Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

Monthly Archives: July 2011

July 5, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment

The Best Resources For Learning About The Space Shuttle

With the Space Shuttle preparing to launch on its final mission this week, I thought I’d bring together a few useful related resources.

I’ll be adding this list to A Collection Of “The Best…” Lists On Space.

Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning About The Space Shuttle:

The History of the Space Shuttle is a series of photos from The Atlantic.

A Photo History of The Space Shuttle Program is a slideshow from TIME Magazine.

Final flight to the final frontier is an infographic from The Washington Post.

30 Years of the Space Shuttle is an interactive timeline from The New York Times.

Elegance In Orbit: The Space Shuttle is a CNN video:

NASA has a special site on the Shuttle.

The Associated Press has an interactive on the Space Shuttle.

The Guardian has an older, but still useful, Shuttle interactive.

Here’s a video from MSNBC:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

How Stuff Works has lots of accessible videos on the Shuttle program.

30 Years of the Space Shuttle Program is a slideshow from The History Channel.

Around the World (About 20,000 Times) is a pretty darn impressive interactive from The Wall Street Journal.

Space Shuttle, Thirty Years of Spaceflight is a series of photos from The Denver Post.

Space shuttle launch: infographic video history of the NASA space shuttle comes from The Telegraph.

In pictures: The space shuttle comes from The BBC.

The space shuttle: 1981-2011 is a slideshow from The Washington Post.

Sizing Up Space: A Visual History is an infographic from NPR.

Here’s a great video, Space Shuttle: The complete missions:

Feedback and 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 700 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

Share|

July 5, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment

Whenever You’re Tempted To Use Punishment As A Classroom Management Tool, Remember This Comic Strip

I doubt that there are many of us out there who have not been tempted, and sometimes given into the temptation, to use punishment as a classroom management tool at times.

I’ve been guilty of it before and I’ll be guilty of it again, I’m sure.

Whenever any of us feel that temptation, though, we might want to remember today’s Pickles comic strip.

It shows what happens next — maybe not as quickly as in the comic, but eventually….

Share|

July 5, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment

Sleep Longer And Become A Better Athlete

I written quite a few posts about the importance of teen sleep (see The Best Resources For Helping Teens Learn About The Importance Of Sleep) and have written in my latest book how I use that research in classroom lessons.

Now a new study has been released specifically pointing to increased sleep leading to better athletic performances. You can read a San Francisco Chronicle story about the study, and a press release (Snooze You Win? It’s True for Achieving Hoop Dreams, Says New Study).

There are tons of benefits to sleeping longer, as I have described in my previous posts and my book. But maybe learning about this new information will provide an extra push to some of my students who have dreams of becoming star athletes or breakdancers,

Whatever works….

Share|

July 5, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

The Best Resources For Learning About Small Learning Communities

Our high school, and others around the United States, are divided into Small Learning Communities (SLC’s). The idea of SLC’s is to create “schools within schools.” We have a total population of 2000 students that are divided into six Small Learning Communities of about 350 students and twenty-five teachers (very roughly) each. Those students and teachers — for the most part — stay together year after year.

I thought it might be useful to pull together some resources giving more information about this concept:

I’ve previously posted “What Are Small Learning Communities?”

Small Learning Communities comes from Educational Leadership.

A Humble, Small Learning Community was published in District Administration.

Small Learning Communities is a research brief from The Principals’ Partnership.

The Wikipedia entry on Small Learning Communities has a lot of useful links.

Feedback and 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 700 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

Share|

July 4, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

This Week’s “Links I Should Have Posted About, But Didn’t”

I have a huge backlog of resources that I’ve been planning to post about in this blog but, just because of time constraints, have not gotten around to doing. Instead of letting that backlog grow bigger, I regularly grab a few and list them here with a minimal description. It forces me to look through these older links, and help me organize them for my own use. I hope others will find them helpful, too. These are resources that I didn’t include in my “Best Tweets” feature because I had planned to post about them, or because I didn’t even get around to sending a tweet sharing them.

Here are This Week’s “Links I Should Have Posted About, But Didn’t”:

Classroom Songs: 16 Creative Ways lists some good ways to use music in the ESL/EFL classroom. I’m adding it to The Best Music Websites For Learning English.

(Not) spreading the wealth is a pretty impressive interactive infographic from The Washington Post. I’m adding it to The Best Resources About Wealth & Income Inequality.

Five myths about the American flag comes from The Washington Post. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About Flag Day.

Are You Smarter Than a 12th Grader? is a New York Times interactive testing you on history questions given in the NAEP test.

