ESL etc.

Occupy Wall Street is a protest in New York City that has been going on for 18 days. On Saturday, 700 protesters were arrested, following the arrest of 80 protesters the week before. The occupation involves members of a number of different groups, and the main thrust is a frustration with the fact that American [...]

[Read more →]

Spent is an educational game that attempts to give users the experience of living on the edge of poverty. You make a series of choices, trying to keep your head above water financially. It is text-based, providing lots of reading opportunities with plenty of life-skills-related vocabulary. I particularly like how they demonstrate that financial pressures [...]

[Read more →]

The RSA Animate series of video clips is an interesting way to present some very sophisticated ideas to learners. The visual nature of the lectures helps comprehension and helps hold student interest. The lecture above looks at how recent developments in cognitive science change our understanding of human nature. Other lectures deal with concepts like [...]

[Read more →]

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of going to a talk on campus by L. M. Bogad. He is a professor at UC Davis and spoke on the topic of performance-based activism. He’s been involved with number of groups, including Billionaires for Bush and The Yes Men. On his website, he has video [...]

[Read more →]

What will the world look like in 1000 years? This is the question posed by Sibylle Machat via her website, where she displays drawings of people’s imagined answers. She invites people to submit their ideas via postcard. This would be a great class activity, and the images Sibylle has already collected would make great writing [...]

[Read more →]

I just received a letter in the mail asking me to sign up for a Florida Agriculture in the Classroom license plate that comes complete with the slogan “Agriculture Keeps Florida Green”. I immediately assumed that the educational materials promoted by this plate probably pushed an industrial agriculture point of view. I was right. They [...]

[Read more →]

I just came across the January 2011 issue of English Journal (vol. 100, num. 3), which had the theme of Green English. The journal is aimed at middle and senior high school English teachers, but a lot of the ideas and activities are totally relevant to ESL or EFL contexts. Several of the articles discuss [...]

[Read more →]

Global Eye is a (now defunct) magazine aiming to bring global issues to primary and secondary schools. Thus, the language is pretty accessible and a lot of it could be used with English language learners. As a magazine, the materials are primarily readings and pictures / graphics, but there are some writing activities in there, [...]

[Read more →]

Forbes just released their list of the top ten highest paid athletes for 2010. I’ve used this as the basis of a lesson plan in the past and found it to be one that students are pretty interested in. The lesson plan is pretty simple: I start with some pre-discussion questions (asking students to guess [...]

[Read more →]

Developing a Global Perspective for Educators (DGPE) is a website based out of the University of Ottawa that has a bunch of K-12 lesson plans created by students in the education program. These include a handful of thematic packages, which are sets of lesson plans spanning multiple grades that cover similar themes. A lot of [...]

[Read more →]