NJ Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages/
NJ Bilingual Educators
From the Editor: Roselyn Rauch, Ed.D.- Inside this Spring 2012 Edition of Voices
President’s Message: Judie Haynes
Vice-President’s Message: Cassandra Lawrence — Success for ELLs Across the Curriculum: A Spring Conference Preview
Spring Conference: Caia Schlessinger —Parking Update for New Brunswick (with Stadium map)
Spring Conference: Gwen Franks — Getting the Best Experience from Your Spring Conference
Spring Conference: Gail Verdi and Claudia Plata — Poster Sessions
Spring Conference: Teacher Education: Gail Verdi — Gearing Up For NJTESOL/NJBE’s Second Annual Graduate Forum
Featured Article: Joe Pompeo — Fellow teachers come to the defense of Pascale Mauclair, singled out as the ‘worst’ by the ‘Post’
Technology: Marilyn Pongracz — Favorite Websites: Classtools.net (1 image)
From The Editor
Inside this Spring 2012 Edition of Voices
By Roselyn Rauch
May 30th and 31st will be here before you know it. And on those days, our annual Spring Conference will take place in New Brunswick. The main focus of this issue of Voices is conference-related: where it is and where to park; what to expect and whom to look for; what is happening and when. Read this edition and you will be prepared to get the most out of the event. Just be sure to check your workshop choices in the conference program to be sure that there weren’t any last minute changes.
The NJTESOL/NJBE Spring Conference is to ESL and bilingual teachers what NJEA Convention in Atlantic City is for mainstream teachers. The best of the best come to our conference to share their expertise and provide top-notch professional development. Networking opportunities abound, too, so that no one individual needs to feel that they are in this profession alone without a support system: share your successes, your failures, your frustrations. Your peers are compassionate and can provide real solutions.
There is one name that appears in at least 3 of the articles in this issue: Pascale Mauclair. Pascale Mauclair is a teacher in the New York City school system who was ranked as the worst of the worst. Wouldn’t you know that she was being judged via her students’ scores- all English language learners? Read Fellow teachers come to the defense of Pascale Mauclair, singled out as the ‘worst’ by the ‘Post’ by Joe Pompeo of capitalnewyork.com. Her situation could happen to any one of our colleagues; it is a scary scenario.
Testing is always on our minds especially at this time of year. Read Tina Kern’s article about the Gray Areas: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell regarding testing protocol. This is recommended reading for all as is Monica Schnee’s article, A New Initiative. Monica focuses on getting parents involved and informing them of what a school scenario is like for their children. I always encourage you to read the reports of the other SIGs. So much of what we do intersects and overlaps across the levels. We need to know what is going on throughout our realm.
And, last, but by no means least, we bid goodbye to Judie Haynes as our President. She won’t be going far, though, as she moves into the Past President’s chair. We must thank her not only for her leadership these last two years as President of NJTESOL/NJBE but for her commitment to our profession for over twenty years. Thank you, Judie.
Looking forward,
Roselyn
Roselyn Rauch, Ed.D., was the editor of Voices and a retired ESL/ESL Resource teacher from the Paterson Public School System.
President’s Message
By Judie Haynes
This is my last message as president of NJTESOL/NJBE. It has been my great pleasure to serve as your president over the past two years. I want to take this opportunity to thank you all, especially those professionals who have served on the Executive Board with me. I am so proud to have served on the Board of NJTESOL/NJBE for 20 years with two more to go as Past President.
Our Fall Conference is fast approaching. We have held our scholarship and awards competitions and the winners will be announced in the Conference Program. We will honor the recipients of our scholarships and awards at a reception on Wednesday evening from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. Please join us to celebrate our students and their accomplishments. There is no charge. We will be holding elections for a new Vice-President, and new Chairs for Bilingual Elementary SIG, Bilingual High School SIG, Adult Ed SIG and Teacher Education SIG. You will meet our new Executive Board members at the reception.
I would also like to thank the Executive Board members who have worked so hard to put this conference together. A special thanks goes to Cassy Lawrence who finishes her second year as Conference Chair and Sandee McHugh-McBride who arranged all of the vendors. Thanks to Tina Kern and Janet Kaback for their work on coordinating the scholarship applications and to Gail Verdi for arranging the Poster sessions. Without the hard work of the entire Executive Board, a yearly conference would not be possible. I look forward to seeing all of you on May 30th & 31st.
Last Fall, I signed a petition to support the No History is Illegal campaign that is protesting a recent law that bans school districts from teaching ethnic studies in Arizona. Most noticeably affected is the Mexican American Studies course that was closed down in Tucson. I received a wonderful letter from a leader of the movement thanking supporters for their help. One of the leaders of the campaign, Curis Acosta, wrote that the support of teachers and students from around the country has boosted their spirits and given them the courage to continue to fight this law. If you want to know more about the ethnic studies law in Arizona, go to their website at Save Ethnic Studies.
Another interesting piece of news comes from the Education Law Center where Stan Karp testified for the Senate Education Committee about the Senate Education bill #1455 also known at the TEACHNJ ACT. Karp expresses concern about adopting teacher evaluation procedures that are not based on proven practice. He contends that a premature adoption of new teacher evaluation processes “may negatively affect our high performing districts while not necessarily impacting the low performing districts.” We see examples of this in other states where teacher evaluation systems were adopted without enough research. Putting a new evaluation system in place is expensive. TEACHNJ, if passed, will require that school districts use most of their professional development money to support the new evaluation.
New York City has already had negative experiences with the hasty adoption of new, untested teacher evaluation process. Joe Pompeo, the son of NJTESOL-NJBE member Carolyn Pompeo, is the media reporter for capitalnewyork.com [Editor’s note: This website no longer exists.], an online publication covering New York City. In a recent article, he told the story of Bronx ESL teacher Pascale Mauclair who until recently has an excellent teaching record. In March when the New York Post printed the ratings of teachers in New York City, Mauclair was singled out as the worst teacher in the city. Mauclair is the teacher of a small group of recently arrived immigrants and many of her students had only been in her class a few months at the time they were tested. The repercussions of publicizing the results of student tests are made clear by this article. Pompeo’s article mentions the harassment that Mauclair has undergone as a result of the Post article. Also, mentioned is the support she is getting from New Jersey ESL and bilingual teachers. I wonder why the decision was made to publicize the results of student tests. What business publicizes the evaluations of its employees? Even if the scores were indicative of teacher ability, what good does it do to publish these results? (Editor’s note: Read Joe Pompeo’s article in this issue.)
I hope to see all of you on May 30th and 31st at our Spring Conference.
Vice President’s Message
Success for ELLs Across the Curriculum: A Spring Conference Preview
By Cassandra Lawrence
The start of spring reveals purple and white crocuses, birds singing happily in the earliest hours, the urge to spend more time outdoors – and for me – the realization that my students have made great strides, both academically and in their English language development. It’s so exciting to watch them engage in lessons with their peers, take creative risks in their writing, and become stronger in their analytical skills. Student progress blooms suddenly at this time of year inspiring me to seek even more ways to bridge learning.
The NJTESOL/NJBE Spring Conference offers bilingual and ESL practitioners from across our state the kind of professional development WE want and need. With that in mind, the 2012 conference theme – Success for ELLs Across the Curriculum – expresses our goal as educators of ELLs: to provide the most optimal learning experiences for our students in all aspects of the curriculum, while including appropriate strategies, experiences, and materials. As a conference participant this year, you’ll find relevant and practical information about how to lead your students toward success.
On both days of the conference, we will begin with a General Session at 8:45 am, with opening remarks and a presentation by NJTESOL/NJBE President Judie Haynes. Both days will also feature a one-hour Keynote presentation, scheduled to begin at 9:15 am. Arrive early and sign in, grab some coffee, and get a good seat.
On Wednesday, May 30, the Keynote will be delivered by Maria Dove and Andrea Honigsfeld, co-authors of Collaboration and Co-teaching: Strategies for English Learners (Corwin Press, 2010).Their keynote presentation, Common Core Collaborations, will help us to develop an understanding of how to best meet the Common Core State Standards with English language learners in mind. As a follow-up to their keynote, Dove and Honigsfeld will present an afternoon session titled Co-Teaching for the Common Core which will highlight several collaborative teaching models.
On Thursday, May 31, we will hear from Keynote speaker Mary Cappellini, author of Balancing Reading and Language Learning: A Resource for Teaching English Language Learners, K-5 (Stenhouse, 2005). During her keynote presentation, Balancing Reading and Language Learning, she will emphasize the importance of making time for language development during literacy, and highlighting students’ strengths as they learn to read and learn to speak English at the same time. Cappellini will also present an afternoon breakout session titled The Importance of Talk during Reading Block where she will highlight the importance of not only making time to read, but also making time to talk during reading.
Workshops and meetings will start at 10:30 am, following the keynote presentations. Here are just some of the sessions we are offering this year:
Raquel Sinai and Lori Ramella will present State Initiatives in Bilingual and ESL Education on both days of the conference. This yearly update on behalf of the DOE will offer our members the most current information on state and federal requirements for bilingual, ESL, and Title III of No Child Left Behind. We have Judith O-Loughlin and Vesna Radanovic-Kocic, who will present Preparing Mainstream Teachers to Teach ELLs, where they will introduce a teacher project which utilized SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) mini-lessons. Our own Judie Haynes, president of NJTESOL/NJBE, will present Professional Development through Social Networking where you will hear about the power of Twitter, Facebook, and other Web 2.0 tools, and learn how to build a professional learning network.
Don’t miss Madeline Franco-DeFaria, and her well-known co-presenter Dr. Jim Cummins (joining us virtually via Skype), who will present 5 Principals for Teaching Math and Science to ELLs. Joining us this year is Ivelis Sanfilippo, who will share games and activities for enriching language during her workshop Having Fun In A Dual Language Classroom. Bonnie Moisan will present Common Core, Objective Driven Lessons, and ELLs, during which she will demonstrate how to look at Common Core and ELL Standards and apply those targets while preparing concise objective driven lessons. Have you heard of ColorinColorado? Claudia Navarro will share this amazing website’s wealth of resources for both teachers and parents of ELLs.
The needs of Newcomer ELLs in High School will be discussed by Marcella Garavaglia and Mariana Sierra, and Preparing High School ELLs for High-Stakes Tests will be examined during a workshop presented by Susan Bova and Susan Harrison. Our own Caia Schlessinger will round out these discussions in her workshop Sheltered Language Arts at the High School Level.
On Wednesday, May 30, we will host our second Higher Ed Mini-Conference. A series of concurrent workshops will take place, addressing the specific needs and interests of our Higher Ed population. Make sure to look at the schedule on our website for a listing of these workshops.
Our liaison, Sandee McHugh-McBride, has worked diligently to gather a great group of exhibitors for this year’s conference. Be sure to visit the hotel atrium, where you can peruse the materials and resources at the exhibitors’ tables. This time well-spent will earn you an extra hour of professional development.
Be sure to join us on Wednesday evening, May 30, at 5:30 pm for our Awards Reception. Our annual student awards presentations will take place at this free event. Join your NJTESOL/NJBE friends and colleagues for some light refreshments while we support some of our star students.
Make the most of your conference experience! Arrive early and start your day with the morning General Session and Keynote presentations. Select the workshops you’d like to attend, and plan on meeting up with colleagues or make new friends at the buffet lunch, which will be served continuously 11:30 am to 2:30 pm.
Follow us on Facebook or Twitter to get more updates about the Spring Conference! And stop by the registration table to say Hi – I’d love to meet you!
Cassandra Lawrence was the Vice President of NJTESOL/NJBE and the 2012 Spring Conference Chair. She is an elementary bilingual teacher in the Perth Amboy Schools district.
New Brunswick Parking Update
By Caia Schlessinger
The NJTESOL-NJBE Spring Conference will be held on Wednesday, May 30th and Thursday, May 31st, 2012, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Workshops begin at approximately 8:45 in the morning and end at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon. Please check the preliminary schedule online for more detailed information. There is also an Awards Reception from 5:00 to 6:30 on Wednesday evening.
Conference attendees will have several choices for parking. There will be parking at the Hyatt Regency Hotel Parking Deck for a daily rate of $6. Once the hotel parking deck is full, there will be spaces reserved at the Ferren Daily Parking Deck at 1 Penn Plaza (for GPS and Mapquest directions use 180 Church Street). When you exit the parking deck, tell the attendant that you were an attendee at the NJTESOL-NJBE Spring Conference for a special daily parking rate.
Another alternative is to park for free at the Rutgers University Stadium West Lot, which is located behind the HighPoint Solutions Football Stadium off of Sutphen Road in Piscataway. The Hyatt Regency Hotel will supply a shuttle bus, which will bring conference attendees from the Stadium West Lot to the hotel at 8:00, 8:30, and 9:00 in the morning. The shuttle bus will bring attendees back to the parking lot at 3:00, 3:30, and 4:00 in the afternoon. There will be an additional shuttle run at 6:30 after the evening awards reception.
