Materials Development 1

For materials development 1, I designed an introduction-to-maps class that I will be using in a few weeks with my CBI level 3 students. You can access it by clicking on the below links.

Part 1: Lesson Plan

Part 2: Tools (explanation and use, as well as additional tools, provided in Part 1: Lesson Plan)
Grockit Video Comprehension: How to Read a Map
Google My Maps: Our Cities

Part 3: Overview

Week 6 Reflection - Corpora in the Classroom

This week's article on applying corpus linguistics to pedagogy by Lynne Flowerdew reminded me of a presentation at the AACL conference in San Diego this year that I really liked and got the most from. The presentation was by Maggie Charles from Oxford University and was on building learner corpora. Not building a corpus of student language, but instead having students build their own corpora of research articles within their field of study. Maggie's class was an academic writing course for international graduate students who needed more practice in formal, academic writing according to their discipline. Her research and presentation were on the effectiveness of having students build their own corpora to improve their writing. In the early stages of the course, her students conducted their own research to find interesting, appropriate, and recent research articles from their own disciplines, and then loaded the chosen articles into their personal, field-specific, and searchable corpus. They then used this corpus as a reference tool to find appropriate expressions, make their writing more professional, check their grammar and wording, and get help with writing in the academic genre of their discipline. In questionnaires she distributed after the course, 94% of the students felt that creating and referring to their own corpus improved their writing ability. Additionally, 86% of the students would recommend using a self-constructed corpus to learn how to write in an academic manner. Furthermore, many of the students continued to refer to their corpus after the class was over, getting continual help in their academic writing endeavors. In the end, Maggie concluded that student-built corpora become valuable long-term tools for students, especially in the EAP setting, engender learner autonomy, and provide for both current and future needs. Much of what we have read and learned about for using corpora have been from the teacher or researcher perspective. I was reminded of Maggie's interesting research and presentation through the Flowerdew article and decided to revisit it for this week's reflection, as other classmates might be interested in a more student-based perspective on using corpora. Of course, Maggie's students were very advanced EAP learners, but it gave me a solid idea of what a corpus-focused classroom could look like and do for the students.

Wordle!

Week 5 Reflection

The technology I tried out this week felt like a bit of a failure. I wanted to create a Grockit activity in which my students would watch a video on a trash item they have been assigned (plastic bottles, cigarette butts, paper cups, or soda cans) and learn about how the item is created, used, and discarded, but I could find no suitable videos that were short and simple enough. After hours of searching, I decided to go with my original plan of finding suitable reading material for them on the internet (so still technology based, but not as fun). The Socrative activity I made did not work on my students' cell phones, and I felt mildly frustrated in class that I could not participate in the online survey questions because the application would not load on my phone. I guess the lesson from this week's attempts is that technology is not perfect and in many cases is not needed when other suitable, tech-free options are available. All of these applications and technologies seem so interesting, fun, and useful, and I am excited by their existence and promise, but I don't think our classrooms, teaching techniques, students, or ourselves are quite at the stage where we can take all of these apps and successfully use them in a meaningful way on a daily basis. As time passes, though, and the technologies improve, the classrooms get better equipped, and the people (teachers and students alike) become even more tech-savvy, I think my experiences of the past week will become rare occurrences and technology will become more seamlessly woven into classroom life. That's my hope, at least.

Socrative Attempt

I decided to go with a quiz on Socrative to help my students learn their vocabulary from last week. I'm teaching a level 3 CBI unit on garbage and recycling, so the students are getting a lot of new and not very frequent words. Because of the newness and the low frequency, I try to do a vocabulary activity every day and I thought Socrative would be a great way to let the students use their cell phones for a bit in the beginning of class and practice their words (recycle, reduce, reuse, garbage, trash, litter, waste, and decompose). When the students tried to get to the site on their cell phones, though, it did not work. It didn't work for me, either, when trying to access the site with my cell phone. Is it a computer only site? Instead, I read out the questions to them and they still had fun trying to figure out which word it was. Maybe Grockit would have been a better site to try. If you would like to import and view the quiz in the "import quizzes" section, the SOC number is SOC-839320. Maybe you'll have better luck with it than I did. Here's a screen shot of the quiz creation process:

