Fall CUE: Creating Movies to do English Language Development in ELs and Other Students

October25

This presentation will take place Saturday October 27 at 1:30 pm at the Fall CUE conference (more info here)

Thanks to my small but loyal group of participants.  I’ve updated the links to include those from a session that Cheryl Sawyer did earlier on Digital Storytelling.

Links for Presentation:

The Best Places Where Students Can Create Online Learning/Teaching Objects For An “Authentic Audience” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
Mathtrain.TV student math videos screencast education learn kids teach marcos
BlogWalker – A Case for Filmmaking in the Classroom – 5 years later
Video in the Classroom.com

MORE links to story-making sites via Cheryl Sawyer:

www.storyjumper.com

http://www.studentpublishing.com/

http://pbskids.org/sagwa/stories/storymaker/index.html

http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/make-your-own/story-maker

http://storybird.com/

http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/storyideas

http://theedublogger.com/2009/04/27/50-ways-to-create-digital-stories-with-students/

and some I’ve used:

Scholastic Stacks Make a Goosebumps Graphix

Scholastic Stacks Make a Capt. Underpants Graphic

 Scholastic Stacks Dog’s Life Story Builder

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The Twenty-First Edition of the ESL/EFL/ELD Blog Carnival

January28

Welcome to the 21st edition of the ESL/EFL/ELD Blog Carnival! This one is full of celebratory goodness, and I promise there will be none of the nasty hangovers that plague some other celebration for getting up to 21.

Let’s start of with a nice base of lessons and resources for you to deploy in your classroom…

The Best Sites For Collaborative Storytelling | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Reminding us why many of us started reading Larry, he also shares this post on resources for collaborative storytelling. I’m still wondering how he gets the time to come up with all these great lists.

Teaching Vocabulary-links, books, ideas | A Journey in TEFL

Eva Buyuksimkesyan has a great post on vocabulary development in ELs giving background into why it’s critical, why and how students brush it off, then tops it off with a great list of activities you can have students do, and a list of online resources. Overall a very nice, neat, well-rounded post. Bravo Eva!

Animating Your Lessons with Some Drama: 20+ Resources | Teacher Reboot Camp

No one will every accuse Shelly Terrell of not providing enough resources for teachers when she shares lessons. This post on adding drama to lessons has the webinar video, links to video examples, with instructional plans, resources, and MORE resources. I’m embarrassed when I think of the “lessons” I’ve posted. Okay, crawling back in my cave in embarrassment, but first, I’m going to check out that Rumors lesson, hmmmm….

Using no opt-out and its limitations with ELLs (and others) | Reflections on Teaching

Your blog hostess shares this post on a technique from the newest darling of American education, Doug Lemov, and how to make it more appropriate for language learners are other students.

Speaking tips for teaching English with TED | Kalinago English

Karene Sylvester hits it out of the park (sorry, couldn’t resist using idiom after her earlier submission when I hosted this carnival) with some really great tips about activities to do around showing videos, like those from TED, that are meaningful, authentic, and not just worksheets.

English Raven: The ‘live reading’ approach explained (in honour of Australia Day)

I like Jason Renshaw because of his experience teaching both EFL and ESL students. His techniques seem to really fit well for any ELL classroom whether is EFL or ESL. This is a great sounding technique and clearly explained.

Picture Boards « Sandy Millin

Sandy Millin references a request from Jason Renshaw (English Raven) who requested that teachers share their version of a lesson using story boards. She shares pictures (Yea, visuals!) of a lesson she did on Christmas vocabulary with her students where they did pictures to illustrate groups of words on vocabulary cards.

ESL Stories

Mark Chapman shares a number of techniques to have students create stories in the ESL classroom. While you may be familiar with some or even many, there will probably be some surprises even for experienced teachers.

a cLiL to cLiMB, Chiew’s CLIL EFL ESL ELL blog: Online Games & Activities: Idioms Part 5 (Animals – Elephant – Flea) Interactive Game

Chiew Pang shares his activity for teaching idioms to EFLs using purpose games. The one he shares in on idioms using animals and is the fifth in his series, so he just jumps right in. Don’t be afraid to join in.

