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

geralt / 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:

The invention of writing emancipated humanity from enslavement to memory. Societies without vibrant writing cultures are timid, hidebound, uncurious…. Written, ideas can be “analysed, challenged and improved.”

AI bans might be the rare equity issue that privileges the have-nots more than the haves.

The good news for educators who already feel out of their depth with AI is that fixing the widening trust gap between teachers and students requires relationship, not technical, skills, the report says.

Some promising interventions such as investing in modern HVAC systems, which I wish had made the cut for the survey, are VERY easy to implement with fidelity. They are technical solutions that require very little human behavioral change. Other promising interventions, like tutoring, are much harder to scale because they require hiring or training personnel, organizational change, and difficult resource tradeoffs.

One of the really basic problems with using A.I. in education is that it is designed to make tasks easier and to reduce friction, and friction is how learning happens.

To restore faith in institutions, you must begin from the bottom up, starting with things as simple as potholes. 

I would like to see more from those who are pushing back on “AI” and ed-tech in schools what their vision and goals are for what should happen instead.

Libraries are one of the few places in this surveillance economy that are not trying to collect and sell your data to come and use our facilities.

Of the day’s 17 acts, spanning a two-hour-long program, the only women who were set to grace the stage were singers. The message couldn’t have been clearer. Women were fit to entertain, but not to lead.

Perhaps the biggest reason I failed, however, was that I focused on telling teachers exactly what they needed to do without taking the time to listen to their ideas and suggestions. See The Best Resources On “Instructional Coaching”

By claiming that an excess of compassion is in fact a social blight, Saad’s book and others offer a theoretical framework for selfishness.

“We learned nothing from social media,” said Nataliya Kosmyna, a visiting researcher at Google with a doctorate in human-computer interactions. “Attention is messed up, and in years we are going to have the same cases with LLMs with children and teenagers.”

At no point in reading this sentence could I have predicted where the next part of this sentence was going. https://t.co/FxBVtpSMLg

— Emily Zanotti 🦝 (@emzanotti) September 30, 2026

I just don’t understand this belief that there’s hostility to direct instruction. It has its place & all teachers use it sometimes. It’s a problem when that’s the only form of instruction used – inquiry, small groups, inductive, PBL all have a place in the classroom https://t.co/4MtAtiyvXJ

— Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo) September 30, 2026

Talk about grade inflation https://t.co/B9hhJ8R4nQ

— Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo) October 1, 2026

I believe there’s justified hostility to using direct instruction all the time, just as there should be hostility to using any one instructional strategy all the time. I don’t believe there’s is any teacher anywhere who doesn’t often use direct instruction

— Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo) October 1, 2026

     

cocoparisienne / Pixabay

Halloween and The Day Of The Day are coming up this month.

You might be interested in:

The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween & Day Of The Dead (I’ve just done a quick update and removed a fair number of “dead” links).

The Best Movie Scenes For Halloween.

The Best Resources For Helping Beginner ELLs Learn About Halloween & The Day Of The Dead

The Best Teaching Resources For The Movie, “Coco”

     

OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay

Media Literacy Week is From October 26th to the 30th.

You might be interested in:

The Best Tools & Lessons For Teaching Information Literacy – Help Me Find More

The Best Tools To Help Develop Global Media Literacy

     

I’m adding this video to THE BEST INFOGRAPHICS HIGHLIGHTING THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR LANGUAGES:

 

     

Breaking the Early Bell: Lessons from the First Statewide Mandate on School Start Times is a new study on California’s law requiring later start times for high school and middle schools.

But it did more than get young people to sleep later:

Average mental health effects are imprecisely estimated, but boys show significant reductions in sadness, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation, and Hispanic students, who experienced the largest sleep-timing shifts, show parallel reductions in difficulty concentrating; together these patterns are consistent with a dose-response relationship between sleep improvement and mental well-being. Math and English scores in grade 8 improved by approximately 0.08–0.10 standard deviations, with the largest gains among Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students. A within-state analysis using teachers’ commute arrival times as a proxy for pre-policy school start times corroborates these findings, and shows academic gains accumulating over 2023–2025 alongside a suggestive decline in high school dropout rates. The absence of effects on chronic absenteeism rules out an attendance-driven mechanism, pointing instead to the direct cognitive benefits of aligning school schedules with adolescents’ biological rhythms.

I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Helping Teens Learn About The Importance Of Sleep.