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.

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.

#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.

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.

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.