What's New at izzit.org

We are celebrating our 10th birthday and we want YOU to join the fun! We’ll be offering exciting new contests and giveaways each month, so remember to come back to izzit.org often for more chances to win! Remember, we want to hear from you, so be sure to Keep In Touch.

Streaming: Streaming is now available to everyone! No login required. Visit
izzit.org, click on a title and start streaming!

Download: For our members, we now offer free unlimited downloading of our
licensed videos straight into your classroom.

Resources: Log in to access the Teacher’s Guide, Table of Contents, Teaching Resources, and more.

DVDs: Still like to hold that product in your hand? You still can! Everybody gets one (1) free DVD, each school year, just for logging in and providing feedback on
a previous DVD.

New Releases 2016-2017: We are releasing new titles this year! Be sure to Keep In Touch so we can notify you when they’re available.

• The Invisible Hand                 • Sustainable Oceans and Seas
• Morality in the Marketplace     • 3 Keys to Success

Current Events: One of our most popular features! These lessons are updated daily throughout the school year. Each lesson includes a recent news article and
discussion questions designed to promote critical thinking, challenge
assumptions, and stimulate classroom discussion.

Social Media: Visit us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Vimeo, and YouTube for more content, contests, giveaways, and much more!

Blogs: Check out our blog section! We’ve added The Teacher Zone blog where
teachers and other educators share classroom/teaching ideas, observations,
new developments in education, book reviews – all sorts of topics. Is there
something you’d like us to blog about? Let us know! We’ve included easy
access to our Daily Current Events blog and izzit.org News blog.

Quizzes: We have great quizzes and we automatically score them for you! 

ESA: See how each video meets your state standards, or search for which of our videos meet a specific standard. We now include Common Core Standards.

Conferences: We’re going! Are you? Mark your calendar and be sure to stop by our booth to get an additional free DVD and other goodies.

1. Annual Middle Level Education Conference (AMLE), Austin, TX, Oct. 9-12, 2016
2. National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), Washington, D.C., Dec. 2-4, 2016
3. National Education Association (NEA), Boston, MA, June 30 – July 5, 2017

We’d love to hear from you! If you need assistance with any of the above items or have questions, our staff is available to help each weekday 8am-6pm (EST). 

Email or call toll-free: 888-242-0563.

Don't Let Tenses Make You Tense - by Lindell Long

Why do we have tenses? A writer is able to pinpoint time with the use of a particular tense but is it really necessary to know if it’s continuous or a perfect tense? In the English language, we have the simple tenses of present, past and future. The more complicated tenses such as continuous and perfect also have a present, past and future form. Then we add them together and have a perfect continuous which also has a present, past and future as well. Whew!

Now imagine you are from another country trying to learn the English language. All of these tenses can be confusing. Couple the number of tenses with all of the irregularities in the English language and it is understandable why an English Language Learner (ELL) can become frustrated.

If the amount of tenses wasn’t confusing enough, tenses also involve changing the verb! Remember

verb conjugation? While native English speakers take verb changing to be commonplace, many other languages do not change the verb. ESOL students from Viet Nam and China (speaking Mandarin) find changing a verb totally unnecessary and exceedingly strange.

How do other languages express time without changing the verb? Many other languages use indicator words without changing the verb. The indicator word determines when the action happened. For example, some words such as now, before, after, yesterday, tomorrow and today indicate when something happened or will happen. Additional words such as just, already, since, right now and later also serve as indicator words. Vietnamese and Mandarin languages use the context of the sentence to establish time or use an indicator word but not change the verb. While English has indicator words, they are used in conjunction with changing the verb as well.

To help an ESOL student, a cheat sheet or flash cards can be created with a formula for creating the

tenses properly.

                                                    Present                            Past                                       Future

  (progressive) continuous:     can+verb                         was+verb                             will be + verb

    

                           Perfect            have+verb                      had+ verb                             will have + verb

Present perfect continuous   have been + verb          had been + verb                  will have been + verb

As far as changing the verb, the present is the only time all of the persons are not the same. The most difficult form of verb change is the third person singular requiring an “s” or “es” ending. This is very difficult for many students to understand and remember and the source of many grammatical errors. Games, puzzles and reviews help students remember the change for the present tense. 

