John Faig's Page

My ELLs love working with mind maps. One of their favorites is the "double bubble" which takes that disorganized venn-diagram and turns it into an organized work of art that can easily be transferred to a writing activity with a minimum of confusion:)

As an ELIC (English Language Instructional Coach), I am supporting the use of Mind Maps in content classes where there are ELLs. Their use would help students develop a clearer understanding of our content texts.

Now as to where to find them, you can make your own (see my website under TEACHER TOOLS) . I plan on scanning some models from a workshop I went to over the summer and emailing them to colleagues. If you like, I can add you to that list.

Denise:)

www.ellteacherpros.com
www.teachingsuccesseswithells.blogspot.com

Hi John,
Welcome to PBL~Better with Practice group. Interesting that you've come to teaching from biz side--I've met many PBL enthusiasts who come to teaching as second career (and bring real-world experiences with them).
Feel free to start a new discussion with any questions you'd like this group to ponder.
Cheers,
Suzie

Welcome to PBL~Better with Practice, John! I think second career teachers have life experiences that make them especially suited to the job. I look forward to your participation in our discussions.

Hi John!

Hope you're enjoying the winter break. I was wondering if you, your educator contacts or students would be interested in participating in a Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. We'd really like to get more students involved from Connecticutt.

You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!

Hello,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this virtual Ning network is no exception. My name is Evan Morikawa. I am a 20 year old student from Olin College of Engineering (near Boston). I am a part of a group of six Olin students who are taking a year off to pursue interests in education, entrepreneurship, design and technology, which brought us to the logical project of a business that designs collaborative software for schools! I found you in a search for "middle school" on Classroom2.0, and since our project is specific to middle schools and uses new learning technology, I thought you might be interested. Our company is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

We are working under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media and tools: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum, and internet-based software. We hope to pioneer a web software tool that acts as a platform for this new media, bringing the power of the web and its tools to students, teachers and parents in a secure, comfortable and innovative environment. More importantly, and unlike many of our competitors, our software will empower teachers to better integrate higher level thinking skills, individualized learning, goal setting, reflection, and effective feedback and evaluation. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2008, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools and individual teachers will want to use to improve their students' learning in and out of the classroom.

Our team is currently trying to win an idea competition on Ideablob.com You can find us at http://ideablob.com/3975. We would love your support in the form of a vote within the next couple days, but more importantly we'd love your feedback and comments. Our description on Ideablob is short, and even the one above hardly gets at many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start. Note that winning this contest will raise $10,000, a large and useful sum of money for a web-based company running on “sweat equity” and minimal costs.

Feel free to email me back, post on my profile, check out alightlearning.com, or do anything you like!

Thanks,
Evan Morikawa
evan.morikawa@students.olin.edu

Hi John,

With your interest in technology and collaboration I recommend you take a look at Wiziq's virtual classroom and authorstream's web based power point presentation platform. Both are web based and have a feature rich free basic service that might work for your students.