Week 12

I found the topic of cellphones and QR codes in education very interesting. However, I'm still not completely convinced of the feasibility (or desirability) of incorporating mobile technology in the classroom. The staff and parents at the BYOD school presented in the introductory video kept referring to the heightened "engagement" they saw in the students. One parent said that her children found learning fun. 

While I agree that it's nice to see children eager to learn, I sometimes can't help feeling that we're going to such great lengths to make everything so palatable, enticing, intriguing, etc., that we're raising a generation of kids that expects to be catered to and can't conceive of doing anything that's not fun. Maybe it's a question of balance. Perhaps it's valid to incorporate the tools that students are used to using in their daily lives in their educational experience as long as they're expected to pick up a book (or kindle) and read an extensive, challenging text every once in a while as well. I suppose it's not really incorporating technology that bothers me, but rather the insistence that everything be fun.

As for uses in education, the treasure hunt seemed like a good idea. I suppose that the aspect of competition would keep them focused so that they wouldn't be checking their whatsapp every other minute. I know that in my own classroom I would love to be able to do Kahoot! quizzes, but there is absolutely no way the Rosh Yeshiva in my school would condone bringing cell phones into the classroom, even for educational purposes. I understand his perspective, since it's such a battle to keep them, and other distractions, out of the class. While I would be happy to adopt the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach, I see that even at the college level, telephones and other mobile devices can be a real distraction. In classes where teachers do not demand that students put away their phones or close their computers a large portion of the students are busy doing things (often important) unrelated to the class. I'm sure that this would be an even bigger problem in a high school population.

Week 10 Research Tools

It's very hard to give an overview of this week's topic -- research tools -- without getting lost in the endless options. I decided to focus on two tools that I thought would be useful in the ESL classroom . . . and I still found myself combating the urge to continue clicking on links.

The Simple English Wikipedia probably has the most relevance for the ESL classroom. Here students can find articles on topics in simple English. Of course, the list of topics available is not nearly as extensive as that on the regular English site. However, students can still find a wide range of topics for research papers and projects.

The George Washington Papers Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress provides information that teachers can use to enrich cultural or historical presentations. For example, there is a large exhibit about African American progress to full citizenship that contains interesting information that can be used to provide context for different works of literature. I clicked on the exhibit of the American Colony in Jerusalem from the late 19th century, but the website was not available. However, the link to the Bob Hope exhibit provided an extensive history of the movie industry's beginnings in vaudeville. This site is a good place to start if you have a specific topic in American culture or history that you'd like to present in an interesting manner.

Now I'm off to see what other sites my fellow classmates have discovered.

Week 7 Using Video in a Grammar Lesson

This week I learned about using video in a grammar lesson. Inspired by Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals , I created an activity to practice the passive voice in past tense.

Activity

First introduce the passive by asking the students to translate from Hebrew:

"How would you say: הוא אכל פיצה" ?

"How would you say: הוא היה עצוב" ?

"How would you say: הפיצה נאכל" ?

Then remind them of the distinction between active and passive (which should be familiar from Hebrew) and give them the correct form of passive verbs in the past tense.

Give them a chart with common verbs, past simple and past participle.

Then tell them you're going to show them a short skit. 

Pass out the worksheet below. Tell them that as they watch they should write letters to show who did the action or whom the action was done to:

Directions:

Who did it? Who was it done to?

3= 3 stooges          (or one of them)    B = boss       OM = old man         H = hats

1) _____________________ were thrown out of the door.

2) __________________ said, "We just got fired!"

3) Their __________________ were thrown at them by an angry boss.

4) ______________________ were thrown out of the door again!

5)_____________________­­­­­­­­­­­­­  ran after them down the street waving a knife and yelling.

8) ______________ were chased down the street and hid in a nearby shop.

9) Then they were greeted by ­an ______________.

10) _______________said, "You came in answer to my advertisement, of course."

11) __________  was slapped by the tall woman who laughed and said, "That's a good one!"

13) She told _____________________, "You're going to be dentists!"

14) Then, __________________ shook hands happily and said, "Hiya, Doc! Congratulations!"

Stop the video at 4:27 as the dental assistant goes out. Then go over the answers with the students.

Then tell the students you're going to show them more of the video. (Until 8:16, when the three stooges go out west.) Tell them they need to make three sentences about what happens using the passive voice and three sentences using the active voice. Tell them they should jot down notes in Hebrew as they watch, and then translate what they've written in Hebrew into English after the video.