Homework: The useful and the useless is by Valerie Strauss at The Washington Post. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About Homework Issues.

Kids Around the World offers stories of children from different countries. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About The World’s Different Cultures.

FDA’s New Cigarette Warnings is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For ELL’s To Learn About The Dangers Of Smoking.

Check-out 15 Stunning Public Health Infographics.

Is weather becoming more extreme? is a slideshow from The Boston Globe. I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Learn About Climate Change.

TIME Magazine has an excellent, and growing, number of slideshows about animals. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About Animals.

The World Trade Center Steel Program is a slideshow from TIME Magazine about the program to donate parts of the Center for memorials throughout the world. I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Help Teach About 9/11.

Inside the U.N.’s Shocking New Report on Refugees is from The Atlantic and has some accessible charts. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About World Refugee Day.

Tweet Wally is a pretty neat search engine for Twitter. You can read more about it at Tech The Plunge. I’m adding it to The Best Third-Party Twitter Apps That Don’t Require Your Password.

Here are some other regular features I post in this blog:

“The Best…” series (which now number 701)

Best Tweets of The Month

The most popular posts on this blog each month

My monthly choices for the best posts on this blog each month

Each month I do an “Interview Of The Month” with a leader in education

Periodically, I post “A Look Back” highlighting older posts that I think are particularly useful

The ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival

Resources that share various “most popular” lists useful to teachers

Interviews with ESL/EFL teachers in “hot spots” around the world.

Articles I’ve written for other publications.

Photo Galleries Of The Week

Research Studies Of The Week

Regular “round-ups” of good posts and articles about school reform

Share|

July 3, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

“Citizen U.S.A.: A 50 State Road Trip” Is On HBO On July 4th

“Citizen U.S.A.: A 50 State Road Trip” is the title of a documentary on HBO tomorrow night. It looks interesting. Here’s how the HBO website (which has a lot of information on the film) describes it:

Acclaimed filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi sets out on a road trip across America to attend naturalization ceremonies in all fifty states to meet brand-new citizens and find out why they chose America as their home. What she discovers is that America welcomes them all-the disabled, the cancer patients, homosexuals, Obama- haters, Christian missionaries, Muslim imams, Jewish rabbis, Buddhist monks, scientists with Ph.D.s (trying to find the cure for all the diseases that are plaguing us), tech giants in Silicon Valley, movie directors, race car drivers, and even a wrestler with his own action figure!

Whether these new Americans arrived here through online dating, adoption, political asylum, student and work visas, or by swimming the Rio Grande River (and remained long enough to be granted amnesty) they all came here to live the “American Dream.” And even though they are no longer visitors, our newest citizens still look at America with an outsider’s perspective; they hold up a mirror to show us how we look as a nation-and how much we take for granted. At a time when unemployment is at an all-time high, America’s manufacturing base is eroding, the federal deficit is exploding, and the poverty rate is at seventeen percent, immigrants from every other country on earth still flock here because no matter how bad it gets here, it’s still a heck of a lot better than most other places on earth.

Here’s the trailer:

The San Francisco Chronicle has written a positive review, as has the New York Post (which also published a slideshow).

Share|

July 3, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

“Not everything that matters can be measured”

The Math Problem is a very interesting post from author Jonah Lehrer on the dangers of being “data-driven.”

It’s focus is on sports statistics, which these days are called “sabermetrics,” but I think it can easily be applied to other areas, including education.

Here’s an excerpt:

Here’s my problem with sabermetrics — it’s a useful tool that feels like the answer. If we were smarter creatures, of course, we wouldn’t get seduced by the numbers. We’d remember that not everything that matters can be measured, and that success in sports (not to mention car shopping) is shaped by a long list of intangibles….

But that’s not what happens. Instead, coaches and fans use the numbers as an excuse to ignore everything else, which is why our obsession with sabermetrics can lead to such shortsighted personnel decisions. After all, there is no way to quantify the fierce attitude of a team that feels slighted, or the way even the best players can be undone by the burden of expectations, or how Kendrick Perkins meant more to the Celtics than his rebounding stats might suggest.

For reasons that remain mysterious, some teammates make each other much better and some backup point guards really piss off Ron Artest. These are the qualities that often determine wins and losses, and yet they can’t be found on the back of a trading card or translated into a short list of clever equations. This is the paradox of sports statistics: What the math ends up teaching us that is that sports are not a math problem.

Can you measure helping to ignite a student’s desire to want to continue to learn about U.S. History? Can you measure the impact on a student of seeing an adult model handling conflict calmly? Can you measure the effect of a student beginning to learn the basics of self-control for the first time?

