Talkin' Ted-Ed Teachin'

The lesson I created would be for adult students to test language associated with a history content course. My language objectives would be to make sure students could understand a historical narrative, and discuss it's implications.

I could test to see if these objectives were met by first having the students rewatch the video and then try to retell the Reagan story in their own words. Then as groups I would have the students choose an even from their countries history and write a short narrative that they could share with the class.

Fun With Flipping!

After reading the two articles on flipping, Three reasons to Flip You Classroom, and Flipping Your EL Classroom, I came away really liking the idea of flipping. It seems like having more time to work with student on material instead of just giving them the material and hoping they'll figure it out, is something that could really work.
What was more interesting to me is that I realized that I've been working with a version of flipping myself for a couple years. The online lessons that I teach are mostly designed to help students work with and practice material that they have already studied. When they get to class with me, it's my job to help them with any questions they have with the material and to show how the language they're studying is used in everyday conversation. 
I imagine the biggest problem with flipping is similar to one that I have in my classes, when students don't do the needed preparation for the lesson, so instead of working with the material you end up using class time explain it to them. Though, if we're being honest, no matter what technique you are using to teach there is always going to be unprepared students, so I don't think that's a good reason to not try flipping.

Teachin' and Tweetin' and Whatnot...

Twitter can be a very polarizing subject these days, for every example of how it is bringing people together and forming global connections there are opposite examples of harassment or hate speech also being spread over the platform.  As someone who has been using twitter for over seven years now I've seen both sides of this argument many times, and I think what it boils down to, is that twitter is what you make of it for yourself.
Like I said I have been using twitter for a long time but it has been more to share thoughts or jokes with my friends and not necessarily for me "productive" purposes.  It was interesting to both look through the Twitterchat and read these articles about twitter to see on other side of it after all this time and to see how it can be used to help in my teaching. 

The first article I found entitled The Teacher's Guide to Twitter is a fantastic source of both guidance and information four educators getting started on twitter, plus  also had this great guide to education hashtags on Twitter. An other article I found from the National  Education Association, was called Can Tweeting Help Your Teaching?  While the first article was more of a guide this one was interesting because it offered some real life examples of how were using twitter in their teaching.  Both of these articles offered a lot of good information but the one thing I took away from them was the idea of being able to stay connected with other teachers.  Currently, I teach about 30 hours a week online from home, this gives me great flexibility with my schedule that in person classes wouldn't be able to give me.  However, the main drawback is that I have little to no connection with other teachers in my same position.  That is why I really liked what these articles had to say about staying connected, they showed me that it's a great way to talk to and share ideas waive other teachers on a regular basis and that is something that I'm not afforded the opportunity to do in my current position.  I am looking forward to doing this in the future and I hope that it will add a lot to what I can offer my students.
Like I said at the beginning there are definitely some drawbacks to twitter and I might be hesitant to let students use it unless they were very highly supervised but it is definitely a tool that can be used and as teachers we have to be willing to use any tool that is offered to us.

Chat Twitter Chat

Regretfully I was not able to attend a Twitter chat live in person in time for me to write this post. Since I still wanted to find out more about the chats I decided to check out the hashtag #ELTChat anyways to see what people were talking about. I realize it's not the same as participating live, but I still got a good feel for how the discussion worked.
This weeks discussion for #ELTChat on Twitter was pronunciation and how to make teachers comfortable teaching it.  Looking through the tweets I could see that there was a lot of people participating and it was a little bit difficult to parse through it all, however I think I was still able to find some good advice and interesting resources.One resource that I found was an interesting website that offered an array of warm-up activities that may help with pronunciation.
Of course I think the most helpful thing was just seeing the short but useful pieces of advice people would give about teaching pronunciation.  For example one user had three short tweets that talked about teaching how we stress words when speaking which was an aspect of pronunciation that I really hadn't considered much.
The only aspect of this Twitter chat that I wasn't particularly fond of was that it seemed to be made up mostly of British English language teachers so they were talking a lot about certifications and tests that I had no reference for.  That being said I can see how this would be a very useful tool and I hope that I have the chance to actually participate in one in the future.