Useful vocabulary:

dentist

false teeth

bite / bit /bitten 

graduate

diploma

Week 6 blog

Voice Chat: Once again, it is hard for me to envision using this technology because of the lack of adequate equipment in our school. However, I think it would be useful, perhaps as a homework assignment for classes in which all the students have adequate computer set-ups at home. It's hard to conceive of a fool-proof method of ensuring that a conversation not monitored by the teacher would actually take place in English, although perhaps creating a communication gap activity and providing a checklist for students to check on the honor system (We asked the given questions, we spoke in English, etc., ) would work well enough. I see that the option of recording the video exists in Skype. Perhaps that is a way to verify that the conversation took place in English.

The idea of pairing up students via Skype from Israel to students from, for instance, America, would be really amazing. Perhaps a school in a sister-community would be amenable to sharing a chat learning opportunity. Part of the conversation could take place in English to help the Israeli students, while a second part could take place in Hebrew to help the American students.

Digital Storytelling The main thing I noticed looking through the Tech&Learning blog about digital storytelling was that they're for the ipad and ipod. One exception was Posterous, but when I clicked on the link, I learned that the site was no longer available. I watched the tutorial for the Sock Puppets app . . . I don't know, but I wasn't impressed. Perhaps my expectations are too high. I suppose I can envision elementary school students being excited to hear their voices accompanying a sock puppet and telling a story, but the example of the story provided (The Apple) lacked any creativity, charm, really anything to recommend it. It seems to me that there are far better uses of class time than creating anything like this story with this tool. For example, actually creating sock puppets and acting out the story with the teacher recording it on a phone for posterity would accomplish the same effect, without the added hassle of a technology-driven learning curve.

VocabularySpellingCity.com seems like a site that could be useful for spelling tests. The vocabulary lists provided by the site are suitable for native speakers (so for a "dovrim") class, they're possibly a good resource), but less so for ESL students, in my opinion. For instance, I clicked on a list for the The Hunger Games, since it's popular with kids, but the words were "hegemony" and "apocalyptic," which are good words, but not too relevant for ESL high schoolers. To be fair, the word "rebellion" also appeared on the quiz, and that's more appropriate. Still, without buying the premium package, I'm not sure there's much here that adds more than, for instance, Quizlet.

Spelling Bee. I actually preferred Spelling Bee to VocabularySpellingCity. I could envision using it for Foundation Level students. The stories are simple enough that I think Israeli students could comprehend them, and the spelling words are basic, yet still require learning. "His" and "me" for instance, from the story I listened to, are words that Foundation Level students must learn how to spell. "Eat," "brown," "two," "four," and "good" are all words that students need to learn how to spell correctly. This site seems like it could be worthwhile, assuming kids have computers with earphones in their computer room.

SMS Generator I also liked the fake SMS generator. I think this would be a good tool to get kids whose language is limited to practice writing grammatically correct phrases and sentences. It's got a bit of dazzle, just by virtue of its being a "texting" tool, which adds enough fun to make the activity more exciting. However, it doesn't require extensive learning or anything other than having a computer room. I could envision using this tool with my students were we to have an adequate computer room. A simple assignment like arranging a meeting place, or planning an outing, would fit this tool.

November 11

Education Blog Update

This week I looked back at some of the blogs I introduced  in previous posts:  21st Century Education Technology 's latest post deals with the web in the classroom, and since my school doesn't provide wifi, I decided to look for something with a more immediate application. The side-bar caught my eye with an old post on PBL (project based learning) driving questions.  I'm new to PBL and was completely unfamiliar with the term "driving questions," so I decided to read on. The description provided on the blog was helpful . . . .

The Driving Question should not give away the contents standards which students may not really care about. It should engage the students and create wonderment through relevancy to their world. It should drive them to “uncover the standards” Through carefully planned PBL the teacher then facilitates this learning experience.

. . .  but I still didn't feel I had a grasp on the concept. An example helped:

Compare the Standards --

Describe the important portions of the Constitution and why it remains a living document.

to a Driving Question:

How can we create a Public Service Announcement for TV showing why the Constitution is still important today?

Click here   for a few more examples.

This was highly intriguing, especially since I'm in the process of trying to develop a Project for a Unit . . . .but, again, I think it will take a lot more exposure, processing, and trying things out to get a handle on how to effectively create a Driving Question.