Up next, some research and policy because the big picture is important

Wasting Money On New Tests For English Language Learners | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Larry speaks quietly but carries a big blog audience, so when he chooses to take a stand, in this post it’s about efforts to create new tests for ELLs at the federal level, it’s worthwhile to read.

Tongue Tied: Bilingual Education, in Policy and Practice

Jennifer Kobrin shares her interview with a principal on teaching ELLs. This is a great look at the clash of research, policy, and reality that can happen so often at the “ground level” of teaching. Korbin shares this story of a school that is trying to do what’s best, and what is required by both state and federal policy, which often contradict each other and even themselves.

ELL Researchers Weigh In on ESEA Reauthorization – Learning the Language – Education Week

Mary Ann Zehr provides important policy information for educators in the U.S.  on ELLs in this piece summarizing the recommendations from researchers about how ESEA re-authorization (NCLB) should report on ELLs. As always, the arcane is made comprehensible in Mary Ann’s capable hands.

The Spelling Blog: Learned or learnt? Spelled or spelt? – A Google Ngram analysis

This post from Johanna Stirling shares a post on her Spelling Blog about some Google analysis of spelling variations between British and American English is closer to action research, but quite interesting. It was another facet to the discussion, “which English do you mean” that I discussed  in a post based on Henrick Opera’s really interesting post on world English standards.

Finally, reflection is good, and these posts have it…

2011 Challenge: Become a Beginner (again) – Teaching Village

Barbara Sakamoto shares her challenge to TEFL/TESOL teachers to “Become a Beginner Again”, and follows up the general command, with some really great examples. Not all of them involve ed tech, or even teaching, but they all sound fun.

Using technology in the classroom can be quite hard « My Integrating Technology journey

Jennifer Verschoor shares the difficult, but ultimately triumphant story of how using technology to teach English lost her a job, but led to a better one. This post is a wonderful piece of personal reflection, but told in the context of the larger issues of education technology (resisting it vs. embracing it).

Dinner and a Lesson? « lexigraph

Daniel Scibienski shares his idea for restructuring his Adult Ed ESL class by having making it a “potluck” dinner party with students and their children, and centering the teaching around conversations. They are basing their recruitment out of the elementary school the program operates in. They are also involving English speaking parents who want to brush up on Spanish. It looks intriguing, and as an elementary teacher in a school with similar demographics, I can’t wait to see how it turns out!

Homework – Moving from “Alfie Kohn” to “Robyn R. Jackson” | Visualising Ideas

Naomi Epstein wins the diversity award. She teaches deaf and hard of hearing students in Israel (already language challenges there), English as a foreign language. As the daughter of a hard of hearing parent, and the parent of a child with an IEP, I really liked this post. It was about her evolving thought on homework, coming from not assigning it, to using it effectively. Even though she has a very different set of students from most folks, most of what she did and discovered is pretty universal.

If this has peaked your interest, you can see all the previous editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival here.

Let Larry Ferlazzo know if you might be interested in hosting future editions. David Deubelbeiss at EFL Classroom 2.0 will be hosting the April 1st edition, and there will be a special May 1st edition focusing on Young Learners and hosted by Shelly Terrell. The following edition will be published by Eva Buyuksimkesyan on September 1st. You can send your submissions here.

Image Credit: 21st Birthday Cake on Flickr Photosharing cc licence

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Reflections on Fall CUE in Napa, California

November11

Pic looking out library/reg/recpeption area window at #FallCUE
Overall, I really like this conference. It was only a one hour drive. I stayed overnight and brought the family, and had fun going out with them the next day. One day is a nice length, but there was enough time to socialize too. I hear that CUE will return next year. If so, I’m signing up now!

My Preso with Larry Ferlazzo on Web 2.0 for ELD

Overall this session went very well from my point of view. The participants were engaged. Even though the conference had a lot of first time attendees, there were plenty of laptops open during the session. It was one of the few ELD sessions, and the only one titled specifically for ELD and ELLs. There is a big demand for workshops on that subject. The attendance was about the same as other sessions I was in, and larger than most at about 25-30. It was a whirlwind tour starting with why we use technology (basically, to solidify the face-to-face relationships that are necessary to help language learners and all students learn). We then went through some specific applications, like online game walk-throughs, VoiceThread, and blogs, oh and did I leave out Larry’s favorite new program, Fotobabble?

