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

Teaching Students How Today’s Events Parallel History is the headline of one of my recent Education Week columns.

Learning to engage with current events thoughtfully and critically builds durable skills.

Here are some excerpts:

     

For the next month or so, I’ll be republishing my best posts from the last half of 2025.

Language often matters when discussing problems.

It’s easy to use language that labels people’s situations, instead of the institutional inequities that put them there.

Whether it’s talking about “slaves” versus “enslaved people” or, as the new study highlights, if we’re talking about the “achievement gap” or the “opportunity gap” (you can read more about this issue at The Best Resources For Learning About The “Opportunity Gap” (or “Achievement Gap”)).

The study, Experimental Effects of “Opportunity Gap” and “Achievement Gap” Frames, is behind a paywall, but you can find a free access version here.

     

During my first years of teaching English Language Learners, my students and I enjoyed The Connect With English dramatic video series designed to teach English.

It eventually got to be a bit dated, and so we stopped using it. It is still available for free online. They even had accompanying workbooks, though Katie Hull and I developed our own worksheet that could be used for any of the videos (and other ones, too).

I recently learned about a New Zealand-based organization called Chasing Time English that produces multiple similar series for ELLs. They’re all available to stream for free, and they have tons of accompanying teaching materials for each one.

There may be some minor issues with accents and certain vocabulary if you’re going to use in the United States, but those can be easily handled.

If I still had my own classroom, I’d definitely give them a try….

     

Why some kids struggle with math even when they try hard is from Science Daily, and summarizes an intriguing new study – one whose conclusions seem a bit too sweeping for me.

As the article says:

Children who struggled with math were less likely to change their strategy after getting a problem wrong. Even when they made different kinds of errors, they did not seem to update their thinking in response. This difficulty in adjusting behavior over time was a key difference between children with typical math abilities and those with math learning challenges.

The researchers also suggest that this may be the key challenge in other subjects, too, and they plan to investigate further.

Whether this is truly the problem or not, it certainly can’t hurt for math teachers – and teachers in all subjects – to help students understand the importance of metacognition and monitoring and adapting their learning strategies.

I’m adding this info to:

Best Posts On Metacognition

The Best Posts, Articles & Videos About Learning From Mistakes & Failures

     

Our two youngest granddaughters live in different parts of the country far away from us.

As I’ve previously mentioned, we use the online Readeo tool to have a video conference with them where we read stories, play Pictionary with mini-whiteboards, and do “show-and-tell.”  It works very well.

I recently learned about a new AI-powered site called My Story Steps that I’m considering trying out with them.

AI-powered tools to create stories for kids are actually a dime-a-dozen.  In fact, they’re so numerous, I’ve stopped making additions to The Best Online Tools Using Artificial Intelligence For Creating Stories For Children.

My Story Steps, however, offers a bit of a twist on the idea by using AI to create age appropriate illustrated choose-your-own adventure stories.

You can create at least some stories for free, as well as access others on their site at no-charge, but I believe you have to pay if you want to create multiple stories or access many others.

But I think I’m going to try it with the grandkids by screensharing with Zoom.  They can take turns creating stories (it asks you questions about it) and making choices as the story goes along.

I’m actually not a big fan of these AI sites creating stories for kids – I personally spend a lot of time telling the grandkids stories I make-up and actually write storybooks for them using Bookbldr.

But I’m intrigued by My Story Steps and think it might be an engaging tool to use now-and-then.

I’m adding this info to The Best Places To Read & Write “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories.