The IT department has been working on this mobile lab to use in our classrooms. Last night they asked me to try using the lab on WIFI....This was not a good idea. Students were creating rooms in Roommaker (elouai.com/room-makers.php)and just as they were creating, the WIFI would go out. A few minutes later it would come back. It was not acceptable, so we put the laptops away. When IT came to roll the cart back, students were able to say (The WIFI was not very good. We were not happy about that.) So they got a lot of good language practice even though the WIFI did not suffice. My take away is that WIFI is not good for 30+ students to use at the same time. It needs to be hard wired for that.
0 Comments
I am back from TESOL. I had a great time presenting there. When I returned to my class on Tuesday, I had five new students. During break time, I gave them an orientation and had them sign up for Remind, and showed them the website. Only one student had no service to sign up for remind, but she said she would do it it at home. Which she did !!!! Another student was absent but her boyfriend (also a new student) had her sign up at home after class. I will see if they can follow the syllabus to sign up for the facebook and quizlet group. I will say that technology doesn't seem to be an issue for most of the students. They enjoy learning English on their phones. Note: none of the new students can access the wifi from the portal until I can get them signed up.
I just got back from looking at my remind account and all six students signed up. This includes the one who had no access on her phone at school and the student who was absent. She had her boyfriend's help. So what did I do to enable these non English speaking students to understand me. 1) I pulled them into a small group while the rest of the class was doing oral practice in pairs. 2) I took them through each step and showed them what to do. 3) I gave them all positive feedback throughout the process. Last week I made Nearpod presentation and sent it out through Remind to the class. One or two people opened it, but I guess they could not figure out how to use it. Last night we had Data Entry in the computer lab, so I used the extra time at the end to do a "Live Presentation" of Nearpod in the lab. I am hoping that this engaged the students enough to go back to it on their own time. That is what I am trying to get them to do is use the activities I give them to practice OUTSIDE the class. I don't know how successful I have been. I do know that they are using Remind, Quizlet and Facebook on a regular basis.
I also know that they only know what I teach them. Last night I showed them how to voice respond to me on Remind. Now we are using remind for me to ask them audio questions. So far only the Spanish speakers have tried to respond. I hope the Chinese do it as well. I plan on sending them out one audio question a day for one week and see if I get responses. Last night we got on the MT SAC portal and now everyone in the room has WIFI!!!!!. A dream come true for me and my class. As soon as we got back to class, we played our first game of Quizlet Live. Here is the link so you can see my class sorting into their teams-https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipPkLW2oGHJbK1Ol-NgaBMV_cv2YSBrvSjAL7mNy My students who are low beginning, had no problem learning how to play this rather complicated group game. We used Quizlet sets that they had been studying at home. The program automatically divides them into teams. Playing the game took one round for them to understand that the answer could be on any device in their group. But after one round they were in it to win it. They did not want to go home last night. They just wanted to play and play. I want to talk about my thoughts on formative assessment. Total engagement in vocabulary, reading and listening is critical at the low beginning levels. Without these basic words and understanding, these students can't compete in the real world. Most teachers are now using Kahoot which is great, but I believe that different formative assessments affects the brain differently. Kahoot is great for in class multiple choice and interclass competitions. Quizizz is wonderful for homework. It creates a student leaderboard where students can compete against each other OUTSIDE the class. Quizlet focuses on vocabulary development. Quizlet live finds out if student understand these vocabulary words in a fast paced environment. Using all three formative assessment tools interchangeably creates for a more dynamic classroom with more engagement. The learning gains are evident as students develop interpersonal relationships with each other. The rigor can also be increased at this point as student are in the zone of proximal development. Thus the CCRS are can be met without hesitation. In addition, we worked on describing people. I had students find a picture of a famous person they were familiar with and describe them. Allowing students to apply vocabulary and sentence structure to someone that interests them, creates more autonomy in learning. They were also eager to add to their vocabulary and asked me to teach them more words such as 6 pack abs, muscular, goatee and bushy mustache. Still no wifi access so I have been working with Quizizz, Facebook, Quizlet and Remind to try and develop some interaction with students outside the class. I have 15 people signed on to Facebook and it appears that most of them are looking at my posts. I post some extra practice links and yesterday evening I posted a Poll. Here is a screen shot.It appears that about half the members are actively responding. I will think about how to increase that. Update I now have 30 people signed up for Remind, and 24 for Quizlet and 18 on Facebook. The numbers are climbing! Yes. Tonight we make an attempt to get on the Mt SAC Wifi. Note to self...be careful of the spelling of Quizizz.
We got to visit the lab on Thursday where I was able to help students get their Facebook, Quizlet and Remind Accounts. Here are my numbers of success so far.
Quizlet: 22 members Facebook: 20 members Remind: 29 participants Let's see if I can grow Facebook and Quizlet some. Thoughts: I use the same tools with advanced learners. I just use different content and do more scaffolding. Right now I am just introducing students to the tools and doing almost all of the work. As the semester progresses let's see if some of the students take more posting initiative. Not sure this will happen at this low a language level. Thursday evening we did go out of the classroom and students took pictures of signs. These were gathered together and posted on the website. Since I could not get Google photos to let students add pictures, I had them add the pictures on Facebook. You can see the photos they took here. Last night I had some successes. I had 3 people join the Facebook group and 3 people added to the Remind group and 3 people added to the Quizlet group. 3 appeared to be my number last night. How did this happen? I posted about the Facebook group on Remind right before class. I posted about the Quizlet Group on Facebook directly after that. In addition, I integrated Remind into my class. Remind is great for that since it uses text messaging. No wifi is needed. Here is what I did. I made a conversation about how to describe their binders. While students were practicing the conversation, I quickly recorded that conversation on my phone and sent it out as a text message. Immediately you could hear the sounds of text messages being received and then you heard my voice in every part of the room. The students loved it and gave me very positive reactions. I can't upload the audio here because I am using the free version of Weebly. Too bad it was a great audio.
We have just started week 2. Week one we did photos which I published here. I also got photo release forms signed by all but 2 of the students.
We started off week 2 learning classroom vocabulary. After we reviewed 20 words I gave them this worksheet. It was interesting that even though the words were in their book and we had just studied them, many students had a problem referring to their book to figure out what the words were. They just sat staring at the page. I walked around and showed them where to find the words. Some students then figured it out, but others said no I want to use only my head. I said that is ok if they can figure out the words, but it they couldn't find the answer, they should use the book as a resource. It is strange to me that they didn't know to do that. Of course we had other problems like students putting their paper in their binder upside down. I fixed those problems, we got our binders organized with the 5 dividers. This was just the first day of week 2. More to come. Merari Weber inspired me to start this blog to periodically write down my thoughts of how I take my students from here to the stars. Her quote was "Belief in student capacity. They can do anything if we scaffold it to their level. :)" I am here to detail that journey of how this is done.
We are now in week 2 of class. Week 1 was distributing the syllabus, going over it even though they could not understand most of it. I showed them this website, I showed them the Facebook group and got 23 of the 32 into my remind group. We had no wifi on week 1 including me. I had a teacher computer hardwired. Even phone services such as Sprint, ATT and Verizon did not work once you entered the building. So I had to get the students to join my remind group from home. I gave them the directions and modeled on the teacher computer and said do it at home. On Thursday we started doing RA. There was a paragraph in their book. I told the students to put their phones away so that they would not use the translator. They were quite upset. I asked them to let me do my job and teach them how to read without the dictionary. I put on the board...I don't understand _________on line _________. We did a bit of pre reading. Then I had them use a highlighter to highlight the words they did not know. Some students said they did not know any words. So I said ok, highlight the paragraph. I modeled how to do that. It took a while for me to walk around modeling for individual students for them to understand that they actually did understand a few words such as student, teacher, I etc... Then we started having them ask me for help. At first no one understood how to use the sentence frame. So I modeled. As soon as they figured it out the room resounded with I don't understand _____on line _____. SUCCESS |
Susan Gaer
A veteran teacher tackling the lowest levels of ESL instruction. Archives
August 2017
Categories |