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"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles
Classroom Before The First Day Of School Though, This Time, It’s My Grandson’s!
I posted photos of my classroom for many years here on the day before school began. Now that I’m retired, I can pass the torch to my grandson , Shea Rusakowicz , who begins his teaching career tomorrow! Good luck, Shea!      A Look Back: Every School District Staffperson In Charge Of Curriculum Adoption Should Read This Piece Explaining Why We Teachers Tend To Not Use The MaterialsFor the next several months, each week I’ll be republishing posts from the past that I think readers might still find useful. This post first appeared in 2019.
Dylan Wiliam shared an incredibly important piece on Twitter explaining how Districts screw-up adopting materials, including technology:
Why aren’t teachers using the resources companies sell to their districts? is the title of the report by Thomas Arnett. It’s from The American Enterprise Institute, which is not my favorite “think tank.” But it nails how districts mess-up their district materials decisions (see excerpt at the top of this post). It even pinpoints how surveys and typical teacher “input” doesn’t work, because then teachers tend to say what district staff wants to hear. It’s definitely worth reading the entire report, including his recommendations about what districts should do, instead. Here are some previous posts that are related to the points raised in the report, and support them: Is Any Teacher Surprised That New Study Finds Textbooks Not Key To Student Learning? The Best Resources For Adapting Your Textbook So It Doesn’t Bore Students To Death What Advice Would you Offer to Textbook Publishers? is from my Education Week Teacher column. The Best Posts & Articles Highlighting Why We Need To Be Very Careful Around Ed Tech  World Humanitarian Day Is August 19th – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources
The United Nations has declared August 19th to be World Humanitarian Day: World Humanitarian Day is a time to recognize those who face danger and adversity in order to help others. The day was designated by the General Assembly to coincide with the anniversary of the 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq. World Humanitarian Day is also an opportunity to celebrate the spirit that inspires humanitarian work around the globe You might be interested in The Best Resources For World Humanitarian Day.  This Week’s Free & Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools For The Classroom geralt / Pixabay
At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM: MarcoAI is an interesting mapping tool, which you can read more about at Google Maps Mania. Travel Animator uses AI to let you create “travel animation videos.” Making Graphic Novels with Gemini and NotebookLM is from Control Alt Achieve.
The structure of this sentence is a dead giveaway that AI wrote it is from Fast Company.
Beyond the Streak: How I Use ChatGPT Voice to Break the Language Plateau is from Tom Daccord.
 Sentences Of The Week 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: Be curious rather than angry when a parent, student, or staff member does or says something you don’t like. See Leading With Inquiry, Not Judgment and “Be Curious, Not Judgmental” As he observes to a fellow dog, “There’s no other place but here.” As much good work as I’ve done teaching multiple generations of students in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I think the next frontier for me, and maybe for all teachers, should be policy. The most pro-Trump counties suffered nearly 70,000 more COVID deaths than the most pro-Biden counties did. Data obtained by Chalkbeat from GoGuardian, an education software company that provides institutions tools to block and restrict certain webpages, shows that the rate of sites blocked in its gambling, betting and fantasy sports category has increased nearly 30% since the company started tracking in 2022, from a low of 13.48 blocks per 1,000 students to 17.4 this year. See The Best Resources For Using “Reactance” With Students To Help Them Learn About How Corporations Try To Manipulate Them Freedom, by their definition, appears to mean that we are all more exposed to more disease and premature death. California’s new budget clarifies which college degrees teacher candidates can use to meet credential requirements, creates a statewide system to review teacher transcripts and increases the cost to renew a teaching credential to help pay for it. Teacher candidates pursuing a single-subject credential must have a degree in a subject related to their credential. What would we do if we treated all our kids like they were all of our kids?” These papers find that even students who don’t excel in high school often stand to gain from attending college. Dennis Ross, a veteran of Middle East diplomacy who served presidents of both parties, said that “the Iranians seem to understand us better than we understand them.” And so far, what we have around here is a bunch of gelatinous blobs.
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