Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Mardi Gras and Carnivals are held around the world just prior to the fasting season of Lent, which is coming right-up!

I’ve just updated The Best Sites To Learn About Mardi Gras & Carnivals.

Here are the latest additions to The Best Sites To Learn About Valentine’s Day:

When Love Is In The Year is a neat little interactive from the Tampa Bay newspaper.

Love and Romance Through The Ages is from the Virtual Museum of Canada.

How Valentine’s Day Helps the Economy shares some interesting information.

Karenne Sylvester has come-up with a great and creative idea for the next ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival on April 1st. It’s going to have a theme focused on teachers sharing lesson ideas.

You can read all about it at her post, The Carnival of English Language Lessons.

She’s encouraging bloggers and non-bloggers alike to participate, and has created a special submission form to use, which you can access at her post. So please don’t use the regular system at the blogcarnival site. Submissions are due by March 21st.

It should be a fun and useful Carnival.

In case you missed it, Shelly Terrell posted the most recent Carnival last week. You can see all previous editions here.

Check out the new post in my other blog, Engaging Parents In School, to learn about this strange but apparently true story…

I’m adding this section to The Best Websites For Teaching & Learning About New Orleans:

The city of New Orleans went wild after their football team, the New Orleans Saints, won the 2010 Super Bowl. Here are some links to see the celebration:

Improbable Win Sends New Orleans Into a Frenzy is a Wall Street Journal video.

Bourbon Street Celebrates is from CNN.
New Orleans Celebrates The Saints is also from CNN.

New Orleans Backing Its Saints

Here are some new additions to The Best Sites Where ELL’s Can Learn About The Super Bowl:

You can find the best commercials from the 2010 Super Bowl here.

TIME Magazine picks The Best and Worst Super Bowl Commercials 2010.

TIME also picks Top 10 Superbowl Ads of the Decade.

The Wall Street Journal also has a collection of Super Bowl Ads 2010.

Amazon has now added the publisher’s description of my upcoming book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work:

Great teaching is about facilitating intrinsic motivation and self-directed learning. It’s about giving students the opportunity to learn by doing and encouraging them to take risks and learn from their mistakes. These same methods and skills apply equally to the huge number of English Language Learners now in American classrooms.

Written by an award-winning practitioner, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies that Work offers educators a five-step methodology for teaching this burgeoning population. Rather than viewing these students through the typical lens of “deficits” they might have, the process helps educators recognize and use the assets ELLs bring to the classroom.

The five principles around which the process revolves are: building relationships, accessing prior knowledge through student stories, developing student leadership, learning by doing, and reflection. The book shows how these ideas can be used in all subject areas to help ELLs master both content and language using “high-order” thinking skills. In addition to providing detailed lessons, the book shares a framework teachers can use to create their own lessons, and it shows how to take advantage of technology and games as teaching tools. References to extensive research studies are included to provide evidence of effectiveness, and each lesson is linked to state standards in English Language development.

As most readers know, I have a website designed for student self-access that has over 9,000 categorized links accessible to English Language Learners (here’s a guide to it).

At one point I was verifying the links every quarter, but got a bit lazy over the past year. My daughter is now verifying each link by sight (the automatic link-checks miss lots of dead links). I will be putting the date on each page when all the links there have been verified.

So far, these pages have been checked:

English For Beginners

ESL Science

Bilingual English Exercises

I’ll keep you posted as more pages get updated.ght

My second book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work, will be published by Linworth Publishing in April.

It now has a page on Amazon, so it can be pre-ordered.

Here’s the publisher’s description of the book, as it appears on the Amazon page:

Great teaching is about facilitating intrinsic motivation and self-directed learning. It’s about giving students the opportunity to learn by doing and encouraging them to take risks and learn from their mistakes. These same methods and skills apply equally to the huge number of English Language Learners now in American classrooms.

Written by an award-winning practitioner, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies that Work offers educators a five-step methodology for teaching this burgeoning population. Rather than viewing these students through the typical lens of “deficits” they might have, the process helps educators recognize and use the assets ELLs bring to the classroom.

The five principles around which the process revolves are: building relationships, accessing prior knowledge through student stories, developing student leadership, learning by doing, and reflection. The book shows how these ideas can be used in all subject areas to help ELLs master both content and language using “high-order” thinking skills. In addition to providing detailed lessons, the book shares a framework teachers can use to create their own lessons, and it shows how to take advantage of technology and games as teaching tools. References to extensive research studies are included to provide evidence of effectiveness, and each lesson is linked to state standards in English Language development.

The introduction is rather lengthy, so I’m going to just reprint a portion here on my blog. You can download the entire introduction here.

You can also see other information on the book, including a slide presentation and a Wordle of it, at one of my previous posts.

