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"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles
The “Best” Lesson Ideas For Teaching About The Protests & Killings In Minneapolis geralt / Pixabay
Today’s news of ICE killing another person in Minneapolis is horrifying. Last week, I published a three-part series in Education where Minnesota educators shared their perspective on what was happening around them. Here are some lesson ideas that educators around the country can use to teach about Minneapolis: PBS has several decent lesson plans. The New York Times Learning Network has a lesson plan that’s two months old about Trump’s immigration crackdown, and it can be modified. Facing History has some generic lesson ideas for current events that I think are usable, as does The Teaching Channel. You can find more ideas at The Best Resources & Ideas For Teaching About Current Events, and I’ll continue to add to this list. You might also be interested in: The Best Sites For Learning About Immigration In The United States HELPFUL RESOURCES FOR TEACHING ABOUT GEORGE FLOYD’S DEATH The Best Sites For Learning About Protests In History The Best Resources Sharing The History Of Teens Organizing For Justice The Best Posts & Articles On Building Influence & Creating Change      This Week’s Free & Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools For The Classroom geralt / Pixabay
At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM. Here are the latest: Chronicle helps you create presentations, and has a generous free option. Mini Tool AI has a collection of free AI tools. Do a run-through of your presentation with SlideFlow. Vikitorek provides Wikipedia entries as summaries for children. Picit.ai is a photo-editor. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Online Photo-Editing & Photo Effects. ScholarQuiz…quizzes you on any topic and Learnogram does something similar.
Part 2: AI-Powered Language Speaking Practice: An Extensive Review of Top Tools for Learners is from Tom Daccord. Brain Activity Is Lower for Writers Who Use AI. What That Means for Students is from Ed Week. Here’s an excerpt: But if participants wrote essays on their own first, and then used AI to write on the same topics, the results changed. This group of writers showed an increase in brain activity. “What it could potentially tell us is that timing could be very important for when you integrate these tools,” said Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab and the lead author of the paper. If writers spend time thinking about their topic and collecting their thoughts before turning to generative AI, it’s possible that they could benefit more from using the tool, she said. “Maybe now you can ask questions, go back and forth. You have your opinions on the topic, you can prompt in different directions.” The paper is a preprint, meaning it hasn’t yet been peer reviewed and published in an academic journal. And the researchers only worked with a small sample of participants, all of whom were undergraduate students, graduate students, or university employees. Still, the findings could offer important clues about when generative AI use might short-circuit the learning process—and when it might actually deepen students’ thinking. I’m adding it to A Beginning List Of Different Types Of Guidance Educators Are Giving Students About AI Use In Their Classes. This is my opinion of all the AI announcements Google recently made, and you can see the links to them following this post:
New ChromeOS tools to support classroom collaboration New security and AI detection features for Google Workspace for Education Premium Google AI for more educators and students Transform teaching and learning with updates to Gemini and Google Classroom Collaborating with Khan Academy to build the best AI tools for learners  Over 100 Of My Videos About Instruction
I’ve made many videos over the years, including quite a few animated ones with Education Week on differentiated instruction, learning transfer, and student motivation. You can see thirty of them all here. I’ve also made about more on TikTok, which you can see here. I’ve begun uploading those TikTok videos to my YouTube Channel, which you can access here.  A Look Back: Try Out My New Free AI Chatbot For ELL TeachersFor the next month or so, I’ll be republishing my best posts from the last half of 2025.
I have created a new free AI chatbot for ELL teachers that uses as its knowledge base just specific ELL teachers or resources that I have vetted. Check out ELL Teaching Expert Companion and let me know what you think. If you ask it, the chatbot will list the ELL teachers and resource sites in its knowledge base. It will also invite you to send me suggestions for others I should add to it. A couple of years ago, I tried creating a similar AI chatbot for ELL teachers that’s been getting some use, and you can read about it and access it at I THINK I Created An AI-Powered Chatbot To Help Teachers Of ELLs, But I’m Not Sure If It Works Well – Or Works At All. I think this new one is far better and easy to update. I hope you find it useful! I’m planning on creating a few more in specific topics.  Sentences Of The Week Darkmoon_Art / Pixabay
I thought readers might, or might not, find this new regular post useful. Each week, I highlight several sentences, with links to their sources, that I find interesting/concerning/useful. And they may, or may not, be directly connected to education. I may also include my own comments or related links. This regular post will join my other regular ones on teaching ELLs, education policy, Artificial Intelligence, infographics, and Pinterest highlights, not to mention sharing of my regular Education Week posts. Here are this week’s sentences: Burke said there are no current plans to convert federal special education money into vouchers or to do away with Title I funding that supports schools serving low-income communities. The visual evidence shows no indication that the agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over. It makes me wonder: why am I spending so much time doing this assignment that was obviously created by ChatGPT or Claude (there’s literally a tab with a ChatGPT icon in the teacher’s browser!) “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.” “What makes the IB so special is that it creates the space for students to find their voices, to learn how to research around the problems they are passionate about and want to solve — and to be able to cite their beliefs in grounded research and sources.” “A lot of kids don’t realize they’re musical because they just weren’t given a chance.” “What is interesting about this moment is, if it’s your employee you’re protecting, or your kid’s teacher that you’re protecting, or the street vendor you buy tacos from once a month, that feels very personal.” “I be teachin’ YOU? We be teachin’ each other?!” While the percentage [of teachers who used AI] dipped slightly in 2024 to 32%, 2025 saw a huge increase, with 61% saying they used the technology in their work in some capacity. If I tell you the truth, you may not like me for a week. If I lie to you, you’ll hate me forever. No matter how fun, interesting, meaningful, or purposeful a task is, we have to contend with free, ubiquitous machine intelligence that promises it can complete it more efficiently. In a reversal of traditional interpretations of civil rights law, the administration has argued that programs intended to help Black children deny equal opportunities to students of other races. I ask [my kids at dinner] to tell me two things about their day that happened and one thing that didn’t, and we all guess which was which. There’s no excuse for assigning inaccessible or boring novels and plays when there are so many books out there that teens would be more likely to enjoy. There are empty desks in school classrooms across the Twin Cities as immigrant children stay home, afraid that they or their parents will be snatched up by ICE agents who lurk in idling SUVs near schools during drop-off and pickup. “The fact that our own government is keeping us from the schools that they provide and they want us to be at is scary, and it’s sad and it’s angering.” Dr. King also had some “failures”, and they are important to discuss because we often learn a great deal from failure. (see The Best Posts, Articles & Videos About Learning From Mistakes & Failures) The question, then, is not whether technology belongs in classrooms, but how much is too much. Overdelivering will impress your customers, create loyal employees and fans, and make all your relationships stronger. Tennessee Republicans want all students to verify their citizenship, residency, or immigration status as part of an aggressive immigration package they say was developed with the Trump White House. (see THE BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING ABOUT THE PLYLER DECISION NOW THAT RIGHT-WINGERS ARE PLANNING A PUSH TO MAKE MIGRANT CHILDREN PAY TO ATTEND SCHOOL)
(see The Best Resources Showing Why We Need To Be “Data-Informed” & Not “Data-Driven”)
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