One of the participants asked, “Is the only advantage of using these online tools for oral language practice engagement?” Meaning, could you achieve the same results having students do these oral language activities face-to-face in class. This is an excellent question, and showed that the participant has the right attitude about technology and is  looking for things that add real value.

Larry shared how important being able to re-record, and correct oneself was in making students more confident, so that they practiced more, and then got better in real life speaking situations. I shared my own experience with this, which was that I had gone into podcasting with students assume that my loquacious students would get the most from it as it would provide an outlet for their need to talk. I discovered instead that my quieter language learners were some of the most eager to volunteer to participate in making the podcasts because they felt safe. They could record in an empty classroom, and erase and fix any mistakes. This was a very important learning processes for these students, and I was proud to see it.

Some folks expressed concern about not being shown how to set up blogs, etc. that were part of the presentation. I think you have the choice of either showing the tool, or showing how to use it. In one hour, you can’t do both, but I did provide links to resources because there are plenty of them online.

Library of Congress: The Power of Primary Sources

I thought we’d dig into primary sources, but this session was more about navigating the LOC.gov website. That’s okay because as the presenter pointed out, navigating the site can only be helped by getting some more information (i.e.: while the UI has some good points, it’s not always intuitive where to find stuff). This is not surprising since it is, essentially, the nation’s storage closet, and we all know that even in a well organized one of those, when you get too much stuff, just knowing what to look for and where, is hard to figure out sometimes. Here are my rough-ish notes, cleaned up a bit:

The discussion started around primary sources, and what they are?

  • Considerations (language, etc.)
  • Analysis rather than recall

Quick facts: 138M items in collection; 650 miles of bookshelves; 470 languages represented. 15M digitized items you can access.

There are ways to search subjects and history

Are the pictures CC licensed? If you click on about for an image, it will tell you.

All picture collections is often best: http://www.loc.gov/pictures

By Subject: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/index/subjects/

You can also look by exhibits http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/

THOMAS tracks bills, etc. http://thomas.loc.gov/

World Digital Libraries http://www.loc.gov/wdl/
to see what other countries have

My LOC, http://myloc.gov/pages/default.aspx for your own info, but what? I missed that part.

Ask a librarian will help answer reference questions from 2-4 EDT they have live chat for the collections marked “Chat” here http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/

Teacher page http://www.loc.gov/teachers/has primary source sets available http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/

You can do self-paced lessons to get recognized for your knowledge of the site http://www.loc.gov/teachers/professionaldevelopment/

They have 4-day summer institute you can apply for (travel on you). Sorry didn’t get the link for that.

Using Data in a Professional Learning Community

This last session had the least technological, but it may prove the most fruitful over the long run. It was about Professional Learning Communities. Since these are being implemented at my site, it seemed worth my while to take a peek in at it. The subject/grade level was based on the presenter’s work in High School Algebra. A very different place developmentally from most of my kids, but a lot of it was about the adults (teachers) and getting them to play well with others. Here were some guidelines I gleaned:

  1. Pick a single unit to focus on, not the whole curriculum;
  2. Agree to common goals to teach students in that unit (it seemed to align to benchmark testing in the presenter’s case, and would at my district as well);
  3. Agree on the measures that will be used to assess which should included assessments beyond benchmark tests (e.g., multiple choice and written exam);
  4. Share score data, and discuss it with others in the PLN (sometimes the hardest part).

Among the various forms she shared (paper, so old school, but?) was one gem:

Student Self Evaluation Sheet from Napa High School

This was a student self-assessment, where they indicate with a 🙂 or 🙁 after a chapter test (formative assessment) whether they understood each concept. They then compare that after they get their graded test back.

There was a really great discussion about these sorts of tools on Lee Kolbert’s Facebook wall recently. She shared a student feedback sheet from Florida based on the annual FCAT test the state gives students. Forms like that are a dime a dozen in the schools (usually in PI) that I’ve taught in, and Sylvia Martinez zeros in on why they are useless. They are too little, too late, since they are summative, not formative in nature. I would also add that they lack in applicable specificity for the student.

The presenter’s story about her form is really what impressed. Even “F” students in the program could point to one skill they had on the form, and for the learning targets they didn’t have, they knew what they had to work on and could articulate it to teachers.