In addition, conference attendees may use public transit. The Hyatt is two blocks from the Amtrak and one block from the NJ Transit station. Please refer to the hotel website for more details.
For the most accurate information, please check the NJTESOL-NJBE Spring Conference website. Click on ‘Directions’ for the most up to date maps, daily parking rates, and any other pertinent information.
Caia Schlessinger is the NJTESOL/NJBE Secondary ESL Representative.
Getting the Best Experience from the Spring Conference
By Gwen Franks
If you haven’t registered yet there is still time (until May 11th).
- Register on-line & pay with Paypal or credit card;
- Print out the form & mail in with a check;
- Print out the form & send in with an approved purchase order (must be sent with the actual purchase order).
If you have already registered you should be receiving an email confirmation. Please read the confirmation to make sure that your registration is correct. If not, please email Gwen Franks at business-admin@njtesol-njbe.org. When filling out the registration form please use your personal email address; many schools are using blockers that will not allow your confirmation to go through.
If your school is sending your registration along with the purchase order and you have not received your confirmation, please double check with your school district as to the status of the PO.
Picture ID is now required at Conference Check-In.
Check-In opens at 7:30 a.m. and remains open only until 10:00 a.m. There is no check-in after 10:00 a.m. You must check- in to obtain your badge and conference materials before attending any workshops. Please wear your badge, so that you can be identified as a conference attendee. Badges will be checked throughout the day.
Two Day Registrants. You MUST check-in both days.
Parking. Hotel parking for 400 cars will be available for $6.00 per car for the day. Additional city parking lots are also available a few blocks from the hotel at regular rates. Maps and addresses for all parking will be available on-line soon. Carpooling and public transportation are recommended. New Brunswick is served by NJ Transit buses and trains.
Join your colleagues and NJTESOL/NJBE friends at a reception after the conference on Wednesday May 30, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m. Light refreshments will be available. Please let us know if you plan on attending.
Check your conference confirmation and membership status. If you received a notice with your confirmation that your membership status is not up to date and have not acted upon it, please be ready to pay for membership at the conference. Your membership must be paid up in order to receive your conference packet.
Exhibits open early, so enjoy a cup of coffee or tea and take a look at the exhibitions before the workshops begin. We are offering an hour of Professional Development for the time you spend in the Exhibit area. The Exhibitors will be open from 7:30 am – 5:00 pm on Wednesday and 7:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. approximately on Thursday.
Check the conference schedule on our website and plan your day.
Lunch buffet will be continuously served between 11:30 and 2:30. Lunch tickets will be included in your registration packet. You will need to provide the ticket when entering the buffet line. Do not lose your tickets, they cannot be replaced.
Professional Development Certificates will be given out at the end of each workshop. Attendees must remain in the session the whole time to receive their certificate. As a courtesy to the presenter and fellow conference participants, it is requested that you arrive to your workshop on time and stay until it is over, at which time the certificates will be distributed.
Directions & Public Transportation to the Hyatt Regency are available on-line.
The Hyatt Regency is offering reduced conference price for rooms. Mention
NJTESOL-NJBE.
Gwen Franks is the business administrator and a conference planner for NJTESOL-NJBE.
