I have written a lot about the concept of "flow" and try to apply it in my classroom. You can see an excerpt from my book chapter about it, Help Your Students Get Into the Learning Flow, as well as check out The Best Resources For Learning About "Flow." I recently read a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his then eleven-year-old son where, though he doesn’t use the word "flow," he definitely understands its importance. Here’s an excerpt:

Here are new additions to The Best Resources For International Mother Language Day: To Resurrect A Vanishing Language, Try YouTube and Indiegogo is from NPR. This language is based only on whistles is from The Week.

Here’s a great video that Jim Bentley shared on Twitter. It’s from the 1940’s and is titled "Progressive Education" and is from the 1940’s:

The BBC’s "Skillwise" site has a great collection of English games that would be accessible to Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners. I’m adding the link to The Best Beginner, Intermediate & Advanced English Language Learner Sites, and am a bit surprised it isn’t already there.

New York experience shows Common Core tests can come at a cost for underprivileged students is the headline of a new Hechinger Report article, and I sure hope a lot of California policy-makers read it. Here’s an excerpt: Pass that exam will soon be required in order to graduate from high school in New York. As state legislators discuss a replacement for the now-defunct California High School Exit Exam (see The Best Posts & Articles About Why High School Exit Exams Might Not Be A Good Idea), which has included mentions of putting test requirements in place that sound suspiciously like New York’s, let’s keep this new data very, very visible…..

StoryCorps, ABS News, NPR and a ton of other groups today announced "The Great Thanksgiving Listen" where they’re inviting high school students to interview a "grandparent or an elder" with the StoryCorps great smartphone app (see Boy Oh Boy, Christmas Has Come Early For Teachers With The New StoryCorps Mobile App!). You can get more information about the project from StoryCorps, including a "toolkit" for teachers.

© 2009 skedonk, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio As regular readers know, in addition to teaching various classes to English Language Learners and to mainstream ninth-graders, I teach the International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge course. I also regularly share TOK resources here on the blog, and I think it’s pretty popular among TOK teachers around the world. In addition, I accumulate links to articles and resources on the Delicious bookmarking site, and now have over 2,000 categorized into the all the TOK "Ways of Knowing" and "Areas of Knowledge." You can find most of them here. However, for some weird reason, not quite all of the "tags" are visible at that link. Here are direct links to the WOK and AOK resources not listed in the above link: Logic and Reason (They’re separate, but all related. I think I first started using the logic tag and later switched to reason) Indigenous Knowledge Systems Imagination Intuition (though most are still in the Emotion category) Human Sciences

This is a great short video from Google about Google Translate. The most translated words are: "How are you?" "Thank you." "I love you." It’s also a little scary to know they receive all that data from the app. I’m adding this post to The Best Sites For Learning About Google Translate & Other Forms Of Machine Translation.

Warren Berger shared this clip from Dead Poets Society this morning. It’s a great one to teach about creativity and also about thinking outside of the box, though I’m not sure what David Coleman, author of the Common Core English Language Arts Standards, would say about this quote: I’m adding it to: The Best Videos Showing "Thinking Outside The Box" — Help Me Find More The Best Sources Of Advice On Helping Students Strengthen & Develop Their Creativity

Q & A Collections: Teaching English Language Learners is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. It brings together all my Ed Week posts from the last four years on teaching English Language Learners - in one place! Here’s an excerpt from one of them: