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Sentences Of The Week Darkmoon_Art / 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: Burke said there are no current plans to convert federal special education money into vouchers or to do away with Title I funding that supports schools serving low-income communities. The visual evidence shows no indication that the agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over. It makes me wonder: why am I spending so much time doing this assignment that was obviously created by ChatGPT or Claude (there’s literally a tab with a ChatGPT icon in the teacher’s browser!) “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.” “What makes the IB so special is that it creates the space for students to find their voices, to learn how to research around the problems they are passionate about and want to solve — and to be able to cite their beliefs in grounded research and sources.” “A lot of kids don’t realize they’re musical because they just weren’t given a chance.” “What is interesting about this moment is, if it’s your employee you’re protecting, or your kid’s teacher that you’re protecting, or the street vendor you buy tacos from once a month, that feels very personal.” “I be teachin’ YOU? We be teachin’ each other?!” While the percentage [of teachers who used AI] dipped slightly in 2024 to 32%, 2025 saw a huge increase, with 61% saying they used the technology in their work in some capacity. If I tell you the truth, you may not like me for a week. If I lie to you, you’ll hate me forever. No matter how fun, interesting, meaningful, or purposeful a task is, we have to contend with free, ubiquitous machine intelligence that promises it can complete it more efficiently. In a reversal of traditional interpretations of civil rights law, the administration has argued that programs intended to help Black children deny equal opportunities to students of other races. I ask [my kids at dinner] to tell me two things about their day that happened and one thing that didn’t, and we all guess which was which. There’s no excuse for assigning inaccessible or boring novels and plays when there are so many books out there that teens would be more likely to enjoy. There are empty desks in school classrooms across the Twin Cities as immigrant children stay home, afraid that they or their parents will be snatched up by ICE agents who lurk in idling SUVs near schools during drop-off and pickup. “The fact that our own government is keeping us from the schools that they provide and they want us to be at is scary, and it’s sad and it’s angering.” Dr. King also had some “failures”, and they are important to discuss because we often learn a great deal from failure. (see The Best Posts, Articles & Videos About Learning From Mistakes & Failures) The question, then, is not whether technology belongs in classrooms, but how much is too much. Overdelivering will impress your customers, create loyal employees and fans, and make all your relationships stronger. Tennessee Republicans want all students to verify their citizenship, residency, or immigration status as part of an aggressive immigration package they say was developed with the Trump White House. (see THE BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING ABOUT THE PLYLER DECISION NOW THAT RIGHT-WINGERS ARE PLANNING A PUSH TO MAKE MIGRANT CHILDREN PAY TO ATTEND SCHOOL)
(see The Best Resources Showing Why We Need To Be “Data-Informed” & Not “Data-Driven”)
     A Look Back: Was This The Biggest Teaching Mistake I Made This Year?For the next month or so, I’ll be republishing my best posts from the last half of 2025.
 geralt / Pixabay
I make lots of mistakes when teaching, though I think most of them are small ones and easily rectified. A very big one, though, that I might have made this year was having my International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge class students use their laptops for just about everything. There has been a lot of public concern expressed recently about the amount of screen time students have in the classroom. This obviously didn’t begin to become a issue until the height of the COVID pandemic when millions of students needed to have laptops for distance learning. It was clear to me as soon as we returned to face-to-face instruction that using laptops as a major tool for instruction with English Language Learners was the wrong way to go – there’s plenty of research on the importance of handwriting in language learning, and we want to maximize the use of our many peer tutors. So, in the classroom, the only time my students have used laptops has been to create weekly slideshows that they present “speed-dating” style. However, as I explained in the post titled The Role Of Tech IN My ELL Classroom? Not Much, But That’s Not The Whole Story, using tech for language learning in students’ homes is truly invaluable. But I thought that laptops could work well in my IB Theory of Knowledge classes – they are much closer to what college level classes look like, students are junior or seniors, and are generally quite motivated. And, boy oh boy, would having materials online reduce my workload so much – no more having to make copies in the teacher workroom. Plus, grading on Google Classroom is sooooooo much easier and quicker! So, for the past few years, that’s how I’ve structured the classes – next-to-no tech in my ELL courses, and 100% tech in my TOK ones. And they’ve all gone relatively well – students in all of the classes always gave me and the courses themselves the highest marks in anonymous evaluations, my ELL students generally did very well in assessments, and my TOK students who were IB Diploma candidates did fine in the IB-evaluated assessments. But, then, right about mid-year during this school year, I began to have second thoughts about what I was doing in my Theory of Knowledge classes. The quality of work being done by about sixty-or-seventy percent of students – who I would characterize as the most motivated and engaged – was excellent (most of them were IB Diploma candidates). None of them were doing any (or, if they were, very little) of copying and pasting text online to the many slideshows we did; from what I could tell, few of them were spending much time on non-class related websites on their open Chromebooks; and most of their talking in class appeared to be about joint assignments they were doing. All that was the kind of atmosphere I saw in almost my entire TOK class pre-COVID, when most text was on paper, and, instead of slideshows, students were constantly working together to create posters for class presentations. This year, however, it appeared to me that thirty-or-forty percent of my class (practically none of whom were IB Diploma candidates) seemed considerably less engaged – doing a lot of copy-and-pasting, spending a lot of time on non-class-related websites, and definitely not using most of their time talking about assignments. That doesn’t mean that I believe thirty or forty percent of my students weren’t learning at least the basics of the material or concepts in the curriculum – through participating in the almost constant rotating presentations and the required personal reflections on them, I’m convinced that most have learned the ideas on the surface level, at least. I’m not sure if this potential problem has been present every year since we came back from distance learning, and I’ve just begun noticing it. Or, perhaps, it wasn’t an issue when we first returned because students were so happy to be back and it’s just become worse recently. My observations this year remind me of the experiment I did many years ago where one year I taught two ELL U.S. History classes covering the same content – but one class was taught entirely in the computer lab and the other in my classroom using no tech at all. The results of content assessments (which, admittedly, were pretty surface level ones) were similar. However, when students completed surveys on how engaged they felt in the class and how much it made them want to learn more about history, the students in the non-tech class were dramatically more positive (see Results From My Year-Long U.S. History Tech Experiment). I wonder if tech generally works for the students who my friend and co-author Katie Hull calls almost “teacher-proof” – they are going to work towards success no matter what – and leaves others who tend to experience more challenges (I want to emphasize that intelligence is NOT one of them) behind? After I started writing this post, I did a simple anonymous survey with my TOK students on this topic. Here’s the question I asked and the results:
I find it very interesting that 61% of students (which is about the percentage I had estimated who have been very engaged in the class) said that they felt like they learned more using tech than they would have without it. In looking at the accompanying student comments, it’s obvious I should have worded the question better since many students talked about the value of doing research online. It would certainly be possible to still create those opportunities, but do a lot less writing and reading online than we’re doing now in class. Here are some student comments: I think I learned more using technology this year because technology like ChatGPT, sources online, google documents/slides, computer, and etc had help me develop my academic skills and help me learn to create ideas and help me become a better learner. Personally, I am capable of learning in any way. I think that technology makes things more entertaining but I’m still capable of learning with simply some paper. With technology, we can learn with things like Kahoot, Quizzizz, etc. However, with a book or some reading on paper, I am still capable of learning. I like that most of my classes do physical work on paper than used on technology because I am more of a visual learner than looking at it and assuming that I can do it. Additionally, having my eyes on the screen all day especially for school work hurts my head and eyes. I think no matter how the work is given ( paper or online) most people would learn the same amount. In my opinion, since its more modern to use technology now, I think it is more pleasing and more efficient to provide work online. I personally feel like I work slower if I were to, lets say, not have a chromebook to type with compared to me writing. I have an easier and less straining experience typing than I do writing with pen or pencil. Its also makes the process of writing quicker than if I were to do it with paper and pencil. I think that paper forces people to do the work, now I’m also saying that tech does help people learn more easier but I also feel like it’s more relaxed and let loose than paper because all you have to do is wait and then get a electrical device do the work instead of forcing actual thought into the piece of paper that you’re working on. In my opinion, I like to investigate each topic in more depth and many times what we use the most is technology. I really feel very grateful for the topics in this class. I think I have learned a lot more about each topic. This class helped me a lot. I think it’s on the student to focus and learn in class and whether or not teachers use tech, doesn’t matter. If a class were to only use tech, there would be some students who don’t focus during class and will play games on whatever websites they can find. On the other hand, a class that uses no tech will lead students to find different methods of goofing off and messing around when they should be focused. It’s the students job to stay on task and focus during class, whether they have tech or not, students will always find a way to goof off and mess around in class. I think it would have been more engaging if it was on paper. We spend most of our time on technology so in class engaged with other students in class could make me learn more since I feel like I would remember the topic or lesson more. I think this question depends on who you ask. If you are old like Mr.Ferlazzo maybe paper but if your younger technology would be best for you.