Poster Sessions Representing ESL & Bilingual Communities & Learners
By Gail Verdi, Tina Kern, and Claudia Plata-Poster Session Coordinators
This year NJTESOL/NJBE is pleased to announce that our poster sessions will highlight a variety of approaches to teaching language and content across disciplines. Please join us at our Poster Session Gallery from 1:30-3:00 pm on May 30th and May 31st in the New Brunswick Hyatt’s Atrium Foyer. The poster sessions will span all levels of education (PreK-16) and provide examples of strategies teachers are using to navigate the new Core Curriculum Content Standards. Take advantage of this informal setting to discuss methods and materials with your peers. Here is a list of presenters and topics:
Sessions Scheduled for Wednesday, May 30
Higher Education
- Stephanie Chilingerian – Color – coded Model for a Five-paragraph Essay
- Deniz Gokcora – Virtual Item Banks
- Dawn Gottlieb – Isolated Grammar Instruction Vs. Integrated Grammar Instruction
ESL Secondary
- Hurisa Guvercin – The Effect of Collocations on Vocabulary Learning
- Paula Leguizamon – 21st Century Centers with I-pads/I-pods
Sessions Scheduled for Thursday, May 31
ESL Pre-K-Elementary
- Patricia Washington – Involving Students Verbally Using Science Groups
ESL Middle School
- Julia Chabonova & Karrie Briggs – Creole Speakers in Urban Classrooms: Challenges and Strategies
- Maria Gavilanez – Guided Reading and English Language Learners
- Lauren Lielinski – Use of Contrast Model in ELLs Writing
Bilingual Pre-K-Elementary
- Esmeralda Garcia, Leslie Sanchez & Elizer Mejia – Visiting Ancient Egypt with ELLs
- Lisa Tanikawa-Brown – ELL Students Dream Globally, Act Locally Maria Triana,
- Katherine Vargas & Natalie Zeballos – Exploring the Rainforest with ELLS Bilingual
Secondary
- Ana Klement – Early American Civilizations: Mayas and Aztecs
Gearing Up For NJTESOL/NJBE’s Second Annual Graduate Forum
By Gail Verdi and BJ Franks
NJTESOL/NJBE is excited to announce that our Second Annual Graduate Student Forum (GSF) has been expanded to two days. We have doubled the number of participants and expanded the number of universities represented. The GSF will take place on Wednesday, May 30th from 2:00-3:30 PM and Thursday, May 31st from 1:30-3:00 PM. Graduate students are eligible to take part in this session if they are in the process of working on, or have completed, projects impacting multilingual/multicultural communities/classrooms. Our goal is to encourage our graduates to publish their work in books and peer review publications. Below you will find the names of presenters, the university they represent, and the titles of their presentations.
For our session on May 30th, the following participants will present:
Elizabeth Conway, Rutgers U: Korean ELL Repairs to English Word-Final
Jessie Curtis, Rutgers U: Community-University Research Partnership
Lisa Rose Johnson, Arcadia U: Perceptions of Generation 1.5 Students
Charlotte Madison & Jennifer Cannatar, NJ City U: Persuasive Essay
Kiran Ramamurthy, Rutgers U: What Are Teachers Taking with Them?
For our session on May 31st, the following participants will present:
Desi Mayol, William Paterson U: Effectiveness of One-on-One Reading Intervention
Meredith Byrnes, Rutgers U: Engaging Latin Parents to Support Academic Development
Robin Chang Rosen, Kean U: The Effect of Grammar on Holistic Assessment
Sora Suh, Rutgers U: The ESL Learning Community
We hope that you will join us in supporting and celebrating the work of graduate students who are doing innovate projects on behalf of our multilingual/multicultural communities. We also invite you to consider self-nominating or nominating a graduate student for our 2013 graduate student forum. See you at the conference.
Gail Verdi is the Teacher Education SIG Representative.
Fellow teachers come to the defense of Pascale Mauclair, singled out as the ‘worst’ by the ‘Post’
By Joe Pompeo, March 2, 2012
*(Reprinted in Voices by permission of the author and capitalnewyork.com. )
Among the reasons members of the teachers’ union were fearful of the education department’s release of a trove of teacher data last Friday to local news outlets that had sued for it to be made public was the prospect of individual teachers being “denigrated in the media based on this information,” as education chancellor Dennis Walcott wrote in the Daily News.
Teachers across the river in New Jersey are now rallying behind the teacher who was dubbed the “worst” in the city by the New York Post.
“Teachers are being trashed by media,” a Garden State E.S.L. teacher wrote in an email that was circulated to a list-serv of New Jersey Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (NJTESOL), a professional organization.
The email included a link to an article on the website Edwize (which is sponsored by the union, the United Federation of Teachers) that described how Queens E.S.L. teacher Pascale Mauclair twice called the cops after Post reporters staked out her home last week.
“She is an ESL teacher with an excellent record of success,” the email reads, “however state teacher data did not provide full story, as clearly her students cannot immediately show proficiency on state assessments!”
The teacher data is based on English and math test scores for the city’s fourth through eighth grade student populations. The scores are one measure used by the D.O.E. to make certain performance-based decisions, such as tenure, but they are not necessarily an accurate metric by which to gauge a teacher’s overall success, which made their release controversial.
News outlets exercised varying degrees of caution in reporting on the data and presenting it to readers.
Post rival the Daily News, for instance, singled out the few dozen teachers at the very high and very low ends of the spectrum with a one-point margin of error while also running several skeptical op-ed pieces.
