I love it when I find a new cool-tool-for-school, and that’s exactly what I ran across tonight with Answer Garden.
This great little service allows teachers to post questions for quick feedback on blogs, websites, or via email. The possibilities are limitless! Check it out, teachers. I think you’ll like it.
Everywhere, everyday schools are struggling to teach, and students struggling to learn.
But where this struggle concerns public education and English Language Learners (ELL), the challenge is multiplied exponentially because students and teachers don’t speak the same language. It’s as if ELL teachers were like the priests of old, delivering sermons from on high in an elitist, Roman tongue. Only it’s not Latin, but academic English that keeps the ELL from learning today. These words though, just as foreign today as they were back in Medieval times. Yesterday’s institutions dealt not in referrals and bad grades, however, but in heresy and death to keep the masses illiterate and docile.
Still, those mighty institutions were challenged and shook up. Remember Fredrick Douglass, Horace Mann, Sequoyah, and the Little Rock Nine? Talk about a revolution!
ELL instruction, by it’s very nature, is a rebellious act because to teach English Language Learners is to teach the very people who have historically been locked out from truth and equity -the poor, the workers.
Thus, ELL instruction is not new, but as old as the Enlightenment ideal of freedom and democracy through reason and learning.
And that’s gotta be rewarding, knowing that ELL teachers today are part of an old and noble fight… the struggle to keep this fragile democracy alive.
Frontiers of the Future (1937) – 10 min
This film made during the Great Depression was an attempt to calm fears of the future by presenting how scientists are hard at work trying to solve the problems of the universe.
Japan’s samurai history is one of my favorite topics in World History 7.0. It has action, adventure, drama, and a very high cool-facotor for young history students. For a cool look at samurai culture and their military technology check out History.com’s Samurai: Deconstructed. I think you’ll like it.
The Samurai were fearsome warriors whose traditions of honor and discipline live on in the study of jujitsu and kendo today.
Freedom: A History of US is great American History website for teachers and students alike. Thanks PBS!
“Come along on an exciting journey through Joy Hakim’s story of freedom in America. Explore a webisode and see why the promise of freedom has attracted millions of people from all over the world to come to America. Hear for yourself why generations of men, women, and children have lived for, sacrificed for, and died for that freedom. It is a story that is still unfolding today. It is your story too.”
Reasons why the world cup is better than world war include, but not limited to: (1) after it’s over players exchange jerseys not plunder, (2) vuvuzelas, though loud, are more pleasant than bombs, and (3) a world at play is simply better than a world at war, (4) add your reasons here…
Ok. I’m creating a blog for me and my students. It’s a bit overwhelming. Theres so much empty space to fill. Not sure where to begin. I’ve kind of gotten caught up on the look and feel of the blog when I should be focusing on the content itself. I just hope I can get enough of it started by the start of the school year. Wish me luck.
-Mr. H
