Diigo bookmarks (weekly)

• How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos

  tags: creative commons commons how to photos

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• Opinion | What Trump’s Speech Says About His Mental Fitness - The New York Times

  Analyzed samples of the public speech

  tags: discourse opinion speech English speaking populations

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• Zamzar - Free online file conversion: FAQ

  tags: conversions FAQs files free online

• Gapminder: About

  "Gapminder is a fact tank, not a think tank. Gapminder fights devastating misconceptions about global development. Gapminder produces free teaching resources making the world understandable based on reliable statistics. Gapminder promotes a fact-based worldview everyone can understand" (What Gapminder is, ¶1, 2018.01.25).

  tags: collaboration education facts global development global issues photos statistics teaching resources worldviews

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• Global Competence Through Career and Technical Education | Asia Society

  "Career and technical education (CTE or vocational education) educators now face a critical new imperative: to prepare all students for work and civic roles in a world where success increasingly requires the ability to compete, connect, and cooperate on an international scale. / A new, free professional development course and toolkit, “Global Competence Through Career and Technical Education,” is available to help" (¶¶1-2, 2017.11.29).

  tags: Asia Society careers continuing education CTE education global competence global education international middle schools online courses professional development secondary schools vocational education

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• Different Approaches To Using Student Blogs And Digital Portfolios – The Edublogger

  "This post explores a range of approaches to student blogs and digital portfolios" (Morris, 2017.10.16, ¶4).

  tags: blogfolios blogging commenting portfolios reflection students student-centered teachers wink_students

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• MWIS Newsletter - September 2017: Becoming a materials writer in the digital age

  Recap. of TESOL 2017 session by Linda Butler and Jennifer Lebedev, with links to related articles and publishers' guidelines

  tags: guidelines materials development presentations self-publication TESOL textbooks venues for publication

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From Languishing Dyslexia to Thriving Dyslexia: Developing a New Conceptual Approach to Working with People with Dyslexia

From Languishing Dyslexia to Thriving Dyslexia: Developing a New Conceptual Approach to Working with People with Dyslexia: This is an account of personal narratives shared by several people with dyslexia. Most of these are presented in their original quotation format to provide personal accounts of the lives of people with dyslexia. In this paper the author shares her conversations with her participants. This paper provides an original conceptual model, which is currently been tested empirically. Dyslexia affects the learning process in areas as such reading, and spelling. Conversely abilities or strengths can be seen in other areas, such as developing coping strategies to manage and overcome challenges. This research aims to adapt positive psychology techniques to support individuals with dyslexia. To develop positive psychology interventions, individuals will be helped to discover their five signature strengths. The VIA (Values in Action) Strengths Survey has been hosted in a website which has been developed in the form of a dyslexia user friendly format, such as providing the ability for respondents to change fonts and font sizes, colours and a text to speech option. This paper introduces the theoretical model of ' How to move from Languishing Dyslexia to Thriving Dyslexia'.

Diigo bookmarks (weekly)

• Mastering Markdown · GitHub Guides

  In addition to standard styling syntax (bold, italics, lists, ...), "GitHub.com uses its own version of the Markdown syntax that provides an additional set of useful features, many of which make it easier to work with content on GitHub.com" (GitHub Flavored Markdown, ¶1, 2017.09.12).

  tags: formatting GitHub guides HTML hypertext markdown resources styles syntax text

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• OpenDyslexic | Free, OpenSource Dyslexia Typeface

  WordPress homepage introducing special typeface for readers with dyslexia

  tags: dyslexia fonts free readability resources websites

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A few dyslexia [font-related] resources

For the list on the OpenDyslexic’s Related Research page (https://opendyslexic.org/about-2/related-research/), the ThinkMind URL below might work better for item three (Tablet PCs…):

• http://www.thinkmind.org/index.php?view=article&articleid=achi_2012_2_20_20083

That’s the pointer the first author uses:

• http://www.ub.uio.no/english/about/people/ubodigit/andrega/ 
• See Publications: Gasparini, Andrea, & Culén, Alma (2012).

For item four (Typefaces for Dyslexia), I think OpenDyslexic meant _previously_ "at dyslexic.com/fonts.” The link seemed broken; so here’s a new one:

• http://www.iansyst.co.uk/articles/article/articles/2012/10/18/fonts-for-dyslexia

That article recommended ... a BDA Tech page (https://bdatech.org/what-technology/typefaces-for-dyslexia/), which indicated, “It is likely that line length, line spacing and font size are just as important" as fonts, and referred to Bigelow & Holmes 2014 post reviewing research:

• http://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2014/11/typography-dyslexia.html

In 2014, on GitHub, Niclas Darville (ndarville) shared a link to a ready-made Google Scholar search:

• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dyslexia%20font

Two of the top three hits from that search today are behind paywalls.

