ESL etc.

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In this podcast I talk about what I’ve been doing for the past several months. I talk a bit about my time at Dancing Rabbit, an community based around environmental sustainability with a website full of photos and articles. I also talk about two online jobs, as a tutor for TalkBean.com and as […]

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“Dancing Rabbit is an ecovillage set amid the hills and prairies of rural northeastern Missouri. Our goal is to live ecologically sustainable and socially rewarding lives, and to share the skills and ideas behind that lifestyle.”
I spent three weeks at Dancing Rabbit, and had an amazing time. Folks were very welcoming, and I learned […]

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“Take your TV, your DVD player, your video iPod, your XBOX 360, your laptop, your PSP, and say goodbye to them all for seven days.”
Mental Detox Week invites people to unplug for a week. Formerly known as TV Turnoff Week, it is promoted by Adbusters and makes an engaging topic for discussion and journaling […]

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I was just going through some files, and I found a bunch of links to ESL / EFL activities and materials that deal with global issues. Some are electronic textbooks, while others are in article form. I also added all of these to the global issues activities page in my collection of links for […]

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Time Magazine has a slideshow showing photos of 15 families alongside a week’s supply of food. Each pictures is accompanied by information about the country in which it was taken, the amount of money that the family typically spends on food per week, and a favorite recipe of two. The images are taken […]

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In Feed,M. T. Anderson describes a dystopic future, in which the majority of Americans are continually online, via neural implants. The feed supplies a constant stream of advertisements and entertainment options, while keeping tabs on the users consumption patterns.
The story follows two high school students, one of whom (atypically) questions the value of the […]

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My interest in videogames as tools for teaching global issues has been waning a bit, but I just saw Sim Sweatshop, a game that attempts to let players experience life in a sneaker sweatshop. Throughout the game, the player is presented with options and situations via pop-up windows. These require reading, and refer […]

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Dot Earth is Andrew C. Revkin’s blog at the New York Times. He covers a wide range of news related to sustainability and climate change. It is too complex for most language learners, but simplified versions of some of the articles he references could be useful.
In addition, he often refers to videos and […]

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Photographer Chris Jordan has three series of striking pictures, each of which could stimulate students to think about a variety of issues.
Each picture in Running The Numbers depicts an America statistic by showing an extremely high number of a mundane item. For example, there is a picture of 1,000,000 plastic cups (the number used […]

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I posted about this awhile ago, but I finally had a chance to watch the Story of Stuff. It’s a 20 minute film about consumption that is packed with powerful information. It’s well presented, too. A bunch of additional resources are available as well, including a footnoted script and a fact sheet, […]

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