"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles

For the next several months, each week I’ll be republishing posts from the past that I think readers might still find useful. This post first appeared in 2017.

We’re going into the home-stretch of the new year, and I’m always trying to figure out new ways to finish strong (see The Best Ways To Finish The School Year Strong).

In fact, On Monday, April 17th, at 8:00 PM Eastern Time, I’ll be hosting an Education Week Facebook Live discussion on this topic, and will share more information as the date grows closer.

Last weekend, I had a brainstorm and tried out something new with my English Language Learner Beginners in order to help everyone get a “second wind.”

It began with me having individual conversations with some students about the question, “Who else (apart from myself) is going to benefit from what I am doing?”  (see Here’s A Great Motivating Question For Students To Consider…).

On Monday, I introduced this question to the entire class and, in the middle of discussion, I thought of the phrase, “Everyone is a teacher.”  I shared that English is hard to learn, they only had a few years of high school left, and that it was going to take more than one teacher to help everybody learn.  So we all had to be teachers. I shared some ideas to illustrate the concept (“I’m a teacher when I speak English because I’m an example”; “I’m a teacher when I come to school because I’m a model for others”) and then invited students to contribute other ideas.   They came fast and furious, and students made posters like the one at the top of this post.

Students have taken it seriously at different levels but there is clearly one huge benefit – It’s far more energizing to students and to me if I say to off-task student “Everyone is a teacher!” than saying “Angela, please get back to work.”

We’ll see for how long it’s effective, but it certainly can’t hurt….

I’m adding this post to

The Best Ways To Finish The School Year Strong

The Best Posts On Helping Students Teach Their Classmates — Help Me Find More

The Best Posts & Articles On Student Engagement

     

Trace the journey of Proto-Indo-European, from the Pontic-Caspian steppe to Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and English, through genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and myth through the Indo-European Explorer, an impressive interactive.

I’m adding it to The Best “Language Maps”

     

(Note: I am going to publish this same post regularly to remind regular readers and inform newer ones about how to access my “Best” lists)

As regular readers know, I have about 2,500 categorized and regularly updated “Best” lists.

You can find all of them in broad categories here. The link to that page can also be found at the top right of my blog: My Best Of Series

I also have them all on another page where they are listed in the chronological order in which I originally posted them. You can find that link at the top of my blog by first clicking on About and then scrolling down to Websites of the Year.

Over two thousand “Best” lists are a lot of best lists! Of course, Control + F on PCs and Command + F on Macs are great ways to search for keywords on those lists when you’re looking for something.

In an effort to make them both further accessible and to update many of them, I began posting “Best Lists Of The Week.” In those lists, I attempted to break my lists into more narrow categories while completely revising and updating them at the same time.

I’ve created about fifty of them so far and they encompass a several hundred “Best” lists. It will probably take a year-or-two to create ones that include all two-thousand, especially since I add new ones all the time.

You will find these newly categorized lists on a page titled My Best Of The Week, and they’ll be shown as “buttons” (you can see what they look like at the top of this blog post) listed alphabetically (more-or-less). You can also click on a link on the top right of the homepage of my blog. It says: My Best Of Week

I hope you find the lists, and the way they’re organized, helpful!

     

Each week, I publish a post or two containing three or four particularly useful resources on classroom instruction, and you can see them all here.

You can also see all my “Best” lists on instructional strategies here.

Here are this week’s picks:

Provide Scaffolds for Difficult Tasks is from DistillED. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Providing Scaffolds To Students.

I’m adding this tweet to The Best Tools & Lessons For Teaching Information Literacy – Help Me Find More:

Media Literacy Week is next week! Prepare to teach your students about the importance of media literacy with this information from PBS. https://t.co/6gE7cRsgsw pic.twitter.com/4Kh89B6ja9

— UChicago Urban Teacher Education Program (UTEP) (@ChicagoUTEP) October 23, 2025

Want Students to Gain Math Confidence? Celebrate Their Mistakes is from Ed Week. I’m adding it to The Best Posts, Articles & Videos About Learning From Mistakes & Failures.

Using Error Analysis to Boost Engagement and Student Talk in Math is from Edutopia. I’m adding it to the same list.

Elevating Tier 1 Instruction With Differentiated Small Groups is from Edutopia. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Differentiating Instruction.

Real, Fake, or Deepfake? This Lesson Helps Students Decide is from Edutopia. I’m adding it to The Best Tools & Lessons For Teaching Information Literacy – Help Me Find More.

Require and Monitor Independent Practice is from DistillED. I’m adding it to THE BEST SITES STUDENTS CAN USE FOR INDEPENDENT PRACTICE.

     

TIME Magazine is doing a YouTube series offering short clips portraying important days during the American Revolution.

Here’s their introductory video, and you can see them all here.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Helping Teach About The 250th Anniversary Of The American Revolution: