Making Healthy Choices Podcast

Healthy Choices

For my ESOL activity, I would have the students listen to the podcast in the link above that talks about healthy eating for students. 

This would meet the following standards:

• Students learn how to listen and take notes on the podcast.
• Students learn about how there are different forms of electronic communication and how to listen to these sources.

In this activity, I would allow the podcast to be a lesson starter where I would play the podcast twice. Students would answer a simple question along with the podcast and take notes. Then, we would discuss how to help students make better eating choices. They would need to think of a way to encourage young children to eat fruits and vegetables as well as other health foods.

This would lead to a project and presentation where the students would need to create a week's menu that has a balanced diet. This would include foods from their culture as well as foods from American culture as well. At the end of the project, the students would get to present their menu and students would get to cook or bring in the healthy food for the class.

A Timeline of My Life

Click on the image to go to the website!

I decided to use Storybird to create a book of a timeline of my life. This would be a great activity for high school ESL students and it would meet the following high school standards:

• Using electronic forms to communicate about yourself
• Recognizing differences among various cultures.

For college admissions essays, students often have to either remark on a specific event of their life or  even an autobiography. It may be easier for the students to make a story book like this first and then use the idea from the story book to write their essay.

Therefore, it would be assessed by The New York Times rubric:

Therefore, the book would be a way for the students to prewrite for their eventual college admissions essay. I think this would be a great way to brainstorm ideas before the students take the time to write down all of their thoughts.

Using Animoto for Social Writing

This week, I used Animoto to write about My Journey to the Ocean. This type of photo story could address the following two standards for middle school students:

• Using an electronic form of social communication for writing about oneself.
• Applying self-monitoring and self-correcting strategies in communication.

 Our original directions for the project were to make a photo story of a minimum of four scenes using text and music to enhance the presentation. Therefore, my directions for a class assignment would be to explain a journey in their lives, whether it be the first time they came to America or visited a new place. They would need to use the phrase "I would" at least twice in their presentation.

 There would also be a part of the assignment where the students would comment on what they did well and what they could improve on for the next video. I would assess their videos with the following rubric:

I especially like this rubric because it is very clear to see what is expected out of the language component of the slides. They have to have a beginning, middle, end of their journey in order for the students to receive full credit.

Electric Skateboards!

Click the skateboard below to go to my TED Ed lesson on Boosted Boards!


The intended audience would be students at the intermediate level (grades 5-8)

The language objectives would be the following:
To use listening strategies to make the spoken text comprehensible and meaningful.
To apply self-correcting and self-monitoring strategies when discussing the text.

I would teach the students how to pause the video to take notes by giving the students a worksheet where there would be a map of what I wanted them to write down. Personally, I really like this infographic from the Create Innovate Explore website, so I think this would be great to use with my ELL learners in order to teach active listening for them.



Essentially, the students would need to pay attention. They would not have other windows open or try to look at other websites. Next, they would need to continue to look at the TED Talk speaker and not be distracted by other people in the room. It's important that they do not talk with other classmates because some people need complete silence when watching the video. At the end of the video, I would have the students ask at minimum two questions to a partner and see if the partner would be able to find the information from the video or from online. This would come from looking and understanding the information not only from the video itself, but from the directions too.

After students write their discussion question, I would have them go back and see if they could find their own errors in their written work. I would give them a checklist on what they may have done incorrectly. Here's a great one. You can click on it to get the actual file:




The students would need to go through that editing checklist about their own discussion post before posting it online to make sure their post meets standards of English. I especially like this checklist because it reminds students about verb tenses and introductions/conclusions. Also, it gives a reminder about articles. This would be especially important when using this TED lesson with students.

I liked the overall flow of the TED Ed lesson, but I like how ED Puzzle allows you to add questions into the middle of the video too. I think that having the questions at the end could be useful as well because it shows that the students were paying attention to the entire video versus just part of the video.

Semi-Flipped Classroom

The idea of using flipped classroom has been discussed in detail with TESOL Connections as well as with the International TESOL Association. Also, it has been praised from everywhere to Twitter to many different education organizations such as NEA. Part of the diagram from the Knewton site describes how this would look in a traditional classroom:

ELL learners would go home and watch the video of the instruction at home before class. Then, they would be doing the traditional homework in the classroom under the guidance of the ELL teacher. 

In my own experience, although all of my students have Chromebooks at the school, it just does not work as well as people would want it to work:

1. Logistics - The internet goes down. The power goes out. Someone decides to stay with their grandmother who doesn't have internet for the week. When you assign a flipped classroom video for homework, you aren't taking all of those considerations into account. 

If you give out a worksheet, they could lose it or Fido could eat it, but most of the time, they are okay with handing it in from last night.

2. Planning - You think you know what they know, but you really don't until you teach it. Some grades are better prepared than others. Some aren't. Some have students that have on average lower reading levels and/or learn in a different way than the grade before. Assignments can be easier adapted than instruction on a video. After teaching the lesson, you would know what they need to do later. Instead, you could potentially have students watching the video, not understanding step 1, and then it snowballs into frustration, disappointment, and wasted time.

3. Improvisation - The best teachers are natural improvisors, and can quickly explain previous information to fill out the lesson. When you assign a video, you don't always think of all of your students' questions.

4. Length of video - Videos are too long and cumbersome for students. My middle schoolers told me that after about four to five minutes, it becomes really tedious and they lose interest.

So, how do we fix this?

We use a semi-flip. We assign homework and assignments in class in the first ten minutes to test last night's comprehension OR we assign notes through Google classroom that students can copy down at their own pace. Next, the teacher goes ahead and explains directions, asking for student feedback. Then, students select small chunks of videos from EDPuzzle that reexplain what the teacher just said OR students work on assignments.

Students in my classroom have the choice of either doing the videos for homework or the assignments. Small groups are formed during the classroom for remedial instruction or for enrichment. Therefore, it becomes somewhat of a three-ring circus, but I'll tell you, students are actually copying the notes down. They actually understand the topics. And, it fits more learning needs.

I hope that I can do more research to show this effectiveness.

Tweeting and Professional Development

 Click above to go to                                        Click above to go to
Eleven ways to make the most of                 Use Twitter to Create a Global Classroom
Twitter's education chatter

This week, I read two articles about Twitter and its use in teaching and in professional development.

After participating in a professional development twitter session this week, I can see that I can use Twitter in order to connect with other educators across the country and around the world. The group chat that I attended was informative and showed me easy ways how to use eBook creation in the classroom.  In "Use Twitter to Create a Global Classroom", the authors met each other online. How neat is that? I might be able to meet a future collaborator in my next session online.

However, I would need to really consider which chat sessions I would attend, as stated in the education chatter article (see the first link above). There are so many options and I need to establish a healthy balance between getting professional development inside my school versus online. Sometimes, the problem is that there are too many options for integrating technology. There's a lot of sites out there and I might want to focus on only the sites that I feel will work best with my current group of students. I have realized that it is good to continue to change it up each day, but I want always the major focus to be on the instruction of my students.

I admit that I am having more difficulty seeing Twitter be used with my students. Most importantly, it is blocked at the school. The major unfortunate problem is that they might be too distracted by the other pages on Twitter instead of focusing on the assignment at hand. I have allowed students to interact with each other through Google's educational platform, but I will be a little hesitant of using Twitter in the classroom because anyone can tweet.

#edtechchat

<-- Click on me to find out more!

So, I attended the edtechchat on Twitter last night. I liked the ability to answer questions and see the answers to questions from the moderators. Everyone was very supportive of each others' remarks and it was very interesting to see viewpoints of many different people across the country. It was nice to see that there were other teachers that have used Chromebooks and iPads in the classroom.