Teaching Philosophy - the Rough Rough Rough Draft

As a teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL), I believe that it is my duty to create a safe, comfortable, positive, and productive environment in which all students can practice and learn English and life skills, as well as to provide students with effective instruction that is based on cutting-edge research and practices. I accept that some students will arrive already viewing ESL class as a beneficial, enriching addition to their lives, while others might initially view it as a burdensome and unnecessary hurdle. My goal is to give the students who recognize the benefits of my class every opportunity to engage in learning, discovering, and practicing, while also encouraging the more reluctant students to find value in their lessons through meaningful, appropriate, and inspiring activities. I also recognize that no two students are the same and that every student learns in his or her own unique way. To address the individuality of every student, I incorporate as many different types of activities into class as possible. This allows students to acquire language through various means, increasing their exposure not only to the material, but also to the diverse situations in which language occurs. Today, technology creates another avenue for learning, and also plays a huge factor in communicating in many parts of the world. Students are conversing through text messages instead of in person; friends are sending emails instead of dialing the phone; and educators are disseminating information through the internet instead of traditional lectures. As an ESL teacher, it is a challenge and a responsibility to have a thorough understanding of the technology that is available to me and my students and how that technology can enhance my ability to teach, as well as their ability to learn. The internet itself, as well as the multitude of language learning applications on the market today, create a bottomless mine of learning possibilities - some effective, some ineffective. Striking a balance between incorporating effective technologies into my lessons and not inundating students with trivial or ineffective applications for the sake of technology makes up a large part of that challenge. Although technology has a lot to offer educators and learners alike, it should always be used to enhance a lesson and a language point, and never vice-versa. Because of the various means of educating that are popular today, teachers have a formidable task in deciding what to teach, how to teach it, and when, but I have come to also view this task as an exhilarating one. One that allows for continual exploration into ESL research and teaching strategies, and growth as an educator. To me, being an ESL teacher means putting the students' educational needs first, never relying on one set way of teaching, and continually exploring, learning about, and applying information from this expanding and fascinating field.

Messin with Google Docs

Week 3 Reflection

The activities we did this week on digital storytelling are exactly the kinds of things that I am hoping to get out of this class - information on useful websites that can be adapted for ESL learners, hands-on practice using some of those websites, and then translating that practice into a teaching activity (see previous post) that I can envision one day using in class. Plus, I had a lot of fun creating the stories and activities. I mainly focused on Storybird because I ended up really liking it, but I'd also like to check out the GoAnimate and Domo sites.

I like the idea of a webquest, too, but it sounds like they take a lot of work to create. I found some pre-made webquests by searching QuestGarden, but the majority of them are for native speakers in elementary to middle school. These kinds of quests might work well for intermediate to advanced CBI classes, which are often designed to mimic middle school content courses.

Hot Potatoes did not work well for me and I've used websites in the past, such as Discovery's free puzzle maker to create similar activities, such as crossword and word-search puzzles, and have used Compleat Lexical Tutor to create cloze activities. I should, however, try out Hot Potatoes at home. It would be nice to have one application (instead of having to use the internet) on my computer that can do all of those things.

Finally, I don't know where to begin with a teaching philosophy, or where to place technology in that philosophy. A teaching philosophy is something that has come up in several classes, but has never been fully addressed. I know I need to start working on one, especially because I'm now applying to job openings for next year. But I don't think I'll actually force myself to write one unless it is made an assignment, sadly.        

Teaching Activity Using Story Bird

This reading, writing, and story-telling activity is meant to go with a unit on animals for young, intermediate ESL students. It involves writing and telling progressively more parts of a story based on pictures of different animals on Storybird. The first picture provides an example of a full story. The second picture requires students to write the ending. The third picture requires students to write the middle and the ending. The final picture requires students to write the full story.

Detailed Procedure:
1. Explain to the students that they are going to look at pictures of animals and write parts of stories based on the pictures.
2. Open the Storybird story and have different students read the beginning (show them how the beginning is the first paragraph), middle (second paragraph), and end (third paragraph) of the story.
3. Ask a student to summarize the story. Ask students to think about other ways the story could have ended. What else might have happened? Write ideas on the board.
4. Explain that the next story has a beginning and a middle, but no ending. The students will write the ending.
5. Ask the students to take out a piece of paper and write their name in the upper left hand corner.
6. Go to the next picture in Storybird. Have different students read the beginning and middle aloud and ask for different ideas on the ending.
7. Give students 3-5 minutes to write the ending of the story on their paper. After they write the ending, they should come up with a title for the story.
8. Ask students to turn to a partner and share what they created.
9. If the class is small enough and time permitting, each student could read their story and the class could vote on most creative, funniest, happiest, saddest, etc.
10. Move to the next picture and explain that students will now write the middle and end.
11. Read the beginning of the third story and give the students 5 - 7 minutes to write the middle and end.
12. Repeat the story sharing process of steps 8 - 9.
13. Advance to the final picture. Tell the students that they need to write the full story - beginning, middle, and end.
14. Give the students 10 minutes to write the story.
15. Repeat the story sharing process of steps 8 - 9.