The second blog I looked at, Free Technology for Teachers   explored a few sites. The one that caught my eye was TinyTap, a site to create games for students. Richard Byrne, the author of the blog, lauded this site as being his favorite for creating games for elementary and middle school. I looked around and played a few games, but didn't find anything remotely fun or middle school level. Perhaps there' s a significant learning curve. It would have been nice had he provided a link to the games he found worthwhile, because there seemed to be a lot of really boring activities.

The Educational Technology and Mobile Learning blog posted the 6  best apps for language learning, which definitely warrants a glance. The one that interested me the most was Wordfolio, app "notebook" for accumulating all the vocabulary you've learned. Unfortunately, it was not available for android.

To sum up, the most useful information this  week comes from an old 21st Century Education Technology post about PBL driving questions. To be able to really apply it, though, I'll need to spend time studying the concept.

Now I'm off to see what my peers discovered!

Well, this week I got a good lesson in the necessity of planning ample time for anything new in the classroom -- especially unfamiliar technology!

Eager to bolster participation and excitement with a new, unenthusiastic group of 10th graders, I decided to add some pizzazz to an upcoming lesson with new technology. Since I'm introducing a text, I thought a word cloud created with  wordle would be an ideal way to ignite conversation and interest in the text.

The first obstacle I encountered was downloading java and reconfiguring the security settings on my brand-new computer, which I did with considerable trepidation, and only after consulting with my husband the engineer. :-) Then, thinking I'd be savvy, I typed in an extremely brief text to try out the tool. After a lengthy wait, it worked. Okay, I thought, I can type in the text I want to use. Well, after typing for quite a bit and pressing the "create" button, I sat and waited. I eventually realized that the program had crashed my Explorer. Undaunted, I tried again, this time copying the text with control C before pressing "create."  Explorer crashed again. Okay, I thought, Wordle isn't doing it for me. I'll just paste the text into Tagxedo. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone reading that the control V didn't work. I'm not sure where in the ether the text disappeared to, but it did disappear. Not one to give up on the idea so easily, I retyped the text into the Tagxedo application. It too crashed my Explorer.

I'm still trying to think of something to excite my 10th graders, but at that point in the process, I decided to abandon the word cloud idea and create a crossword puzzle for my weak 9th graders. Thank G-d, that worked without a hitch, although I had a bit of experimenting to do in order to copy and paste the crossword puzzle file which I had saved as a .pdf.

Apart from learning this week that new technology takes time to learn and does not always work the way it's intended to, I learned that I definitely have to try things-- programs, web sites, applications -- out on my own before I can plan a lesson centered around them!

Classroom. It's not necessarily a word that conjures up images of the latest technology. In my teaching experience and in my own children's learning experience, the words "classroom" and "technology" describe two almost entirely distinct realms of experience.

So how can technology successfully be harnessed to enhance learning? The following blogs provide some useful ideas:

As Michael Gorman of 21st Century Education Technology  writes, we have to keep a few things in mind when aiming to update our classrooms: 

• First of all, it's a step-by-step process. Implement and integrate slowly, while constantly assessing possibilities that are opened up by the tools already implemented. 

• Most significantly, make sure the children and their learning, are not overshadowed by new technology. As Gorman writes: It is important that we take a moment to admire the shine and then move on to real learning possibilities. How might the newest tools or resource allow for student learning of the necessary content standards? 

 A blog that provides lots of specific examples of sites and apps that teachers can use to enhance their students' writing and reading experience is  Free Technology for Teachers. Richard Byrne, this blog's creator, provides links and descriptions of some of the latest free tools for students and educators. It's less about the philosophy behind incorporating technology, and more about the nuts and bolts of what to use. Of the tools Byrne introduced on his latest blog entry, I particularly liked Zing, a site that provides free e-books in a variety of different subjects, on a variety of different levels. Teachers can choose a book and invite their "class" to read it together. While I don't envision being able to use it for my current students, I hope to survey the available titles to find something appropriate for my own children.

The final blog I chose to follow deals with technology and mobile apps useful for education: Educational Technology and Mobile Learning. While I won't presume to judge the blog by my initial encounter, I must say that the first link they provided -- to a site that looked really interesting, called, apparently Histography -- did not work in my browser, Firefox. When I searched for it in Safari (without using the hyperlink), I didn't find it.

So . . . I'll have to report later, when I'm not on my Mac and am using Chrome, on neat tools and links to follow from this site.