Using an indicator word with the tenses will make learning the English language form of tenses a little more familiar for ELL’s. Learning an ELL’s home language grammatical structure can help an ESOL 

student’s teacher understand some of the more difficult concepts to learn and why the concepts are difficult to comprehend. Don’t be tense teaching tenses, chart it out!

Lindell Long teaches ESOL at Clover Middle and High Schools in Clover, South Carolina, a position she’s held for the last 18 years. She’s married with 4 children and so many pets her family fears she’ll bring home a stray yak one day. 

izzit.org is Open for Business by Donna Corcoran

What do From Poop to Profits, Freedom’s Sound and Drew Carey have in common?  They’re all videos from izzit.org that truly engage students in business courses.

In most high schools, business classes are electives competing for the opportunity to educate today’s students on the principles of sound business decision-making as owners, investors and consumers.  In order to increase enrollment, it is essential that business courses are relevant and exciting—incorporating “fun” with thought-provoking challenges.  This is a much easier proposition when you have izzit.org in your corner.

I’ll admit, it was the free DVD option that enticed me to try izzit.org, but it was the quality of the resultant classroom debates, and projects generated by the DVDs and current events that really hooked me.  Why?  Because they hooked the students! When I first shared a DVD, it was hundreds of students – and three budget cuts – ago. Yet I consistently get the same student reactions: they are enthusiastic and interactive!

I define a great day as one where the bell rings before the students are ready to leave.  izzit.org days are great days!  In my classroom we post two critical sets of questions:

1) Is there an unintended consequence?
2) Who chooses? Who benefits?  Who pays? What’s fair? 

These question sets help students frame their responses in more thoughtful and encompassing ways.  I often hear students discussing the issues down the hall after class.  Many times they return the following day – or week – with additional higher-level follow-up.  What more can a teacher ask?

School goals in my district include differentiated instruction and rigor.  The Teacher Guide that comes with each DVD facilitates the process of differentiating for various student populations, while keeping the information relevant and rigorous.  Much of the work is done for me. And in the days of having to do more with less, it’s invaluable to have a trustworthy source at a price I can afford.  As a district trainer for CRISS (Creating Independence through Student-owned Strategies), I use the izzit.org materials in my workshops as examples of excellent student-centered resources.

My biggest concern, frankly, is that more business teachers should become aware of the great resources available through izzit.org. Although the videos are certainly pertinent in a variety of curricular areas, many of my colleagues think of them as social studies resources. This simply is not the case! Eminent Domain is a perfect for Business Law, as is Markets Without Borders. Students in Introduction to Business and Entrepreneurship LOVE Free Trade and the Win-Win Trading Game.  They walk away with a clearer understanding of the world, and their individual choices. I remind students they are always voting with their dollars and their actions. Students in Consumer Education chose to lend money through Kiva.org after viewing the Pennies a Day video.

I make it my business to spread the word at business education conventions – izzit.org is open for business! Student activities that engage, teacher lesson plans and assessments--all in one great package? That’s a win/win!

Lessons from Rwanda: Preconditions for Prosperity By Casey C. Fleming

I will never forget how good it felt to earn my first paycheck as a teacher. After four years subsisting on New Orleans’ Po Boys, I could finally afford to enjoy the finer things. But I overdid it. I spent every last cent furnishing a new apartment, buying new clothes and treating my friends. I even applied for a few credit cards. I could afford it, I thought. When the bills started pouring in, I quickly realized I needed to change my habits and I turned to the Internet to look for savings strategies.

I stumbled on izzit.org. There I found an abundance of resources aimed at teaching students economic principles, fiscal responsibility and entrepreneurship. Realizing that the disadvantaged students I worked with could also benefit from these lessons, I decided to integrate izzit.org materials into my curriculum. I ordered the DVD Victoria’s Chance, a video about the education of a young Ghanaian, and I challenged my students to think about real poverty. And so it began. Together we explored budgeting, free markets, and entrepreneurship all while learning grammar and composition.

My newfound passion for integrating enterprise-based solutions to poverty in the classroom led me to apply for a teaching fellowship with the Social Equity Venture Fund, or SEVEN, to travel to Rwanda to discuss, observe, and learn about how Rwanda’s leaders were also integrating such lessons in their own classrooms and economy. The following is a reflection on what I learned during my visit.

