New Teacher Advice - ‘Hold On To Your Optimism & Idealism’ is the title of my latest Education Week Teacher column. Allison Zmuda, Jenny Edwards, Kelly Young, Maurice J. Elias, and Emily Geltz contribute their guest responses sharing advice new teachers, and many readers do the same. Here are some excerpts:

Here’s a short video infographic that would be accessible and engaging to English Language Learners:

© 2007 Elana Centor, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio I’ve shared many Harvard Business Review articles over the years - in fact, when I searched by blog I found 94 results. They usually only have a limited number you can access before you hit their paywall. However, they have just announced that all their content is available during the summer — all you have to do is register. Start reading, and you might want to start with the 94 articles I’ve already recommended! http://t.co/B1hqeye6Y7 is unlocked for the summer. Just register to get unlimited free access http://t.co/no4b0GfZDL pic.twitter.com/X5xGaKMpO0 — Harvard Biz Review (@HarvardBiz) July 8, 2015

Here are two new addition to The Best Websites For Creating Online Learning Games: eQuiz Show lets you easily create online Jeopardy-like games without requiring registration. There are already a number of similar tools on the list, but you can never have too many because who knows what School District content filters will block and what they will let through. Thanks to Alison Rostetter, I learned about Teachers-Direct. They have two styles of games you can create without registering. One is called Quiz-Busters. The other is sort of interesting. I’m not a big fan of Word Searches, and view them as basically busy work. At this site, you can create a Word Search - with a twist. Instead of listing the words students have to find, you list sentences with a blank and the students have to come up with the word and find it. I wouldn’t spend any teacher time on creating one, but I could see having students use it to create ones for classmates to play now-and-then.

© 2014 Kevin Dooley, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio I have periodically shared links to lessons on using art as a language-learning activity, and have published some of my own. I thought it would be useful to start compiling them here, and to invite readers to contribute what I hope are a whole lot more. I’m excluding music lessons from this list since I have several separate ones for them: The Best Music Websites For Learning English The Best Online Sites For Creating Music The Best Online Karaoke Sites For English Language Learners Not "The Best," But "A List" Of Music Sites The Best Places To Find Lyrics On The Web The Best Sites For Ideas On Making Simple Musical Instruments You might also be interested in The Best Resources Discussing The Importance Of Art In Education — Help Me Find More. Here is a beginning Best Resources For Using Art As A Way To Teach & Learn English: Videos: Using Art As A Language-Learning Activity Using art in the classroom is from ELT-Cation. Five Reasons to Teach English Using Art Art Least is "A site that explores art & creativity in ELT." Chain Drawings is a nice lesson from The British Council. From my NY Times posts for ELLs: Students separate run-on sentences in this interactive about International Dance Day, and use it as a model for creating their own.  In addition, they can view a variety of dance videos and write a compare/contrast essay. Developing English Language Skills through Dance from ArtsConnection on Vimeo. @Larryferlazzo Here are some resources 4using art in ELA http://t.co/xDdAUxBi3R & http://t.co/4fMISyCUo8 pic.twitter.com/l50kCaPoay — Trevor Bryan (@trevorabryan) July 9, 2015 I’m looking forward to lots of new suggestions from readers!

‘Culturally Responsive Teaching': An Interview With Zaretta Hammond is the headline of my latest column at Education Week Teacher. Here are some excerpts:

Big news today here in California: California now has more Latinos than whites for the first time since it was part of Mexico. Here’s an excerpt from that Fusion article (followed by a tweet showing that Texas isn’t far behind): .@washingtonpost: In TX, whites should be outnumbered by Hispanics by end of this decade http://t.co/KFrunE9t9l pic.twitter.com/SEeJAkvlOG — Evan Smith (@evanasmith) July 8, 2015

© 2015 Steve Davis, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio Shaun Allison has written an exceptional post and created a great slideshow about the growth mindset. He graciously gave me permission to share his slideshow here, but I’d also strongly encourage you to check out not only yesterday’s blog post, but past ones, too. I’m adding this resource to The Best Resources On Helping Our Students Develop A "Growth Mindset." Growth mindset dhs conf from shaunallison

Every month I make a few short lists highlighting my choices of the best resources I through (and learned from) Twitter, but didn’t necessarily include them in posts here on my blog. I’ve already shared in earlier posts several new resources I found on Twitter — and where I gave credit to those from whom I learned about them. Those are not included again in post. If you don’t use Twitter, you can also check-out all of my "tweets" on Twitter profile page. You might also be interested in The Best Tweets Of 2015 - So Far. [View the story "July’s (2015) Best Tweets — Part Two" on Storify]

© 2007 Kevin Dooley, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio The Wall Street Journal just published an article about different chat applications and decided to end it with a couple of paragraphs about our experiment with using WhatsApp this year (see Here’s How We’re Using "WhatsApp" For Language-Learning). Here’s the part about us: At Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif., teachers use WhatsApp to help non-English-speaking students learn the language. Most students already had the app, so teachers created a group chat for the class. Teachers pose a daily question in English by text and audio message to the group, giving students until the morning to respond. Larry Ferlazzo, who has taught English for nonnative speakers for 11 years at the inner-city school, says WhatsApp lets students speak and write their answers. "Both features are important for learners of a second language," he says.Mr. Ferlazzo says it would be challenging to use Facebook in a similar way. "You’d have to all ‘friend’ everybody else," he said. "That might put unnecessary pressure on students to friend their teachers." By the way, if you click on the link to The Wall Street Journal article, you’ll find that it’s behind a paywall. However, here’s a trick that you might or might not know: The Journal has it set up that you can access any of their articles if you get to it via a search engine. So, you just find the headline of any article you want — in this case, "Chat Apps Take a Swipe at Facebook" - paste it into a search engine, click the link, and you can read the whole thing.