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.

© 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….

Every year I identify my personal favorite posts, and it’s time for my mid-year selection. You can see my choices for each of the past eight years here. Here are My Favorite Posts In 2015 — So Far: Here are some of my favorite "The Best…" lists from this year (by the way, the total lists I’ve published reached 1,450 this year): The Best Articles (And Blog Posts) Offering Practical Advice & Resources To Teachers In 2015 - So Far All My BAM Radio Shows - Linked With Descriptions The Best Movie/TV Scenes Demonstrating Metacognition - Help Me Find More The Best & Most Useful Free Student Hand-Outs Available Online - Help Me Find More The Best Posts On Reading Strategies & Comprehension - Help Me Find More! The Best Resources About Inductive Learning & Teaching I also wrote quite a few posts for The New York Times on teaching English Language Learners (you can see them all here) that I think are quite useful. By the way, I’ll be writing for a fourth year starting in September and, insanely, I will be going back to doing it weekly instead of monthly. I had several articles published elsewhere, including some excerpts from my latest book on student motivation that were surprisingly popular: Help Your Students Get Into the Learning Flow What Motivates A Student’s Interest in Reading and Writing Creating the Conditions for Student Motivation Strategies for Helping Students Motivate Themselves The real stuff of schooling: How to teach students to apply knowledge Why Viewing Classroom Management as a Mystery Can Be a Good Thing Teachers: What we want everyone to know about working in our high-needs school And here are a few other posts from this blog that I thought were particularly useful: Jigsaw Puzzles As A Language-Learning Activity "Cash" For Good Student Behavior - Without An Exit Strategy - Is Not The Best Classroom Management System Here’s My Chapter On Elements Of A Successful Lesson, Along With Student Hand-Outs THEY Use To Teach All Student Hand-Outs From My New Student Motivation Book Now Online For Free No, The "Cone Of Experience" Is Not "Research-Based" & Yes, Some People Debunking It Have Way Too Much Time On Their Hands Last, but not least, I think this relatively short video of me talking about student motivation is one educators might find helpful:

© 2013 H. Michael Karshis, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio Mandela Day is on July 18th. Here’s a description of the day: Nelson Mandela International Day was launched in recognition of Nelson Mandela’s birthday on 18 July, 2009 via unanimous decision of the UN General Assembly. It was inspired by a call Nelson Mandela made a year earlier, for the next generation to take on the burden of leadership in addressing the world’s social injustices when he said that "it is in your hands now". It is more than a celebration of Madiba’s life and legacy. It is a global movement to honour his life’s work and act to change the world for the better. You might be interested in The Best Sites For Learning About Nelson Mandela.

© 2012 fotografeleen, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio I’ve published quite a few posts and "Best" lists related to teaching writing, and I thought it would be useful to me and to readers to bring them all together: The Best Posts On Writing Instruction The Best Online Tools That Can Help Students Write An Essay The Best Websites For K-12 Writing Instruction/Reinforcement The Best Places Where Students Can Write Online The Best Sites For Grammar Practice Not "The Best," But "A List" Of Mindmapping, Flow Chart Tools, & Graphic Organizers The Best Resources For Researching & Writing Biographies The Best Resources For Learning How To Write Response To Literature Essays The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An "Authentic Audience" The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis The Best Online Resources To Teach About Plagiarism The Best Resources For Learning Research & Citation Skills The Best Online Resources For Helping Students Learn To Write Persuasive Essays The Best Spelling Sites The Best Sites For Gaining A Basic Understanding Of Adjectives The "Best" Sites For Helping Students Write Autobiographical Incident Essays The Best Sites To Learn "Feelings" Words The Best Sites For ELL’s To Learn About Punctuation The Best Resources To Help Students Write Research Essays The Best Sites For Learning To Write A Story The Best Writing Advice From Famous Authors The Best Resources On Punctuation The Best Ways To Use Mistakes When Teaching Writing The Best Funny Videos To Help Teach Grammar - Help Me Find More The Best Video Clips On The Benefits Of Writing Well — Help Me Find More

© 2012 Julie Jordan Scott, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio The Key to Rereading is the headline of a new article in The New York Review of Books. As every educator in the United States knows, rereading a text is a hallmark of the close reading strategy emphasized by Common Core Standards. This passage in the article sounds profound, but after rereading it several times, I’m still not sure if it really makes any sense. He suggests that reading something new creates a "lock" in the brain concealing its true meaning that can only be opened by a "key" created by rereading the text. I’ve reread it a number of times, and still can’t figure out what the difference is between that analogy and one of looking at the text as a lock that can only be opened by a key developed by the brain a second time that it is read. What am I missing - if anything? "When we perceive something new for the first time we cannot really perceive it because we lack the appropriate structure that allows us to perceive it. Our brain is like a lock maker that makes a lock whenever a key is deemed interesting enough. But when a key—for example, a new poem, or a new species of animal—is first met, there is no lock yet ready for such a key. Or to be precise, the key is not even a key since it does not open anything yet. It is a potential key. However, the encounter between the brain and this potential key triggers the making of a lock. The next time we meet or perceive the object/key it will open the lock prepared for it in the brain." It’s an elaborate theory and in fact the reader turns out to be the philosopher and psychologist Riccardo Manzotti. Intriguing above all is the reversal of the usual key/lock analogy. The mind is not devising a key to decipher the text, it is disposing itself in such a way as to allow the text to become a key that unlocks sensation and "meaning" in the mind.