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.