Global Cooperative Learning

The ePals sight is very interesting and I think of all the tools we've looked at this semester this is probably the one that intrigues me the most. The idea of being able to not only collaborate with another teacher, but also give students the chance to collaborate with students in another country, brings up endless possibilities.

The program that I think interests me the most from what I saw is the "A Taste of Culture," concept, it involves kids from different country exchanging recipes. Part of what I liked about this idea, is that it incorporates aspects from two other classes I am taking this semester. In my Methods and Materials class we are learning about Collaborative Learning, and this would give students to not only work in a group but work in a group with kids on the other side of the globe. I am also taking a class on teaching culture, and besides the obvious cultural lessons taught through a recipe exchange, just the act of cooperating with kids from another culture would help students to learn about those students culture.

Social Me Me Media

After looking through the sites suggested, I decided to join the google +  group "English Language Teachers," for a few reasons. I will admit the fact I already have a good account and didn't have to sign up for another site was a big draw in this case, however it seems like the google + groups seemed to be the most populated and active of the sites I looked at.

With the group I joined I could see a lot of good resources and discussions started in just the last few days. With the some searching and studying I'm sure you could tons and tons of great stuff that could be useful. I will be checking it out more in the future.

Connectivism and the Modern Student

            

  The modern student is very much like the modern bank customer. If we look at knowledge as currency like George Siemens does in his article, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age we can think of learners as bank customers who are able to withdraw knowledge from computers and networks all over the world in the same way that people who need money can withdraw it from any ATM in the world.  The same can be said for the way customers put money into a bank, as Siemens says, "Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual." In the same way that knowledge is fed into a network, people put money into a bank, and that money goes on to be dispersed among all of the customers but can also be retrieved when the original depositor needs it. 

What’s important about this analogy is that it changes how we look at education, where students are no longer just expected to just take in knowledge. As Siemens also says in the video, The Conflict of Learning Theories with Human Nature, "As human beings we desire to externalize what's in our head." I think this is an important idea to take away from Connectivism, that we must let students put their knowledge back into the network and make sure that we are not only dishing out knowledge, but we give students the tools to find knowledge for themselves and express their interpretations of that knowledge.

Diigo or Pinterest? Who ya got?

   It was interesting for me to setup and start using both Diigo and Pinterest. While I was aware of Pinterest and had a general idea of what it was, I had never even heard of Diigo before. I was happy to find out that they were both excellent ways to share ideas and resources.  After spending some time with both of them, it's interesting to see how the two offer a similar service but it very different ways.
   The most glaring difference of course the appearance of the two sites, while Diigo offers a very clean text heavy interface, the Pinterest look is almost completely graphic with a more intuitive interface. Beyond the look though, there is other more important differences with the functionality of the websites and how we can use them as teachers.

When setting up my Diigo page what I liked most about it was the ability to search by tags and keywords to find a site you are looking for, and I was able to add or see detailed information about a site without having to actually go to the site. It was also very useful with Diigo being able to follow others to see what they are interested in, as well as sharing my interest with them. One thing that Diigo was missing though, was ability to comment on others links or any real sense of interactivity.
On the other hand, when setting up my Pinterest boards, I was a little overwhelmed by how interactive it was, it was a bit hard to get a handle on what I was meant to do as I was being inundated with tons of images but not a lot of explanation. Once I learned to search through keywords and find some good images I was amazed by the sheer volume of resources available on Pinterest. I also like that you could comment on people's pins and send messages making it more interactive that simply sharing bookmarks like Diigo.
Over all, as much as I can appreciate how much Pinterest has to offer I think I would more be more likely to use Diigo again, as it seems a little more logical and easy to follow, I do wish it had more interaction, but when compared to how busy Pinterest seems to me, Diigo just feels easier to manage and deal with.