The topic of discussion was eBooks. When I first entered the discussion, I was hesitant as to how I would integrate creating eBooks into classroom instruction. I didn't exactly know how to create them or even how to help my students create them. After the hour long discussion, I started to develop my ideas on how I could help my students create eBooks and I even integrated those ideas into a lesson today.

Here's some major considerations about using twitter chats as professional development:

#1. You don't have to know a lot about the topic to join. As a person who didn't know a great deal about eBooks before yesterday, it is a great place to start talking and seeing how people simply use technology to enhance instruction.
#2. You can communicate with people that have successfully integrated technology into the classroom and get ideas from them. The conversation does not have to be limited to the main questions.
#3. Don't be afraid to ask questions yourself. I answered a few questions about eBooks from other participants and it seemed to be very useful for them. For example, I have seen eBooks be used in the younger grades when I substitute taught, so this was useful information for an undergraduate student that's trying to think of some of the basics on how it's used.

The downside to Twitter is the constant refreshing. It bugged my eyes after a while. I hope I can find another way to update the website without hurting my eyes in the feed.

Therefore, this is useful if I am trying to get involved in learning the basics of different types of technology. I hope I can find other types of Twitter accounts that may help me with Chromebooks especially in the math classroom.

ePals!

 <--Click on me!

ePals is a great site for teachers to connect and share content. You can even connect classrooms together from around the world! There's a school swap and even a robot building activity. Teachers can build their own activities.

I could see using the robot building activity during my one STEM class. They would like to collaborate with other students from other places.

The only downside would be getting the parent's permission to connect classrooms. Some parents may not want that type of collaboration with the outside world. I would be slightly hesitant to do this because of the stranger factor.

Classroom 2.0

 <-- CLICK ON ME!

Classroom 2.0 is a great place to be if you are a educator using technology in the classroom. It has open forums, a place to create a page, groups, and live online and in person events. There are many areas to discuss including flipped instruction and instruction in the different content areas using technology. I think that this will be useful in my future, as I can make connections with teachers and learners from around the world.

One of the most interesting features of the website is a live chat. When you are accepted as a member, you are able to live chat with other educators on the site. There is a main room where you can do a group chat or you can do a private chat. This type of synchronous communication would be especially useful if you find someone with a similar interest or question like you.

The forum allows you to talk asynchronously with other educators from around the world. Recently, I saw a post about the idea of teaching a "computer class". I can respond to her and get other ideas from teachers.

This is a wonderful resource, but like all social media accounts, it takes time to do. As a teacher and doctoral student, I struggle with having any time free. Although this would be great professional development, I can see that I will probably spend more time working with the teachers in my school than I will online.

A learner is like a marimba!

A learner is like a marimba. I'm sure if you are reading this post right now, you may not know what a marimba is, but it is an instrument that I play. Here's a photo of this instrument:



An instrument like the marimba is only useful when it interacts with its environment similarly to a learner. Although it has the potential to be interesting sounding, if it is not played by someone, no one can really understand what it sounds like or what can be done with it.

Everyone is a learner. Everyone picks up some sort of information from the environment and stores it. Each of these bars are tuned to a specific note. Different parts of the instrument help it sound a certain way. Therefore, we all are programmed to receive information.

This is only part of the learning process.

We need to be able to respond to this information. The instrument needs to be played and this can only come from interacting with the environment. The learner needs to speak or write to demonstrate that she or he has acquired information.

This is quite related to the quotes from the videos this week.

“content really leads into the ability to talk to one another…”

Essentially, communicating with one another through social networks has affected our world tremendously. In my small area, I might have only been able to talk to five or six people about the marimba. With social networking, I can find thousands that may teach me how to play the marimba in a slightly different way. Also, I may synthesize many different people's remarks in order to play the marimba in a new way. The reason why this is important is because...

“many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime” (Siemens, 2005).

In Siemen's "Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age", he describes how people will be using their knowledge in a variety of ways. Not only does the learner need to learn effective expression of ideas, he needs to learn multiple methods of application. A learner may find different styles of writing a paper through taking courses in the liberal arts. If the learner is tenacious in learning, he or she may discover a different interesting subject. Exploring the ideas of "interdisciplinary" learning may unearth something new that creates a new area of discipline.

