© 2008 Martijn.Munneke, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio Saturday is the twentieth anniversary of the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica. Notwithstanding Russia’s U.N. veto to labeling it an act of genocide, here are new additions to The Best Resources For Learning About Genocide: How to Teach About Genocide and Mass Atrocity is from Education Week. 20 Years Since the Srebrenica Massacre is a photo gallery from The Atlantic. Srebrenica Massacre, After 20 Years, Still Casts a Long Shadow in Bosnia is from The New York Times.

© 2010 Paul Townsend, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio Here’s the latest edition of this every-weekend feature . These are the posts appearing this blog that received the most "hits" in the preceding seven days (though they have originally been published on an earlier date). You might also be interested in Most Popular Posts In 2015 - So Far and Eighth Anniversary Of This Blog — What Have Been My Most Popular Posts? Here they are: 1. "Actively Learn" Looks Like A New Tool My Students Will Be Using A Lot 2. "SuperTeacherTools" Looks Like A Great Site For Creating Online Learning Games 3. Two More Tools For Making Online Learning Games 4. The Best Popular Movies/TV Shows For ESL/EFL 5. The Best Resources For Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy In The Classroom

© 2006 urban_data, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio I’ve written a lot in my books and on this blog about goal-setting with students (see The Best Posts On Students Setting Goals) and what I do in the classroom. A new study has just been published that, once again, reinforces previous research documenting goal-setting’s positive effects on student motivation and achievement. This one has a a couple of twists, though, that sets it apart from other research. First, the results of the goal-setting experiment with college students (from NPR’s report, The Writing Assignment That Changes Lives): [it] showed a powerful positive effect with at-risk students, reducing the dropout rate and increasing academic achievement. Secondly, what the three-part, two-and-one-half hour intervention was (this comes from the study itself, which is NOT behind a paywall) - I’ve copied and pasted snippets from each step: Step 1 included a series of exercises that required students to free-write for specified amounts of time (e.g., 1-2 min, 10 min) about (a) their ideal future, (b) qualities they admired in others, (c) things they could do better, (d) their school and career futures, (e) things they would like to learn more about, and (f) habits they would like to improve (i.e., related to school, work, relationships, health). This initial "fantasy" step was intended to allow participants the chance to consider a number of possible futures and toidentify the ones that were most desirable. Step 2 asked students to examine the result of their fantasizing about the future and to extract seven or eight specific goals that could be pursued to realize the desired state. Step 3 required students to evaluate their goals by ranking them in order of importance, detailing specific reasons for pursuit and evaluating the attainability of each goal within a self-specified time frame. Step 4 asked students to write about the impact that achieving each goal would have on specific aspects of their lives and the lives of others. Steps 5, 6, and 7 helped students to elaborate on their specific plans for goal pursuit. Finally, Step 8 asked students to evaluate the degree to which they were committed to achieving each goal. Here are what I view as the unique "twists" this process takes that sets it apart from other goal-setting experiments I’ve written about, and used: Steps 2,3,5,6,7 all are very similar to those previous studies and what I have used with students. Steps 1 and 4, though, are new angles that neither I or other researchers have tried previously. In addition, another element that stands out is that they didn’t appear to do any follow-up with students (which I do) by having them regularly evaluate their progress towards achieving their goals — it appears to be a one-shot deal that, nevertheless, had a significant longer-lasting impact. The researchers call their entire process "past authoring" and "future authoring." Of course, most goal-setting studies have already demonstrated the valued of students setting them (on a side note, this study has a nice section summarizing previous research). I guess there’s no way of knowing if this experiment’s "twists" had a positive impact on the results, or if just the more general idea and practice of setting goals themselves was the cause of positive student impact. But it seems to me that adding Steps 1 and 4 to a student goal-setting process couldn’t hurt, so I’ll probably give it a try next school year.

© 2005 Bruce Irving, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft will be arriving at Pluto shortly. You can access tons of visuals and infographics on the mission at a special Pinterest page NASA has created about the mission. Images of Pluto From NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft is from The New York Times. Pluto comes into focus is a really cool interactive from ABC in Australia. The Journey to Pluto is from The Wall Street Journal. From Pluto to the Sun is also from The WSJ. Humanity reaching out with New Horizons is an interactive from The Washington Post. And here’s a neat video the National Space Society has created: Here’s one from Vox: I once showed Pluto to Pluto. He looked delighted. Or maybe that’s his reaction to everything. pic.twitter.com/mhLZ5t7LoN — Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) July 8, 2015 You might also be interested in a ton of "Best" lists related to space you can find here. This is just a small sample: The Best Sites For Learning About Planets & Space The Best Sites To Learn About The Hubble Telescope The Best Images Taken In Space

This Year’s Most Popular Q & A Posts! is my latest post over at Education Week Teacher. If you scroll past the top eight from this year, I’ve also listed several posts from previous years that have enduring popularity and received many visits this school year. Here are two excerpts from the posts on the list:

Here’s a clip from last night’s PBS NewsHour: You might also be interested in Vox’s piece titled A century of research says Donald Trump is wrong about immigrants and crime.

The All-Nite Images via Compfight Here are new additions to A Collection Of Useful Posts, Articles & Videos On Race & Racism - Help Me Find More: The Dylann Roofs I Have Known is by Liz Prather at the Center For Teaching Quality. Dear White Teacher http://t.co/9YIy5RQQFH pic.twitter.com/qfSU35mRXP — Rethinking Schools (@RethinkSchools) July 10, 2015 Thousands Of Black Students Attend Schools Honoring Racist Leaders http://t.co/BoWRmPa7wo pic.twitter.com/1jGGPYgtgp — HuffPost Graphics (@HuffPostGraphic) July 1, 2015 What's the psychological toll of racism? http://t.co/AFCNyrUuiJ — NYT Magazine (@NYTmag) June 24, 2015

In yet another attempt to get at the enormous backlog I have of sites worth blogging about, I’ve recently begin a regular feature called "The Week In Web 2.0." (you might also be interested in The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education In 2015 - So Far). I also sometimes include tech tools that might not exactly fit the definition of Web 2.0: I learned about Quizalize from David Kapuler. It seems like a simple and useful tool for creating an online quiz, though it also seems like a clone of Kahoot. Unfortunately, it also has Kahoot’s big drawback — when students are taking the quiz, though teachers can see the results, students cannot see how they are "ranking" compared to their classmates, which eliminates one of the best potential game features. Fortunately, Quizziz does have that element which, obviously, has to be used with care so that students facing more challenges don’t feel bad if they are not "winners." I usually handle that by pairing students up. But I’m still adding Quizalize to The Best Ways To Create Online Tests because you never know what sites will be blocked by District filters and it’s always helpful to have options. Animaps is a new tool for created an sequential series of points on a map — in another words, an animated video of a trip, a series of events & where they took place from literature or history, etc. It seems very easy to use. You can read more about it at Richard Byrne’s blog. I’m adding it to The Best Map-Making Sites On The Web. Chisel is a simple way to create visually attractive quotations to share online. Here’s a sample of one I created in seconds: I’m adding it to The Best Tools For Creating Visually Attractive Quotations For Online Sharing.

© 2005 upyernoz, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio The United Nations has declared that July 11th is World Population Day. You might be interested in The Best Resources For Learning About Our World’s Population Of 7 Billion.

I’m adding this video to The Best Resources For Learning About Human Trafficking Today. Unfortunately, the narrator talks pretty fast, so it will not be easy for English Language Learners to keep up….