ESL etc.

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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I just became aware of two documentaries that would fit nicely into a unit on happiness. The first is The Economics of Happiness. This documentary links a number of global issues (climate change, terrorism, etc.) with personal issues (depression, loneliness, etc.). I haven’t seen the whole thing, but the trailer brings up a lot of [...]

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Scholar as Citizen is a new blog launched by UW-Madison professor William Cronon exploring the public practice of history. One of his first posts was about ALEC, a “nonpartisan” group for state legislators working to promote “free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty”. Two of their current objectives are exposing the “trainwreck” of the [...]

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George Monbiot just put together a proposal for an agenda for an upcoming rally in the UK that will include a number of different organizations. He did this in recognition of the fact that it is important to be FOR something, not just AGAINST things. This parallels something that I’ve long wondered: how can politicians [...]

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The Story of Citizens United v. FEC is a new video by Annie Leonard (of the Story of Stuff fame) about how corporations have gained undue influence in American democracy. She looks at it historically and also looks at the 2010 Supreme Court case of the (ironically named) Citizens United v. FEC. As a result [...]

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Mother Jones has put together a collection of 11 great infographics that look at the distribution of wealth in American from a number of different angles. I particularly like the one headed “Out of Balance” (included here) that compares perceptions, reality and preference. It is really incredible, with the concentration of wealth and power in [...]

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Products of Slavery is a deceptively simple website: a gray world map dotted with yellow numbered circles. Each of these circles corresponds to a country, each number to the variety of products produced in that country by child or forced labor. Click on a number and it bursts into a collection of icons depicting the [...]

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Where Children Sleep is a slideshow from the Telegraph that shows children and their bedrooms. They tend to focus on somewhat extreme examples, but the differences are powerful. I find the images of the children themselves particularly striking. The brief descriptions that accompany each photo relate to global issues like child labor, human rights and [...]

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