Michael Fairbanks, SEVEN’s co-founder, has laid out five “preconditions” that must be satisfied for emerging nations to improve their global competitiveness: leadership, moral purpose, tension, receptivity to change, and insight. Do Rwandans satisfy these five conditions? And do I? By relating each precondition to a personal experience of mine during the trip, I hoped to answer these questions.

Leadership—When one thinks of leadership in Rwanda, he or she can most likely not help but to first think of his Excellency, President Kagame. In Rwanda, individuals assigned to positions of leadership are held accountable through the ancient cultural tradition of signing an imihigo. An imihigo is a cultural practice in which an individual appointed to a position of leadership sets targets to be achieved within a specific period of time. If such an individual fails to meet the targets laid out in the contract, or to keep promises made during the course of a political campaign, that person is relieved of his position. Leaders are thus held accountable for their actions and their promises. I can only dream of what America might look like if we conducted our political process in a similar manner. In my own career as an educator, I have adopted this accountability measure to set goals for myself and my students while working at a New York City charter school.

Moral purpose—Writer and native African Eric Kacou defined moral purpose as a compelling aspiration that ignites the desire for change. I witnessed such moral purpose in Rwanda during my time spent with a conservationist from the Dian Fossey Foundation prior to a gorilla trek in the Virunga Mountains. Rwandans are committed not only to enacting policies that promote economic growth, but also to the conservation of its most extraordinary natural resources—like the majestic silverback gorilla. Listening to our guide discuss Rwanda’s approach to conservationism through eco-tourism convinced me this was an issue close to Rwandans’ hearts. Moral purpose is firmly established in the country’s approach to protecting its ecology which also allows for competitiveness in the eco-tourism industry.

Tension, in the context of economic reform, is the third precondition for national success. Tension refers to a sense of urgency triggered by a situation that has become unsustainable.  Undoubtedly, the tribal genocide of 1994 catalyzed the sense of urgency that has transformed Rwanda’s national identity. Some of my counterparts on this trip have suggested this event was a necessary evil for Rwanda to undergo the amazing transformation that has taken place since. One can only speculate. However, when I reflect on my time in Rwanda – and all of the extraordinary people I met while I was there – I can only be saddened by the thought of all those lost souls who might have contributed to Rwanda’s renaissance. What is more inspiring than the sense of urgency that exists in Rwanda is the people’s capacity to forgive and to unite.

Receptivity—The fourth precondition, receptivity, indicates willingness to listen to new ideas and embrace change. Nowhere was this receptivity more apparent than in the bright-eyed enthusiasm of Rwanda’s children. In my time as an educator, I have never had the pleasure of working with a group of children as eager to learn. I could not help but think back to my students in the U.S., many of whom are so easily discouraged and so eager to plug in their headphones. And yet here, in this classroom with makeshift desks, I witnessed a room full of attentive students waving hands in the air. They were eager to be called on. They yearned to be challenged. I was as fascinated with their thirst for knowledge as they were with my red hair and blue eyes. In the face of poverty and uncertainty, it is clear that these children are filled with optimism. While working with the students, I perceived a healthy balance of national identity and cultural pride coupled with a desire for western knowledge, modernity, and technology. The children of Rwanda possess receptivity in spades.

Insight—The final precondition is insight. In this context, insight refers to the knowledge required to make informed strategic choices. I had the privilege of meeting with many successful Rwandan

businessmen, economists, and entrepreneurs during my visit. A recurring concept that each speaker stressed was just how imperative it is that the people of Rwanda invest in themselves and begin to generate their own wealth. Overwhelmingly, they want to resist outside sources of foreign aid, often called “dead aid” due to its tendency to corrupt and create dependence. Yet I was encouraged to see how willing Rwandan leadership is to seek advice from outsiders when it comes to economic affairs. Based on what I observed, it is my belief that Rwanda’s greatest economic insight comes from its willingness to benefit from the wealth of knowledge available around the world.

As a young teacher, one of the most difficult lessons I had to learn was to seek advice from more experienced teachers; for acknowledging what one doesn’t know is more important than relying on what one does know. When making strategic choices concerning economic policies, leaders must keep in mind that the choices they make will affect the standard of living for years to come. Likewise, my decisions as a teacher will affect the academic achievement of my students for years to come.