French et al. (2013) may shed light on general benefits from alternative fonts. Rello and Baeze-Yates (2013) found, "Sans serif, monospaced and roman font styles significantly improved the reading performance over serif, proportional and italic fonts" (Abstract). 

A Master's thesis from University of Twente by Leeuw (2010) examined one font in particular, Dyslexie. Leeuw's thesis is accessible on Google Drive.

References

• French, M. M. J., Blood, A., Bright, N. D., Futak, D., Grohmann, M. J., Hasthorpe, A., … Tabor, J. (2013). Changing Fonts in Education: How the Benefits Vary with Ability and Dyslexia. The Journal of Educational Research, 106(4), 301–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2012.736430

• Leeuw, R. de. (2010, December 21). Special font for dyslexia? Retrieved from http://essay.utwente.nl/60474/

• Rello, L., & Baeza-Yates, R. (2013). Good Fonts for Dyslexia. In Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (p. 14:1--14:8). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2513383.2513447

Alternative webpage readability extensions for Google Chrome

Searching for a replacement for Clearly, which has disappeared from Chrome extensions, I found a pointer to the following GitHub page in a comment on an Apps User Group post: 

• Alternatives for the Clearly readability extension (Eric Curts, 2016.01.21).

• GitHub - ZachSaucier/Just-Read: A customizable read mode extension for Chrome

(Zach Saucier, 2016.10.28)

A few alternatives mentioned either in Curts' blog post and embedded YouTube video about alternatives (Control Alt Achieve, 2016.01.20), or in comments on it, included:

• BeeLine Reader (http://www.beelinereader.com/)
• Featured in Curts' blog post and YouTube video
• https://youtu.be/Q0sLceZAPDY (2016.01.20)
• 3.9 star rating by 150 (Chrome Web Store, 2017.09.06)
• Just Read: 
• Maintained (Unknown, 2016.10.27)
• Mercury Reader (https://mercury.postlight.com/reader/)
• 3.9 star rating by 1426  (Chrome Web Store, 2017.09.06)
• Readability:
• Obsolete (Michael, 2017.03.21)
• Reportedly replaced by Mercury Reader (Anonymous, 2017.05.21)
• The Readability site said, "[C]heck out Mercury Reader" (c. 2016).

At present, Easy Reader:

• 4.7 stars by 472 of 30,587 users (Chrome Web Store, 2017.09.06) 

seems to be right up there with Just Read:

• 4.7 stars by 376 of 72, 480 users (Chrome Web Store, 2017.09.06).

If you favor either Easy Reader or Just Read, please share your rationale(s) in comments on this post.

[205 words]

Diigo bookmarks (weekly)

• Empathy Vs Sympathy | Psychology Today

  Comparison of pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion in terms of increasing engagement with others

  tags: compassion empathy pity psychology sympathy

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• How many languages are there in the world? | Ethnologue

  "This is a fragile time: Roughly a third of languages are now endangered" (7,099 languages are spoken today, ¶1, 2017.07.25).

  tags: countries Ethnologue languages maps regions world

• The Fracking Boom, a Baby Boom, and the Retreat From Marriage - Freakonomics Freakonomics

  • Even the most persnickety economists will tend to grant that whether there is this geological formation under your county is probably exogenous to family formation preferences.
    • A genuine research opportunity
  • First let me be clear that we are not looking at North Dakota and Montana, in what’s called the Bakken region up there.
  • The data do show that in response to these increased economic activity and earnings potential we do see an increase in births. But interestingly there’s the same response among married births and nonmarried births and no increase in marriage
  • the nonmarital birth response is very different: a 10 percent increase in earnings associated with the coal boom actually led to a reduction in nonmarital births
  • So a coal boom produced more marriage, more kids and fewer kids born to unmarried moms; whereas a fracking boom produced more kids, but no more marriage and a lot more kids born to unmarried moms?
  • Not everyone sees the rise in nonmarital childbearing as a challenge, but if you look at the data on the economic circumstances of kids, it’s hard not to think of that as a challenge.  

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Diigo bookmarks (weekly)

• NCEE | Empowered Educators

  "_Empowered Educators_ is a landmark, international comparative study of teacher and teaching quality in the world’s top-performing education systems" (How are they doing it? ¶2).

  tags: 21st century achievements books briefs comparisons countries education educational systems international policies research resources teachers teaching

• TEACHER VOICE: When it comes to teacher training, the U.S. could learn a thing or two from Canada - The Hechinger Report

  "Preparation for a career shaping the minds, values and spirit of our youth requires people of substance who are attracted to the profession because being an educator is an engaging and secure job choice" (¶17).

  tags: 21st century Alberta Canada curriculum degrees education educators empowerment international qualifications teacher training teachers U.S.

• The Origins of 10 Nicknames | Mental Floss

  Explanations of more or less popular nicknames

  tags: English diminutives history names nicknames phonetics popularity

• Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms.pdf

  In this article, Gilliard (2017) illuminated redlining, surveillance, and profiling practices that impinge upon educational and empowering uses of the World Wide Web.

  tags: access consent discrimination education empowerment information practices technology WWW

  • Digital redlining is the modern equivalent of this histori-cal form of societal division; it is the creation and maintenance of technological policies, practices, pedagogy, and investment decisions that enforce class boundaries and discriminate against specific groups.
  • Students are often surprised (and even angered) to learn the degree to which they are digitally redlined, surveilled, and profiled on the web and to find out that educational systems are looking to replicate many of those worst practices in the name of “efficiency,” “engagement,” or “improved outcomes.”

• Avoiding Assessment Mistakes — The Learner's Way (Coutts, 2017.07.16)

  "Testing for the skills valued in the 21st century, assessing socio-emotional intelligence and the capacity to function effectively within dynamic teams is difficult to do at scale, so we instead measure what is easy to measure. The trouble is in doing so we assign an inflated value to the parts of the curriculum which matter least and then lock ourselves in to teaching for these skills even when we know they are obsolete" (Assessment needs to be of the learning that matters, ¶1, 2017.07.19).

  tags: 21st century skills assessments education feedback formative assessment learning self-assessments teacher development timeliness

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• Book review: Post-admission Language Assessment of University Students

  "In most cases, results from these types of tests are meant to guide students toward university resources that would help them achieve their potential in their studies and to optimize their employability upon graduation."

  tags: assessments book reviews diagnostic tests language testing languages literacy post-admission proficiency testing

• How to get started with new online ESL students by Kris Jagasia from Off2Class — Online Teacher Summit

  Guest post with tips recycled from "past communication with online ESL teachers" (¶4).

  tags: ESL getting_started how to online Online Teacher Summit teaching

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• Search | LearnEnglish | British Council

  Site search for "environment"

  tags: agriculture animals business charities conservation consumerism ecotourism Eden Project education energy English environment ethics global warming habitats overpopulation resources

• Who We Are | International Rescue Committee (IRC)

  "The International Rescue Committee responds to the world's worst humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster" (Who We Are, The IRC: 83 years of history, ¶1, 2017.06.21).

  tags: conflict countries disasters education health international organizations non-profit rescue services

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• Professional Identity in an Age of Social Media | Tomorrow's Professor Postings

  "The more you tell your own story on a social media, the more difficult it is for other people to tell a story about you based on the fragments of material they find about you online" (Identity dilemma #1: Your employerm ¶5)

  tags: disclaimers employees employers higher blogging education identities institutions online identities policies social media

• Learn English Directions

  Interactive practice for giving directions

  tags: interactive English tutorials directions

• Diigo outliner supports image now | Diigo

  "This new update allows you to insert images into an outliner directly on Diigo website" (¶1, 2017.05.23).

  tags: Diigo images outliners tools updates

• EST: Emerging issues

  At present (2017.06.01), this page covers three emerging issues: 1) Price volatility, 2) Investments, and 3) Climate change.

  tags: agriculture climate change economics environment food security global issues international investments prices trade United Nations

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• How to get published in English: Advice from the outgoing Editor-in-Chief - ScienceDirect

  tags: academic writing co-authorship ethics guidelines open access peer reviews plagiarism predatory journals publication

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• How To Create Unique Online Programs In 4 Easy Steps by Elena Mutonono — Online Teacher Summit

  Elena Mutonono suggested ways online educators can "find completely new [online] teaching formats" (2017.05.09).

  tags: online online business online education online programs Online Teachers' Summit program development teaching

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• English Writing Tips: Improve your Skills Today - ESL Activities: Saving YOU Time, Guaranteed

  tags: tips writing accuracy skills fluency English

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