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"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles
Today Is The Anniversary Of “Bloody Sunday” In Selma – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources Alexandra_Koch / Pixabay
“Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama happened on this date in 1965. You might be interested in The Best Resources For Teaching About Selma.      Around The Web In ESL/EFL/ELL
Eight years ago I began this regular feature where I share a few posts and resources from around the Web related to ESL/EFL or to language in general that have caught my attention. You might also be interested in all my Best lists on teaching ELLs. Also, check out A Collection Of My Best Resources On Teaching English Language Learners. In addition, look for our latest book on teaching ELLs, The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox 2.0. Here are this week’s choices:
ELL students could watch this video and then talk/write about what they saw:  Headlines is a good lesson plan from The TEFL Zone.
Here’s a video to show ELLs that they can talk/write about:   What is Grammaring? is from The Barefoot TEFL Teacher.  “Padlet Arcade” Looks Like A Great – &, For Now At Least, Free – Place To Easily Create Online Learning Games
As most teachers know, Padlet is a particularly useful online tool that can be used for many purposes. Now, they’ve created a completely separate AI-powered site called Padlet Arcade. For now, at least, it’s completely free, and students don’t have to register or login to play any of the games. I learned about it from Tony Vincent, and I would recommend signing up for his newsletter. It’s a pretty neat site. If you, as the teacher, sign-up and login (again, for free) you can copy any game that’s there or easily create your own. They’re not very clear about how to do it, but if you copy a game or create your own, and share that link with your students, then you will see the scores of only your students. When students play any game on the site, their scores go to some kind of universal leaderboard. I’ll explain more a little later. When you first want to create a game (again, you also have the option of copy someone else’s), you are sent to “Describe your game” and then you’re given various choices about what you want it to look like (Fill in the blanks, flashcards, multiple choice, etc.). Once you review it, you submit it and it’s done. There is no limit on the number of games you can create – for now, at least. Here’s what ChatGPT says to do if you want to see scores from your own students:
That will effectively give you a class-only leaderboard.
I’m adding this info to: The Best Websites For Creating Online Learning Games The Best Online Games Students Can Play In Private Virtual “Rooms”  Research Studies Of The Week Mohamed_hassan / Pixabay I often write about research studies from various fields and how they can be applied to the classroom. I write individual posts about ones that I think are especially significant, and will continue to do so. However, so many studies are published that it’s hard to keep up. So I’ve started writing a “round-up” of some of them each week or every other week as a regular feature. You can see all my “Best” lists related to education research here. Here are some new useful studies (and related resources):
I’m adding this next post to The Best Resources On The Importance Of Building Positive Relationships With Students:
I’m adding this tweet to THE BEST RESOURCES ON PEER TUTORS:
A new RCT on banning smartphones in the classroom is from Marginal Revolution.  Who’d Have Thought? Students Who Prompt AI To Create Texts They’re Interested In Are More Likely To Want To Read Them
One of my first thoughts when ChatGPT came out three years ago was that it would be a great tool for students to create texts about high-interest topics that they wanted to read – whether it was a story about soccer featuring them as the star player, or about any nonfiction topic. A new study finds that when students do this: statistically significant differences were identified in favor of both experimental groups with respect to reading and comprehension skills as well as reading motivation. The study is titled Improving students’ reading, comprehension, and reading motivation through texts generated from their prompts using ChatGPT-4: a mixed-method study. Of course, since many districts block AI tools, many students won’t be able to create these texts on their school-issued Chromebooks, but they can on their phones.  More Recent Articles
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