What I have taken home from Rwanda is the fact that the five preconditions I set out with as mere concepts are already deeply embedded in their culture. The Rwandan people have inspired me to become a better leader, driven by my students’ needs; to search for moral purpose; to be cognizant of tension in order to impart a sense of urgency in the classroom; and lastly, to become a catalyst for change. I will be more receptive to different cultures and new ideas and will embrace these cultures and ideas with an open mind. I will continue to turn to others to benefit from their wealth of experience in order to make more informed decisions regarding the strategies that will ultimately shape the lives of my students. I will do all of these things for one very simple reason: If an entire nation is capable of undergoing such a profound transformation, there is absolutely no excuse for an individual like me not to do so as well.

Pokémon Go in the Classroom

by Susan Gable

I know, I know...it’s only mid-July. You’re not ready yet to be thinking about school stuff. It’s summer vacation, for Pete’s sake!

And do you know how a lot of your students are spending their summer vacation? Odds are (millions worldwide have already downloaded the app/game) they’re playing Pokémon Go.

So let’s not fight the trend, but embrace it, and use it to our advantage in the classroom. After all, keeping them interested is the biggest hurdle, right?

1     Math & Graphing

Exactly how you go about this will depend on the age of your students. For the youngest students, do a visual graph with pictures of different Pokémon characters. Each picture can represent one, five, ten...whatever scale you need....of different Pokémon. How many Eevee, Pidgeotto, Charizard, etc. did the class capture? (Make sure you cover the common and the not-so-common. Don’t know the names? Ask the kids. They’ll know.) Your graph can even become a bulletin board in your classroom.

With older students, they can collect the data and graph it using the computer. (Excel or Google Sheets are two options to use.) Ask them also to express each Pokémon data as a fraction, and as a percentage. Once you have the data, you can create class-specific word problems for math, again relating to the math concepts you’re currently studying. Do they notice any data trends? What can they conclude from the data?

2    Map Skills & Geography (Social Studies)

Do schools still teach map skills as far as north, south, etc.? Or are we dependent on our mapping apps and GPS now? In any case, you can use Pokémon Go to teach map skills as applicable. Print out a large map (again, potential bulletin board option) for the classroom, and smaller ones for students and mark locations where you’ve caught these. (Or again, use technology and Google Maps to make these.) Now teach whatever skills you need to – “Find the Pokémon location that is south of Main Street and west of the school.” “Using the map scale, determine the distance between Pokémon A and Pokémon D. You could do longitude and latitude.   “Provide the longitude and latitude where (Pokémon character name) was found.”

Do your students know where Pokémon originated? Again, your grade level and what you cover in social studies should guide your activities. Locate Japan on the map/globe/map software. What do students know about Japan? Have them research facts about Japan, history, geographic information, culture – whatever is appropriate. You could assign different groups certain topics and have them create presentations to share with the rest of the class. Have them compare/contrast Japan with their own location/culture. How does the Pokémon phenomena illustrate globalization?

       3.  Writing Across the Curricula

The last question in the paragraph above is a natural lead in to writing.  Instead of the normal “What I Did on Summer Vacation” essay, students who played the game over the summer could be asked to write about a particular Pokémon Go adventure they had over vacation. Did the game bring them closer to family and friends? How?

Write about the pros/cons of this game. Make a T-chart to demonstrate.

Make a Pokémon Word map.  

Write a story about a Pokémon character.

What are the economic implications of this game?

What are the health implications of this and other augmented reality games? Discuss the pluses and the minuses.

What are the privacy and safety concerns of this game?

Create an idea for your own augmented reality game.

Find a current events article about Pokémon. Write a summary of the article. Practice note-taking from the article.

In the end, the ability to make use of this captivating game is limited only by your imagination. Don’t let this opportunity pass by in your classroom – when it comes to student attention...you gotta catch them all!

Share your ideas with us!




Susan Gable is the Director of Educational Curriculum at izzit.org. She holds a BA in Psychology from Douglas College/Rutgers University and is a certified elementary teacher in 3 states, with ten years of classroom experience. She’s a multi-published, award-winning author who also teaches writing workshops.