“We felt in terms of naming people, that was the fairer way to do it,” deputy editor Arthur Browne told Capital earlier this week. “We had good reason to believe that that information carried more veracity as far as these particular individuals were concerned.”
The Post, meanwhile, printed the rankings of all of the more than 12,000 teachers named in the report, and promoted the list heavily on the front page of last Saturday’s paper.
The following day, the Post published a follow-up item about Mauclair, reporting: “The city’s worst teacher has parents at her Queens school looking for a different classroom for their children.”
Reached for comment earlier this week, the Post education reporter listed online as the paper’s public liaison for the teacher ratings said she was not authorized to comment. (At a paper like the Post, big stories like this are generally executed by teams of reporters, and the overall tone and packaging of the coverage is determined by multiple editors, whom the tabloid also generally does not permit to comment publicly on editorial decision-making.)
The EDwize article, on the other hand, paints a different picture of Mauclair, who teaches at P.S. 11 in Woodside Queens, where more than a quarter of the students are not native English speakers, according to the site.
“If a journalist with integrity had examined the TDR data, a number of red flags which suggested something was seriously amiss with the scores for Mauclair and P.S. 11 would have presented themselves,” wrote Leo Casey, the teacher union’s vice president for academic high schools and the author of the essay. “Mauclair is an ESL teacher, and over the last five years she has had small, self-contained classes of recently arrived immigrants who do not speak English. Her students arrive at different times of the school year, depending upon that date of their family’s migration; consequently, it is not unusual for her students to take the 6th grade exams when they have only been in her class for a matter of a few months.
“The Post gets its share of the blame,” he continued. “It engaged in the calculated effort to destroy the good name of a teacher whose sole crime was her vocation to make a difference in the lives of children. It set out to brutally strip her of her personal dignity, and paraded in public an egregiously false ‘naked’ portrait of her life’s work.”
Technology
Favorite Websites
By Marilyn Pongracz
Classtools.net hosts a wide variety of templates for activities for classes or individual students. Most are either games or organizers that can enhance lessons and aid in learning by making it more visual and fun. These activities are all free and can be embedded in any blog, wiki, or website. There are suggested uses for all of them, and some also provide detailed sample lessons. Samples and suggestions can be searched by the type of activity or by the subject. With creative guidance from the teacher, most of the activities would be appropriate for ELLs at any level who can read and write.
Fakebook, although similar in appearance and name, is not related to the social networking site. This tool is for educational purposes only. Teachers can have students create profile pages for characters in a book or historical figures. Students can add related “friends” pictures, videos, and comments. See Romeo Montague.
QR code
QR Treasure Hunt Generator is a new application that turns questions into QR codes, which when scanned, revert back into text questions. The suggested activity is that these can be hidden around a room or school, and small groups of students search for them. The questions could be simple for beginning ELLs to practice asking and answering questions of their classmates, such as, “Who has a big dog?” to a higher level activity like the one in the example on the website of a “History Mystery” research quest.
Arcade Game Generator is good for reviewing concepts or vocabulary in question and answer format. The teacher can choose to produce flashcards, matching pairs (like the Memory game), Wordshoot (like space invaders), Manic Miner, or CannonBall Fun.
Jigsaw diagram is useful for sorting or matching to either learn vocabulary, create a review, write notes for summarizing, or to brainstorm ideas and then group them by color or by putting the puzzle pieces together. It could also help students apply concepts such as “The Water Cycle.” Dustbin Game is another application for reviewing concepts that need to be grouped, such as the characteristics of the 13 colonies. The class or individual students can make their own and then use it to review. (See the 13 Colonies.) Post-it aids students in brainstorming and categorizing and also has the option of allowing them to label a picture. Timeline is a visual tool to guide students to focus on key events in a historical period or a story, with the option of categorizing through color coding, and finalizing the project by choosing a background picture.
Some of the templates have more specific uses such as the Random Name/ Word Pickerto choose students at random to answer questions or to play a game with vocabulary, such as giving definitions of words or word associations. Fishbone is a graphic organizer for more advanced students. Source Analyzer provides a diagram and hints to help students distinguish between useful and reliable sources and those that are not, and the Burger Diagram is made for outlining a five-paragraph essay.
While not every tool may be useful, the site is well-organized and has a good collection of options for the creative teacher.
Marilyn Pongracz is the Technology Coordinator for NJTESOL/NJBE and the English Language Resource Center Supervisor at Bergen Community College
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