Group items tagged

"Index Mundi is a site that provides a huge amount of information about every nation in the world. This site is a data portal full of information, statistics, charts and maps that users will find easy to navigate because the information is all categorized and is easily accessible on the home page. The site not only offers data about individual nations but it has comparison maps and charts as well as an entire area dedicated just to the United States. With data ranging from health, to economics, to energy consumption,and so much more, Index Mundi is an amazingly useful site that just about any educator can use in the classroom."

Grades 9-12 (ages 14-18) science, health, and technology topics offer curricular links, background and a variety of hands-on activities that would be good for language building as well as content area subject matter. As usual, PBS Teachers has very high quality programs.

"Knowitall.org is ETV's educational Web portal, a collection of fun, interactive websites for K-12 students, teachers and parents." Has culture snapshots (eg, Gullah Net), how-tos, history-related features (Road Trip through Civil Rights History). jobs, health, career development resources, etc. K-12 with an emphasis on younger kids.

This site is filled with stories of interest to Adult ESL learners at many levels. Each story has a pre-reading, timed reading and audio component.

This project was designed to create leveled reading selections that are appropriate for and valued by adult learners. These materials, combined with the research-proven strategies of repeated reading and guided oral reading, aid in building learners' fluency and comprehension skills. The materials correspond to Casas 200 - 235. This project helps adults become better readers and more informed consumers, parents, employees, citizens and community members. The focus of these reading selections will be on topics such us: Civics, Employment, Housing, Health, School, Money, and Government. This project is funded in part through an EL/Civics Grant from the MN Dept. of Ed - ABE Division and mini-grant from the Minnesota Literacy Council.

"What if classroom learning was a little more active? Would university instruction be more effective if students spent some of their class time on active forms of learning like activities, discussions, or group work, instead of spending all of their class time listening? "A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences addressed this question by conducting the largest and most comprehensive review of the effect of active learning on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Their answer is a resounding yes. According to Scott Freeman, one of the authors of the new study, "The impact of these data should be like the Surgeon General's report on "Smoking and Health" in 1964-they should put to rest any debate about whether active learning is more effective than lecturing."" This is great news for teachers of EFL/ESL also.

This page shows how a student website can be created and maintained. The topic is "digital health and wellness" or "digital citizenship" but can be revised and improvised on for other topics. The plan shows how teams are created, expectations for individuals within the team, grading, tasks, etc. Great lesson planning for a problem-based learning experience. T/H to J. Brueck on Diigo in Education.

US Government guide to primary care of HIV

Has several links to video on DNA, etc.

Has several links to video on DNA, etc.

Defines 3 types of bilinguals. Helpful in defining what your students needs might be.

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are "visual learners" and others are auditory; some are "left-brain" students, others "right-brain." . . . . "The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing," the researchers concluded. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding. "What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting," Testing helps memory: The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call "desirable difficulty," is evident in daily life.

Offers ESL educators ready to use media-rich lesson plans from Northern California Public Broadcasting on a range of useful themes: health, eco-litereacy, immigration, the green economy, financial literacy etc.

Nice teaching about the new food pyramid, but exceptionally dense reading--can be done in small parts

Movement and mindfulness. A good break that stimulates minds and bodies. Hundreds of videos to dance to, or solve a puzzle, or learn something.

"The participants were given an intelligence test in 1947 at the age of 11 and were retested in their early 70s, between 2008 and 2010. Of the participants, 262 said they were able to communicate in at least one language other than English. Of those, 195 learned the second language before the age of 18, while 65 learned the language after this age. Researchers found that those who spoke two or more languages had significantly better cognitive abilities in later life, compared to what would be predicted from their performance in the tests at age 11. " However, it might be that people who learn a second language also perform many other brain-activating functions throughout their lives.