I’m adding this post to The Best Resources Showing Why We Need To Be “Data-Informed” & Not “Data-Driven.”

Share|

July 3, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

June’s Most Popular Posts

I regularly share my picks for the most useful posts of each month. I also have tried publish a list of the month’s most popular posts, based on the number of times they are “clicked-on.” I’m very behind on that one, though.

I also share a list of Post Rank’s analysis of each month’s top posts. Post Rank uses a variety of ways to measure level of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts. I have a constantly updated “widget” on my blog’s sidebar that lists these posts, but I thought a monthly post would be helpful/interesting to subscribers who don’t regularly visit the blog itself.

Here are their rankings for the month of June:

  1. Wow, This Is Really Useful: A Bloom’s Taxonomy For Student Reflection

  2. Have Some Time This Summer? Here Are 7,000 TEDx Videos You Can Watch

  3. Help Me Understand The Significance Of This New Study That “Finds Sudden Insights Key to Learning Words”

  4. A Couple Of Useful Bloom’s Taxonomy Videos

  5. The Best Language Learning Games (That Are Not Online)

  6. The Best YouTube Channels For Learning English

  7. I Don’t Like “Accountability”

  8. Making Book Trailers With Fotobabble

  9. Here’s A Video On Self-Control I’m Showing My Students First Thing Next Week

  10. Shortcuts, School Reform & Private Foundations

  11. Interview Of The Month On The Save Our Schools March

Share|

July 2, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
2 Comments

Knovio Makes Creating An Audio/Visual Web Presentation As Easy As Pie

Knovio might end up being one of the best Web 2.0 applications of the year. You upload a PowerPoint presentation, record a presentation with your microphone and webcam, and then it’s done! It’s free, and it is not open to the public yet, but I received an invitation about five seconds after I requested it.

I’m adding it to The Best Ways To Create Online Slideshows and to The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English, and I’ll probably add it to more when it officially becomes public.

Share|

July 2, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

Two Useful School Reform Articles

Here are two recent useful school reform articles:

The rumors of our sucking at math have been greatly exaggerated comes from The Julia Group. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Getting Some Perspective On International Test Comparison Demagoguery.

Firing Line: The Grand Coalition Against Teachers comes from Dissent Magazine. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation.

Share|

July 2, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

New Education Data Source From ProPublica

ProPublica has just unveiled an impressive new interactive where anyone can get school data. It’s called The Opportunity Gap: Is Your State Providing Equal Access to Education?

You can read more about it at ProPublica’s newest news app uses education data to get more social, a post by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

I’m adding it to The Best Places To Get Reliable, Valid, Accessible & Useful Education Data.

Share|

July 2, 2011
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments

Part Sixty-Two 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 — 2010.

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

Here are the newest additions:

CREATE AN INTRIGUING KIND OF POLL: Tricider lets you write a question (without registration) and then anyone can propose an answer with supporting reasons. People can then vote on which answers they like best. Responses are not moderated, but it appears that the originator can delete them. You can see an example that Nik Peachey created: How do we encourage pedagogically sound exploitation of technology in language learning?

MAKE GUITAR MUSIC: There probably aren’t many people out there not familiar with Google’s famous Les Paul “Doodle” that let you compose music, record it, and then gave you a link to your composition. It was pretty darn neat (though, I also have to say, pretty distracting to students in the computer lab :) ) Even though Google has pulled it from its home page, you can still access it here. With luck, Google will keep it alive for a long time. If you want inspiration, you can check out 7 Les Paul Google Doodle Tunes From Mashable Readers.

CREATE AN INFOGRAPHIC: Create A Better Life Index lets you, without having to register, create an infographic emphasizing the qualities that you believe are key for a “better life” and showing how different countries in the world are doing in those areas. You can then share your infographic with others. It’s from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

MAKE AN ONLINE TUTORIAL: tildee lets you very easily create a simple step-by-step tutorial for just about anything. You can add text, maps, videos and photos (unfortunately, though, you can only upload photos — not grab them from the Web). And you don’t even have to register for the service.

SEND A MESSAGE TO JAPAN: Messages For Japan lets you easily send a message of support to survivors of the Japanese earthquake, and it translates what you write into Japanese.

COMPOSE A STAR WARS AUDIO MIXTAPE: The Star Wars Soundboard lets you pick your favorite lines from your favorite Star Wars characters and create a mixtape of them. Thanks to Wesley Fryer for the tip.

Additional suggestions are always 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 700 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

Share|