ESL etc.

This is a guest post written by Linda Ruas from the New Internationalist Easier English Wiki. If you have materials or ideas you’d like to share, please email me. I have often felt I need to apologize in some way for my wiki. Reading about breast-ironing in Cameroon, slavery in Mauritania, the feral rich in […]

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I first posted about the New Internationalist Easier English Wiki about a year and a half ago. Since then, they’ve added a lot of great materials to their site. The New Internationalist is a magazine focused on promoting global justice and, through their easier English wiki, they make articles more accessible to English language learners […]

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Here is a list of resources discussed at the LGBTF Forum roundtable at TESOL 2014. Creating Safe Space for GLBTQ Youth: A Toolkit Gay Straight Alliance Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) National Council of Teachers of English National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Peace Learner Safe Schools Coalition Seattle and King County Dept. […]

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This Valentine’s Day activity from Teaching Tolerance provides insight into Valentine’s Day’s roots as a holiday of resistance. It also highlights the injustices that can occur during this holiday — “moments of exclusion and ostracism, assumptions of a heterosexual norm” — and draws a parallel between the ban on gay marriage and the ban on […]

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YES! Magazine just added a great new activity based on the above picture to their curriculum section. It would work well in an ESL or EFL classroom. It’s simple, it requires critical thinking, and it makes a great speaking or writing prompt. First, show students the above picture and ask them what they notice. Then, […]

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Food MythBusters covers a wide range of topics, including things like hunger and food security and marketing and advertising. They have resources in a variety of formats, including videos, infographics and fact sheets. The blog is also full of great information. This is definitely a site I’d look through if I were putting together a […]

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100 Views of Climate Change is a website from Colorado State University that offers short and long videos on climate change, along with notes on books and articles and links to other resources. Finding specific resources is very easy. The site is broken into five sections: climate, nature, humans, action, and the big picture. Each […]

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The True Cost of Food is a 15-minute video about the hidden costs of factory farming, industrial agriculture and fast food. It comes with a discussion guide and an excellent Take Action handout. I really like how the Take Action handout is framed — recommending actions based on the issues students care about. The video […]

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The Simplicity Exercises is a free PDF full of lessons that engage students with the concept of simplicity. Produced by the Simplicity Institute, it covers areas such as mindfulness, the environment, money and time, asking students to consider simplicity and sufficiency. Some of the activities are experiential. For example, a lesson called Silence and Solitude […]

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Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers and engineers that has put together the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that enables DIY fabrication of 50 different industrial machines that they believe are required to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. I like the principles behind the […]

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