  

Equality: Outcomes vs. Opportunities by Brian McGarry

Two popular themes often pushed in schools are "celebrating diversity" and "preaching tolerance." At first glance, these ideas sound really nice. However, the roots of these messages stem from an ugly past in which people were judged by the color of their skin (or gender/ethnicity), rather than the content of their character. The battle Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  and others fought was intended to make these debates obsolete.

Today our schools are filled with children making posters, flying balloons, and drawing colorful rainbow pictures showing the blending of cultures and acceptance of others' beliefs in order to showcase their collective tolerance for one another. This helps create a school environment that discourages discrimination.

"Teachers need to distinguish the important difference between equal outcomes, which inevitably lead to greater government controls, and equal opportunities, which free the individual to succeed and to make mistakes."

Most students have an intrinsic sense of fairness and sharing. When teachers appeal to the idea of equality, students tend to gravitate towards it. Therefore, teachers need to distinguish the important difference between equal outcomes, which inevitably lead to greater government controls, and equal opportunities, which free the individual to succeed and to make mistakes. Simply talking about equality as a global ideal can easily be misinterpreted.

Each year, I do an experiment in my classroom that highlights the problems with forcing equal outcomes. I adjust the grades from a chapter test by rewriting the "new" grade to account for the successes and failures of each student. For example, those who score in the 90s receive an altered grade in the 70s. Those in the 50s jump to the 70s. Seeing the reactions of those who celebrate their sudden fortunes and the anger from those who have seen their intellectual efforts destroyed by a "central authority's" arbitrary decision is quite interesting. Give it a try with your class.

izzit.org's video 2081 presents educators with an entertaining and graphic example of what happens when you force equal outcomes. The students see how equal outcomes drag the successful down, while institutionalizing mediocrity and incompetence. The heavy hand of government is highlighted in this wonderful adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian short story "Harrison Bergeron."

The production value matches the important message. My kids watch intently and are actively engaged in class discussion after viewing it. I ask them to compare and contrast the video with Lois Lowry's The Giver, which is another dystopian novel we read.

I think I have about 20 videos from izzit.org. Thanks to izzit, I can show students that rugged individualism and free-market economics are not merely about making money. These principles also help people tear down the many barriers that tend to make people judgmental and intolerant, without the government attempting to equalize all outcomes.

Book Review - How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life (Andy Jobson)

Review – How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness by Russ Roberts

I recently was introduced to How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness by Russ Roberts.  Roberts takes the lesser known Adam Smith work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and selects useful highlights to illustrate how we can know ourselves better and pursue happiness.


I first became interested in Moral Sentiments when I read a P.J. O’Rourke book called On the Wealth of Nations.  Like Roberts, O’Rourke analyzed Smith’s seminal works and made his own observations, (although O’Rourke worked far harder, and perhaps less successfully, at being amusing), and he referenced the earlier book enough that I bought a copy.  Like many before me, however, I bogged down somewhere in the middle.  Smith is brilliant, but his syntax can get complicated, and his reasoning is often roundabout. I got busy with work and family life and set it aside.  

When a friend at izzit.org recommended the book, however, I was excited to re-open my investigation. Capitalism gets a lot of bad press as being ‘heartless’—evil capitalists are the villains of several TV shows and movies nowadays, it seems—but I believe capitalism is actually the most moral of economic systems.  (As Smith put it, as everyone pursues his own self-interest, the good of society results, as if an ‘invisible hand’ were manipulating the process.)  The challenge is to figure out how to explain this.

Roberts does a good job of selecting appropriate passages to explain key ideas from The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He adds more modern stories to illustrate the concepts, such as the role of conscience (or what Smith called ‘the impartial spectator,’ whose approval we seek).  At my school, moral instruction is important, and Roberts takes a book that raises important issues (like ‘How to Be Good’ and ‘How to be Lovely’) and provides a coherent, entertaining overview.  I look forward to sharing portions with my students this year.

You might enjoy doing the same.

An educator of 22 years, Andy Jobson has taught government, economics, and U.S. History. Currently teaching English literature at Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, GA, he’s also been an administrator, a STAR teacher twice, and taught elementary school with Teach for America.