my day job and then, painful as it was (see above) turning Edublogs into a sustainable and growing business. I want much, much more for it, but fundamentally having started and continue to run the World’s largest education blogging platform is a pretty cool thing to feel like you’ve done.

In terms of mistakes, gah, almost too many to mention.

Probably, on reflection, it was making some v poor decisions regarding hosting – old school edublogs users might remember that we made Twitter look good when it came to downtime :/ Not fun. Essentially what I was doing was tyrying to get a managed hosting company (peer1) to sort out a 7 server cluster – whereas in fact I was much better off with unmanaged (serverbeach, actually owned by peer1) and hiring a great sysadmin.

There are still improvements we can make, and we’re working on them all the time, but I have less sleepless nights about uptime these days!

Could you share some future plans/hopes you might have for Edublogs?

Well, just around the corner we’ve got a massive upgrade, which will bring a whole heap of new features :)

And then we’re going to really start going for it – you can look forward to integrated wikis, straight from your blog, chatrooms and maybe even some serious online learning environment tools.

Making Edublogs almost a one stop shop for all your online teaching and learning tools… imagine that!

Heck, we’re even considering setting up a system that would allow teachers to use Edublogs to run paid courses or offer paid resources for download – I’d love to know what your readers (and you :) might think of that.

And that’s just for starters… all in all 2011 and beyond is going to be a very, very exciting time for Edublogs!

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share?

Probably one of the most significant things is that I recently brought Incsub and especially WPMU DEV – The WordPress Experts under the same roof as Edublogs – so the number of dedicated resources for Edublogs just expanded about 300% – this is going to enable us to do some great, great work.

Thanks, James!

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May 5, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment

Instablogg

Instablogg is a super-easy, super-fast way for students, teachers or anybody to create a webpage, and it doesn’t require registration. You can learn more about it at Richard Byrne’s blog.

I’m adding it to A Few Simple Ways To Introduce Reluctant Colleagues To Technology, where it joins several similar tools.

That “The Best..” list, incidentally, is part of a broader collection of lists I’ve titled My Best Posts For Tech Novices (Plus A Few From Other People).

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May 5, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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Wow! These Are Wild Visualizations Of Colors Across Cultures

In The Best Sites For Learning About The World’s Different Cultures, I share an infographic on What Colors Mean Across Cultures.

I’m now adding two similar infographics, though these are interactive. They look pretty neat though, I have to say, they may bee a little too wild for some students to easily understand (well, they were tricky for me, at least). And they both have the same title — Interactive Colors In Culture. And here’s the other one.

Thanks to Information Aesthetics for the tip.

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May 5, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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The Best Resources For Learning About The “Freedom Riders”

I’m going to begin this “The Best…” list with an excerpt from NPR:

Fifty years ago today, 13 activists piled on a bus headed south to test new laws against segregation. The group of “Freedom Riders” that left Washington, D.C., that day would be one of many to confront racial discrimination in public transportation.

You might also be interested in these other “The Best..” lists:

The Best Websites To Teach & Learn About African-American History

The Best Websites For Learning About Martin Luther King

The Best Sites To Learn About The Greensboro Sit-Ins (It’s The Fiftieth Anniversary)

The Best Sites For Learning About Protests In History

Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning About The “Freedom Riders”:

PBS has a huge Freedom Riders website with tons of resources. They’ll be showing a film on the Freedom Riders later this month.

LIFE has a slideshow on the Freedom Riders.

Ahead Of Anniversary, Freedom Riders Remember comes from NPR.

Slideshow: Remembering the Freedom Riders

The New York Times has a slideshow on The Freedom Riders.

The Freedom Riders, Then and Now is from The Smithsonian, and includes a photo and video gallery.

Oprah Winfrey had nearly 180 Freedom Riders on her show today, and you can see many video excerpts here.

Here’s a video report from ABC News on the anniversary:

50 years after the Freedom Riders is a Washington Post slideshow.

Freedom Riders inspire new generation of Arab protest leaders is from CNN.

The Denver Post has published a great collection of photos of the Freedom Riders: The 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Riders.

Freedom Riders remember is a slideshow from The Washington Post.

Additional suggestions are 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 over 675 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

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May 4, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment

“Lyrics Gaps” Is A Good Tool For ELL’s

Lyrics Gaps lets you choose a song and the language you want it sung in and then gives you the option of seeing/hearing it in different modes — karaoke, beginner, intermediate, expert. Apart from karaoke mode, you’re then shown a YouTube video of the singer, along with the lyrics on the side including blanks (fill-in-the-gap).

I especially like the beginner mode, which provides several options to chose to complete the sentences. The higher levels don’t give any hints.

I’m adding it to The Best — And Easiest — Ways To Use YouTube If, Like Us, Only Teachers Have Access To It.

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May 4, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
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The Most Effective Thing I’ve Done To Prepare Students For Standardized Tests

We’ve recently begun our two week session of state testing. I’ve written many posts about preparing for these tests (see The Best Posts On How To Prepare For Standardized Tests (And Why They’re Bad)). Unfortunately, because of space limitations, the chapter I wrote on dealing with state tests was pulled from my newest book and won’t be published until next year in its sequel.

However, I did want to share what is clearly the most effective thing I’ve done to prepare students for standardized tests — apart, of course, from teaching a good curriculum.

Plenty of research shows that student motivation plays a huge role in test results. I’ve previously posted about Angela Duckworth and her research into “grit” (perseverance). In fact, my newest book has a complete lesson plan on that topic. Basically, a fair amount of research has shown that grit is a key, perhaps THE key, quality essential to life success.

Because of what students have learned through that lesson, I have been able to talk about the state tests (and many other topics) in that context. I am very clear with them that I do not believe that the tests provide any kind of accurate measurement of their intelligence. I do remind them, though, about what we have learned about grit, and we talk about trying their best on the test as just another opportunity for them to develop that quality and show themselves that they have it by taking it seriously, not just “bubbling” in answers, checking things twice, etc.

There are a number of other things we do related to the test — many which you’ll find described in my “The Best…” lists on tests that I cited earlier in this post. But it’s clear to me that this idea of “grit” has had the most impact on many levels. I see it as they are taking the tests and, when I talk with other teachers and they tell me when their students are done, it appears that most of mine take at least a half hour more than other classes to complete the tests.

I like it because I’m honest with students and don’t make-up reasons for why it’s important for them to try hard at the test, and that the motivation to do well comes more from them. It actually turns the tests into something meaningful — and that something is much, much more important than what the ultimate scores say.

Of course, there are also far more meaningful ways to develop grit, but we play the hand we are dealt…

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