ESL etc.

My wife and I just watched a great documentary on PBS called My Life as a Turkey. It tells the story of naturalist and wildlife illustrator Joe Hutto and his experience as “mother” to a brood of wild turkeys. The video powerfully reveals the complex and sophisticated lives of wild turkeys. I think this should [...]

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Slavery Footprint is a visually engaging survey that roughly determines how many slaves were involved in producing the goods we consume. It’s similar to carbon footprint calculators in terms of the questions it asks, asking about your home, electronics, diet, clothing and so on. On several of the questions, it allows you to really delve [...]

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NPR has a neat short video on how the world population has grown to reach 7 billion. It would be pretty understandable, even at lower levels, and it would work with a range of topics: population, poverty and wealth, food, consumption, etc. Thanks Krista

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Business Insider has a page that features a ton of different charts and graphs on wealth inequality. It would work great in conjunction with an activity on Occupy Wall Street. The graphs start off showing how unemployment is at an all-time high (since 1940), then they look at CEO pay and corporate profits. The graph [...]

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One of the fundamental problems with capitalism as it is currently practiced in many countries around the world is that it relies on continual growth. Obviously, this is not sustainable. The Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economy (CASSE) is an organization that seeks to explore the true costs of growth-based economics, as well [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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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