Click here to read this mailing online.
"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles
Study Finds, To No One’s Surprise, That Well-Designed Peer Assessment Can Be Effective
Self- and peer-assessment in upper secondary schools. A quasi-experimental study to investigate the educational effectiveness of formative assessment is a new open-access research paper that finds, as my headline states, that well-designed peer assessment activities can work well. They actually found peer assessment to be more effective than self-assessment. One thing, though, that I found a bit odd about the paper is that the authors appeared to describe self and peer-assessment as “formative assessment,” which they obviously are. But they gave the impression – to me, at least- that self and peer assessment were THE types of formative assessment. In other words, they didn’t even seem to allude to the fact that there were tons of different types of formative assessments, and these were just two of them. I’m adding this info to The Best Ideas On Peer Review Of Student Writing and to The Best Resources On Student Self-Assessment.
     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: Imitation versus Retrieval Practice in Foreign Language Pronunciation Learning is from The Learning Scientists. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About Retrieval Practice. ELL students can watch this video and talk/write about what they saw:  Whoever Does the Thinking Gets the Language is from The Barefoot TEFL Teacher. ChatGPT as speaking partner is from AI in ELT. I’m adding it to THE BEST POSTS ABOUT USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITH ELLS. I’m adding this tweet to The Best Music Websites For Learning English:
Here’s another video to show ELLs, who can talk/write about what they saw:  Film English is a great site to get ELL lesson plans for popular movies, and they offer a free individual subscription. I’m adding it to The Best Popular Movies/TV Shows For ESL/EFL. I’m adding this tweet to The Best Resources On ESL/EFL/ELL Error Correction:
Franglish will “Proofread and Translate your Texts like Never Before
 Video: “Why the number of languages is ‘increasing'”Sentences Of The Week Darkmoon_Art / Pixabay
I thought readers might, or might not, find this new weekly post useful. I’m planning on highlighting several sentences, with links to their sources, that I found 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: Traffic to top websites has fallen by 11+% in the past five years…Data shows that AI chatbot referral traffic to top media and news websites is roughly 96% lower than traditional Google search. (see Does AI-Assisted Search Mean That No One Will Ever Read The Online Content That I & Others Create Ever Again?). Ryan Coogler’s revival of The X-Files is happening, and it’s happening before the writer-director’s next Black Panther movie. We may think we finish with books, but they don’t finish with us. Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families on Friday said that investigators have found child care facilities at the center of recent fraud allegations were operating as they should. What does it mean when your doctors keep insisting you redo the cognitive exam? The biggest disappointment of 2025 may well have been not what Trump did but how so many let it happen. Barzilay’s analysis of more than 10,500 children across 21 U.S. sites found that those who received phones at age 12, compared with age 13, had a more than 60 percent higher risk of poor sleep and a more than 40 percent higher risk of obesity. Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.
 “9 Teacher-Recommended Books to Hone the Craft and Nourish the Soul”9 Teacher-Recommended Books to Hone the Craft and Nourish the Soul is the headline of one of my recent Education Week columns. Here are some excerpts:
 More Recent Articles |