Therefore, in order to thrive in this world, learners must acquire, express, and apply information into their everyday lives.

Pinterest and Diigo

This week, I started working with Pinterest and Diigo. There's many features to them, including highlighting text, using multiple tags, and copying and pasting. Diigo allow you to enable sticky notes in it so that you can allow other people to comment while Pinterest is a little easier with that function.

There's ways of interacting with your audience with comments and messages. Pinterest is a little more useful in the way that it will redirect you to sites.

Honestly, I would use Pinterest, but not too much. When I worked in a daycare, there were many ideas. As a high school math teacher, there's some information, but I tend to put all of my websites archived in my Google classroom and bookmarks.

Educate teachers first in the present

First, watch this video:

Disclaimer: I am obviously interested in technology, but I just had to make a video reaction myself:

After making this video, I realized my audio isn't the greatest, but hopefully you were able to distinguish my major points.

1. Test scores do not equate to the "best teaching practices". We have to look at curriculum and teaching practices based on our specific student groups.
2. Entertaining students does not necessarily change the content that we have to teach. A good teacher tries her best to engage students, but not all students will always feel that the subject is interesting.
3. Schools should be working more with teachers to slowly introduce technology rather than require it for all teachers and then scrambling later.

Tweeting your students...

One of the recommended videos for this week was The Social Media Revolution (2011). You can either click on it above or you can watch it below:

Do you love social media? How do you use it in your life? Do you use it with students?

Although I am really interested in using technology to help my students learn, I personally feel that as educators, we need to be extremely cautious of the blurred lines that can occur with social media.

The type of communication with our minor students should be able to be completely monitored by our schools and companies. Yes, many people use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. to communicate with others. However, many of these accounts are really designed for mostly personal reasons, and are not really accounts created by the school for the school.

Email can be more easily monitored by a school. I wouldn't only have access into my account; other people would be able to make sure my communication is appropriate with students. When it stated in the video that we are going to go away from giving out email addresses to students, I feel that this may not be the right direction to go in. Communication within the school (and about the school) should be monitored by the school.

Two Ways to Use Blogs Video :)

This is my first YouTube video about this topic, so I hope you enjoy! :)

Two Ways to Use Blogs

In the mathematical classroom, students are constantly learning new methods of solving problems. Embedded within the solution can be challenging words.

For ESOL students, there can be an inherent difficulty with picking up the language plus also understanding the mathematical concepts. Since specific terminology is used to describe the order of problem solving methods, students that are ESOL may not initially be able to interpret the order of the steps.

Additionally, depending on the country, different rudimentary mathematical concepts such as adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing can be shown in drastically different ways.

Therefore, for my ESOL students, there are two ways to use blogs within the classroom:

1. Use it as a clarification tool. Students need to have the ability to synthesize their information from a variety of sources, and this may start with the initial instruction wtih the teacher. Each day, I could post a general description of the solution plus also include a video that may describe it in a different manner. Then, ESOL students can use closed captioning, slow down the video, or repeat different parts of the video to help aid in the learning process. I can also include a question that encourages the students to describe another way of thinking about the problem or draw similarities among other problems that were solved in previous classrooms.

2. Students create their own collection of methods that help them learn. This can clearly be seen in the self-monitoring standard of ESOL.  Self-guided learning can often be the best method of learning. Thus, students should be encouraged to find the resources that help them learn the best. With more schools adopting Chromebooks and iPads, the focus should not always be on the teacher to create the blog or archive all of the possible mathematical methods. Instead, as educators, we should be striving to help students make these connections for themselves.

Joy can be derived in the learning process when it "clicks" or when the content connects with the personal learning style of the student, making an imprint on the student's memory. Teachers need to allow the students to explore and find what methods make the most sense.


Students with ESOL need to have the guide of the active teacher, but also know the other resources online that will help them toward success.