As the publisher’s description explains, the book focuses on looking at English Language Learners through the lens of “assets” instead of “deficits,” and includes many practical ideas and lessons on how teachers can implement that perspective in the classroom.   I also use many of these same strategies in my mainstream classes.

I frame this concept through what I call the “Organizing Cycle,” ( Building Relationships, Accessing Prior Knowledge Through Student Stories, Developing Student Leadership, Learning By Doing, and Reflection), which is similar to how effective community organizers work. As many readers know, I was an organizer for nineteen years prior to becoming a high school teacher six years ago.

Obviously, I’m biased, but I believe teachers will find this book very helpful.

Here is a portion of my Introduction that explains the parts of the “Organizing Cycle”:

Building Strong Relationships with Students

Community organizers often say that “organizing” is just another word for “relationship building.” You can quickly identify people’s self-interests on the surface, such as the desire to get a better job or buy their own homes. But it is necessary to go deeper and find out what personal experiences might inspire people to seek improvements in order to develop power to create significant personal and social change. These insights can only be uncovered in the context of a genuine relationship.

We can use these self-interests, to be more of an agitator (challenging students to reflect on their own knowledge, lives, and experiences and then use these reflections to frame a vision for the future) instead of being an irritator (telling them what they should want to know and how they should learn it). Doing this successfully can help English language learner students fight past the frequent frustrations most people experience in learning a second language.

Accessing Prior Knowledge through Stories

Stories can help immigrant students make connections based on their similar experiences and help them consider alternative perspectives. These classroom conversations involve an exchange of information, not an interview or a one-way presentation, and can result in the creation of a community of learners. By developing this type of class culture, students can find that they have both more personal self-confidence and more in common with each other than they had originally thought. This combination of increased self-assurance and feeling more connected to their peers results in students feeling more comfortable taking risks, which is one of the keys, if not the key, to second language learning success.

Identifying and Mentoring Students’ Leadership Potential

Assisting students to develop the leadership skills helps them become cocreators of their learning journey. Everyone in the class, including the official educator, can be a learner and a teacher.

Patiently helping our students develop the capacity to lead helps them create their own sense of power, which dictionaries define as “the ability to act”—both individually and collectively. Developing this capacity is particularly important to English language learner students, many of whom have been uprooted from their native countries through no choice of their own, face challenges in understanding and communicating in our culture’s primary language, and can be living in lower-income communities where examples of powerlessness are obvious each day.

Learning by Doing

It’s difficult for students to feel powerful if the leadership and energy only flows from the teacher. Using Saul Alinsky’s “Iron Rule” of “never doing for someone what they can do for themselves” as a guide, we can show students how to become much more than empty vessels waiting to be filled by the educator’s input.

Community organizers describe action as the oxygen of an organization. Action is equally important to the healthy life of a classroom. We need to help students learn that people without power tend to react to rules and experiences that others create, while people with power can act to create those rules and experiences.

Having English language learners describe and interpret classroom experiences has long been considered an effective instructional strategy. Helping students discover knowledge on their own through those experiences instead of telling them information creates even richer language (and life) learning opportunities. To paraphrase Dave Kees, a talented English teacher in China: What makes for more engaging stories and conversation—going on a prepackaged tour or on an adventure?

Reflection

Many of us often define ourselves by our activities instead of the outcomes of those activities. Educators, too, can fall into the trap of substituting busyness for real progress. As T. S. Eliot once said, “We had the experience, but missed the meaning.”

When we take time to critically review our work and search for evidence of our accomplishments (both through data and personal observation), we learn how to improve and we’ll often uncover key lessons we may have missed. It’s important for educators and students alike to develop the discipline of reflection. Many often do not take the time to digest what they are doing and learning. English language learner students have to learn double the amount of other students—language and content—and are therefore even less likely to naturally incorporate this element. There’s always so much to learn!

It’s common for many groups doing good work in neighborhoods to focus all their energy on what they view as the task at hand—to build affordable housing, to develop jobs, to provide social services. In community organizing, the task at hand is providing people with the opportunity to develop relationships, relate their personal stories and traditions to what is going on now, develop themselves as leaders, shape their own learning environment, and take time to digest it all.

By focusing on these priorities, community organizing groups, in turn, are often recognized locally and nationally as extraordinarily effective organizations in getting needed services provided to low-income communities, creating affordable housing, and developing jobs that provided good wages and benefits to previously low-income people. The concentration on personal development in the context of “agitational” relationships (see the earlier discussion about the difference between “agitation” and “irritation”) can result in people gaining concrete community improvements and, much more significantly, insights and skills that can last a lifetime.