If I was going to be teaching next year (as regular readers know, I’m “hanging up my spikes” next month), I think I might try to do something similar to what I did with my ELL US History class – perhaps teach some of my classes like I’ve done mostly using Chromebooks, and one teaching it like I used to – with considerably less tech. And then create some kind of common assessments to see the results. I’m not beating myself up about this since I still believe that most students learned a lot, and practically all them really liked the class. But I do wonder how much better it could have been……
I’m adding this post to The Best Posts & Articles Highlighting Why We Need To Be Very Careful Around Ed Tech.  38 “Best” Lists About Artificial Intelligence & Education emerson23work / Pixabay
Here are all my regularly updated “Best” lists on AI in education: The Best Posts On Education & ChatGPT. THE BEST RESOURCES FOR TEACHING & LEARNING WITH AI ART GENERATION TOOLS THE BEST FREE ONLINE TOOLS USING ADAPTIVE LEARNING THE BEST SITES FOR ONLINE PRONUNCIATION FEEDBACK – DO YOU KNOW OTHERS? The Best Online “Chatbots” For Practicing English THE “BEST” TOOLS FOR AUTOMATICALLY TURNING TEXTS & VIDEOS INTO INTERACTIVE LANGUAGE LEARNING TOOLS The Best Tools That “Automatically” Create Presentations The Best Online Tools Using Artificial Intelligence For Creating Stories For Children THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM A Beginning List Of The Best Resources For Teaching About Artificial Intelligence THE BEST RESOURCES FOR HELPING STUDENTS SEE THE BENEFITS OF WRITING (IN THE AI AGE) The Best Posts On Computer-Graded Essays The Best Online Tools That Can Help Students Write An Essay THE “BEST” IDEAS FOR USING CHATGPT, BARD, & OTHER FORMS OF AI WITH STUDENTS NOT NECESSARILY THE “BEST,” BUT A LIST OF AI TEACHER PREP SITES THE BEST 34 FREE AI TOOLS FOR EDUCATION IN 2023 – SO FAR THE BEST POSTS ABOUT USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITH ELLS My Best Posts On Artificial Intelligence In The Classroom THE BEST (& FREE) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SITES FOR THE CLASSROOM – 2023 EVEN MORE BEST (& FREE) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SITES FOR THE CLASSROOM – 2023 THE BEST COLLECTIONS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS USEFUL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESOURCES FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO PLAN TO WRITE NOVELS SOMEDAY THE “BEST” TOOLS FOR TEACHERS TO CREATE THEIR OWN AI CHATBOTS THE BEST USES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN LEARNING GAMES ED WEEK PUBLISHES OUR “AI DO’S AND DON’TS” FOR TEACHERS” DOWNLOADABLE POSTER 2024’S BEST ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS & RESOURCES FOR TEACHERS & STUDENTS – SO FAR The “Best” Strategies For Creating AI-Resistant Assignments The Best Posts & Articles Highlighting Why We Need To Be Very Careful Around Ed Tech The Best AI Tools For Creating Visuals & Infographics The [Few] AI Tools That I Use Regularly & How I Use Them 2024’s Best Artificial Intelligence Tools & Resources For Teachers & Students – Part Two The Best Free AI-Powered Multi-Use Tools For Teachers The Best Posts & Articles On The Idea Of Using AI Tutors 2025’s Best Artificial Intelligence Tools & Resources For Teachers & Students – Part One 2025’s Best Artificial Intelligence Tools & Resources For Teachers & Students – Part Two The Most Useful Free Or VERY Low Cost AI Tools For Supporting English Language Learners    Here’s Advice I Gave To My Student Teacher Grandson This Week About Student Engagement OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay
My grandson entered a teacher credentialling program just as I retired from the classroom, and he’s doing great! Any school will be lucky to hire him next year. He’s doing his student teaching and, this week, he asked me for some advice about student engagement. I assured him that this was an ongoing challenge for veteran teachers, too. One of the points he raised was that when he asked his students to turn-and-talk, very few said anything. Here are some of the ideas I offered him about that issue, and engagement in general.
I’m adding this info to The Best Posts & Articles On Student Engagement.  This Week’s “Round-Up” Of Useful Posts & Articles On Ed Policy Issues
Here are some recent useful posts and articles on educational policy issues (You might also be interested in seeing all my “Best” lists related to education policy here):
More students are going to college. Affordability and workforce training are factors is from NPR.
Looking out for ICE, California parents, teachers help students get to school is from EdSource. I’m adding it to The Best Resources To Support Schools, Teachers, Students & Families In The Face Of Trump’s Deportation Threats. I’m adding this to the same “Best” list:
I’m adding this post to The Best Resources Showing Why We Need To Be “Data-Informed” & Not “Data-Driven”:
 Russian Strikes Force Kyiv Schools to Close Amid Rolling Blackouts is from The NY Times.
At nine, I disappeared into home schooling. No one came looking is from The Guardian.
 
Federal immigration enforcement near schools disrupts attendance, traumatizes students and damages their academic performance is from The Conversation. 
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