I have been preparing for a lot of conferences this spring. This time, my focus is on integration. It is no longer about what apps you can use and about how cool tech is, but about how to integrate into your instruction. I am in a classroom with no computer access and a book that is mediocre at best. But none of that matters for the learning process. What matters is how engaged the students get and how much they practice the language. In order for technology to be meaningful, it needs to be INTEGRATED into the instruction using new ways of learning that fit that INTEGRATION. To this end, I have started archiving good tutorials and lesson integration plans. You can see the tutorials here and the lesson plans here.
The more you can encourage students to practice outside of class, the more time they spend on task. The more time they spend on task, the more they learn. My students are really busy. They work all day and come to school all night. They come to class almost every night and sometimes they don't eat dinner. Some of my students drive about 1 hour just to get to class after work. They don't have any extra time to spend learning. So teachers have to make it as easy and convenient as possible by producing practice activities on the topic at hand that are easily accessible whenever the students have a free moment. All the tools I use are very mobile accessible. I encourage the students to practice at break time, on the bus, while eating lunch, etc. Of course not all of them do, but I continually remind them that this is what they need to do.
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This week my focus was on vocabulary. I started out by having students learn to use the OPD (Oxford Picture Dictionary). Even though I am a seasoned teacher, I forgot that I can't expect students to know how to use it unless they have instructions. I was also introducing them to Padlet an electronic bulletin board. My instructions were to look at pages 22-25 and find one new word. They were then (using their phones) to search the internet for a picture that described the word and post it along with a sentence. I showed them how to access Padlet and had a model set up. Then I took them through the process of posting a new word, picture and sentence. At first it was very difficult because the students did not understand that they had to find the word first. In retrospect, I would have them search the word, write it on paper and then post it on the Padlet. However, with a lot of support from me, they were eventually able to see what to do. A few of my more advanced students told me that there was no no words on pages 22-25 so I instructed them to find another page in the book where there was a new word. Once they got the word, I helped them to post it on Padlet. What happened after that was incredible. They started posting more and then they started commenting (without prompting) on each others posts. They even tried to correct errors they saw in other posts. I had not enabled this so it was not possible for them to do. Two days later, I continued my quest to help them learn how to increase their vocabulary. This time I gave them the OPD and said pick a page any page. They were not used to this type of freedom, so it took a while before they understood what I meant by any page. After the wrote down all the words from the page (I had them do this in their vocabulary notebooks) then I had them create Quizlets with them. This is to help them learn how Quizlet is their best picture dictionary. Two students were able to post directly to the class and two students shared it with me in email and I edited their sets (they were in Spanish/English) to English + picture and then reposted them in our group with their names. I hope that next time we do this activity, I will get more sets made. Finally I sent them a text message to look at the Quizlet and play their classmates sets. Let's see if this happens. A great week of learning for both me and my students. You can see the Padlet here: https://padlet.com/susangaer/adjectives The Quizlet class is here:https://quizlet.com/class/3741546/ The teacher next door, Katarina Gyurindak, and I decided to do a inter-class Kahoot. We have computers in our classroom but no web cams. Doing an inter-class Kahoot requires webcams. So we brought in our laptops. Katarina has a dell PC and I had a Chromebook. Google Hangouts worked perfectly. She called me on Hangouts and we played Kahoot with our two classes. It was so much fun. Students were really competitive.
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Susan Gaer
A veteran teacher tackling the lowest levels of ESL instruction. Archives
August 2017
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