ESL etc.

The Institute for Humane Education has a great collection of activities, many of which could be used with English language learners. Most of them are aimed at younger learners, but many could also be used effectively with adults. I haven’t yet had a chance to go through the whole site, but I took a look [...]

[Read more →]

Here are a bunch of quick links that I have been meaning to post for a while: Strange Maps is a great blog that features, well, strange maps. The pictures are really interesting, and the accompanying text is usually informative. A Road Map to Success and Bridge to Nowhere: a Map of Golden Gate Jumpers [...]

[Read more →]

ACT Responsible is a Swiss non-profit that attempts to use the talents of advertisers to address environmental sustainability and social responsibility. Their gallery is full of images and short videos that could be great visual prompts for activities on a wide variety of issues. For starters, check out highlights in The Best Adverts to Save [...]

[Read more →]

I just came across an interesting article about Daniel Suelo, an American who has been living without money since 2000. The article offers a brief and accessible biography. Suelo also has a blog and there is also a short documentary on him. I think this would be an interesting way to bring up issues of [...]

[Read more →]

A Class Divided is a wonderful episode of Frontline that shows an ingenious two-day activity undertaken by the third grade class of teacher Jane Elliot. In this activity, devised the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Elliot divides her class into blue-eyes and brown-eyes. On the first day, the blue-eyed students are given preferential [...]

[Read more →]

I was recently asked for suggestions for materials that could be used with younger learners. Here are a few of my favorites. Facing the Future has a collection of activity-based, global issues lesson plans for students of all ages. In addition to the great stuff they offer for sale, they have a ton of materials [...]

[Read more →]

Worldmapper has a large collection of world maps that display various issues in a simple yet effective way. They expand each country to illustrate their share in a given issue. For example, the map below illustrates each country’s proportion of the world’s child labor. Worldmapper has maps on many, many topics, including poverty, gender empowerment, [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve been pretty busy at work the past couple of weeks, so I’ve got a backlog of things I want to post, but I wanted to quickly share a bunch of resources that I’ve found for teaching about the protests in Iran. As usual, Larry Ferlazzo has pulled together a lot of great links in [...]

[Read more →]

The New Internationalist has a collection of global issues articles written specifically for learners of English. They have articles on globalization, the environment, human rights and war. They haven’t updated the articles for several years, but the topics are still very relevant. One example that I like is a series of 5 stories told by [...]

[Read more →]

I just read a great article on a very interesting activity that a college anthropology professor does with a few hundred students in a lecture class. He breaks them into groups of about 20, and assigns each group a culture. They spend a few weeks preparing, and the class culminates in the World Sim activity [...]

[Read more →]