The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that similar outcomes can result by applying the steps described above to English language learner classrooms (and to other classes as well). By using these strategies in the classroom, educators can help English language learners make huge strides in their language development and in becoming lifelong learners

The posting yesterday of The Best Sites To Learn About Australia brought the total of “The Best…” lists to 400…on the dot!

You can find them in chronological order at Websites Of The Year, and divided into categories at My Best of Lists.

Though you’ll certainly find a dead link periodically in some of the older ones, I’m pretty conscientious about both adding new links to lists and getting rid of dead ones. If you do find some dead links, please let me know.

I’ve revised and updated “The Best Sites Where ELL’s Can Learn About The Super Bowl.”

Of course, I’ll be adding more resources there over the next two weeks…..

A Look At Haitian Art is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal. I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Learn About The Earthquake In Haiti.

WP Clip Art has a whole lot of attractive clip art that “…may be used for commercial as well as personal projects without attribution or linking.” I’m adding it to The Best Online Sources For Images.

Pixlr looks like a free and neat photo editor. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Online Photo-Editing & Photo Effects.

I’ve written about 1 Cast, a “one-stop shop” for online video news. I discovered that it’s not blocked by our school’s content filters, so I’m adding it to The Best Sites For News & History Videos That Won’t Get Blocked By Content Filters (At Least, Not By Ours!).

The TED Talks blog has an excellent interview with the head of TED, Chris Anderson. It’s very interesting, and includes him sharing his favorite Talks, including links. I’m adding it to The Best Teacher Resources For “TED Talks.”

Educational Origami has created Six Quick Sheets For Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy In The Classroom. Thanks to Diana Dell for the tip.

I just sent-out the February issue of my monthly email newsletter.

I’ve been sending it out for three years, and have about seven hundred subscribers now. You can see all the past issues here, and subscribe to it here.

February is Black History Month in the United States, and I’ve just updated The Best Websites To Teach & Learn About African-American History.

It has quite a few useful resources.

Groundhog Day is coming-up on February 2nd, and I’ve just updated The Best Resources For Groundhog Day.

It might be worth a visit.

Here are the most recent additions to The Best Sites To Learn About The Earthquake In Haiti:

The Wall Street Journal has a special page on the quake.

The Miami Herald has numerous slideshows on the earthquake.

The Los Angeles Times has several audio slideshows.

Disaster In Haiti is the special CBS News page on the quake.

In Haiti, Slow Relief is a New York Times video.

MSNBC has a new interactive on the earthquake.

Crime Rises as Aid Awaits Distribution is a New York Times slideshow.

Here are recent additions to The Best Sites To Learn About The Earthquake In Haiti:

Haitian Earthquake is a slideshow from MSNBC.

MSNBC also has a video report.

Devastation in Haiti after earthquake is a slideshow from The Miami Herald.

The Red Cross has information on how to help victims of the earthquake.

CBS News has a video of the quake’s aftermath.

I’m not having a good day with posting correct links. Here’s the correct link to David Kapuler’s review of my parent engagement book.

I’ll be leading two workshops at The California League Of High Schools Annual Conference in Monterey, California. The conference takes place January 15-17th.

Both my workshops will take place on Saturday.

One will take place in a computer lab:

Technology, Relationships and English Language Learners

This computer lab session will focus on the “value-added” benefits technology can bring to English Language Learners, and how tech can be used to develop and deepen face-to-face relationships. The session will help teachers understand that technology has its place, but also has to be kept in its place.

The other session will be a preview of my upcoming book, “English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work,”  which will be coming out in April.  Here’s how it’s described:

Teaching English Language Learners: Strategies that Work

This session will share research-based methods to teach English Language Learners that are used in the context of what the presenter calls the “Organizing Cycle” — Building Relationships, Accessing Prior Knowledge Through Student Stories, Developing Student Leadership, Learning By Doing, and Reflection. This process reflects the presenter’s twenty-year community organizing career prior to his becoming a teacher, and is featured in the forthcoming book, Teaching English Language Learners: Strategies That Work (Linworth Publishing). Teachers will learn practical lessons to use in the classroom. Lecture and small group discussions will be incorporated.

Just a reminder that you can find all 400 plus “The Best…” lists in two locations:

“My Best Of Series” has all of them divided by categories (Social Studies, Web 2.0, etc.)

Websites Of The Year has them listed chronologically.

You can also find links to both of these compilations on the sidebar of my blog.

Last year, and in 2007, I invited readers to share their thoughts for an annual January 1st post where people shared what they learned during the previous twelve months.

Many people responded, and I’m doing it again this year. The deadline is tomorrow.

Feel free to write one-to-three things you feel you’ve learned this year in the comments section of this post. I’m not going to give a specific restriction on their length, but please try to keep them short. Please submit them by December 28th. I’ll leave them in moderation until I include them in a January 1st post.

Also, please include a short sentence you’d like me to use to describe you.