ESL etc.

In preparation for an office move, I’ve been going through my files. I found a presentation I gave last summer that I wanted to share. It’s on a global issues themed poetry activity. I’ve done it with both intermediate and advanced students. The first iteration of this activity was done as one of the activities […]

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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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The Dark Mountain Project is a group of environmentally minded writers and artists who are challenging the stories we tell ourselves. The stories which any culture tells itself about its origins and values determine its direction and destination. The dominant stories of our culture tell us that humanity is separate from all other life and […]

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Here is the slideshow I just gave at the third annual BART symposium. It’s a modified version of the presentation I gave a couple of months ago at TESOL. Within the slideshow, there are links to PDF versions of some of the handouts. If you’d like DOC versions to adapt for your own use, you […]

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For those who both were and were not able to attend my TESOL 2012 presentation, here are the materials I referred to. The overall focus of my presentation was using local environmental resources as a way to both raise student awareness of environmental issues and to offer them opportunities for positive action. One emphasis I […]

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It’s not ESL specific, but I found a lot of relevant ideas in McKay Jenkins’ recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In it, he argues against focusing on preparing students for competition in the global marketplace. Instead, he suggests helping students understand and explore the problems of the marketplace, problems that are becoming […]

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I may be late to the party, but I want to highly recommend the Adblock Plus plugin for Firefox. It is free, quick to install, and it blocks virtually all banner and pop-up ads. It’s amazing what a difference it makes. It even blocks ads in things like Hulu. I haven’t noticed any slowdown, and […]

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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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Youth Xchange is produced by UNEP and UNESCO, and it has links to loads of educational resources aimed at young people. Topics include the environment, consumption, body image, nutrition, and much, much more. I haven’t nearly explored it all, but there is a lot of good stuff here. It is mostly profiles of people and […]

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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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