Keynote Speakers

One of the things that I enjoy about smaller conferences is I find I’m much happier with the keynote speaker. Sure it’s nice to see a famous author, but usually they cover territory I’ve already heard if I read their book. I have more than a passing acquaintance with Rushton Hurley the opener on Friday night, but his keynote was fresh and full of new material. The big take-away, using technology as tools for project-based learning for our kids. I don’t know how Hall Davidson manages to do it, but his presentations always seem up to date. Actually I do know, if you ever see him at a conference, he is usually doing last minute re-writes before he goes on-stage. His take away, sometimes folks on Facebook and Twitter at a lecture or presentation are talking about…the presentation, which makes it better.

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Week in Lab Week Eight 2010

October31


Photo Credit: Non-Magic 8-Ball Originally uploaded by 60 in 3

The good news is that I managed to beat a nascent cold that my body started flirting with last weekend. I needed my health because there was lots of stuff going on this week. In addition to doing the computer prep gig, I was observed teaching ELD “nekkid” in a classroom, instead of the lab (more on that here). I also spent time at a district level training on “cyber-safety”.

Morning Classes

Each morning, I cover a different class as each of the various grade-level teaching staffs meet and do collaborative planning. Most of the teachers prefer that I do the morning routine they have, rather than taking the kids to the lab. This has forced me to go back to my old substitute teaching skills, being able to fill in and maintain the regular teachers’ routines.  At first I was a little cranky (in a minor way) because it was a change, but I’m enjoying it a lot. Two classes in particular are really letting me stretch my wings. The first I write about more in this post.

The next class, is ELD (English Language Development period) for intermediate (grade four to six) EOs (English speakers). Despite that, this group is low academically, and needs to work on basic reading and writing, including phonics in some cases. I’m having them work on making stop motion videos with sight words and sounds.  I’m working with a small group/pairs to get them to film, voice, and edit each one. They started shooting on the first one last week, and should finish up work this coming week, so look forward to seeing it in my next Week in Lab post. This group helped to create the Thank You video I did for our Donors Choose grant:

First Grade:

Same as last week, nothing new or innovative, so I’ll skip this one.

Second Grade:

What’s exciting is the upcoming Skype conferencing we’ll be doing with a class at Kevin Jarrett’s school in New Jersey. We shared information about each school on VoiceThread (sorry, we’re keeping it private) but the video-conferencing won’t get under-way until next week. I’m very excited about this.

Third Grade:

These grade ended their work on Friendship by answering questions they themselves had put up about the topic. Here is the VoiceThread:

They are starting a new unit on city animals, that will include studying ecosystems, and biomes. I’m looking forward to this because it is a fun topic for all of us.

Fourth Grade:

Moved on to a unit on dollars and sense (about money sense). Since I had them cover money as a unit in third grade, I started out by having them review what they came up with last year in this VoiceThread:

They had such a great time listening to themselves and their classmates (some of whom have left our school), that it really kept them engaged. I think this was a great “into” activity.

Fifth Grade:

These students are still finishing up their unit on cooperation and competition. As part of that, I had them complete this end of unit survey on Google Docs. I will do a tie-in with a writing assignment that is being using for assessment purposes by having them write their topic sentences and revise them with me in the lab next week. It feels much better doing some work like this that is directly tied to what they are doing in the classroom.

Sixth Grade:

I’ve started them on research. They’ve learned about Google Wonder wheel (it is a wonder), and we talked about reliability and suitability of sites. The second is much harder to “teach” since it requires both some background knowledge and judgment, which are not best conveyed in two-45 minute teaching periods. I used the Pacific Tree Octopus to try to teach them about this. The first class, did not get it, even after we read this, because they didn’t know what “hoax” meant. I asked the other class if they watched “Punkd” and I used that as my into teach them about what a hoax like the Pacific Tree Octopus is.

The teachers have not been able to start their end with the kids, but that’s okay, they will just have better “research” skills by the time they are working on it for “real”, and they’ve already gathered some background information.

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Doh! I can’t believe I missed that!

October11

365.274
When I did my review of the 19th ELL/EFL/ELD Blog Carnival, I left out a wonderful piece by Shelly Terrell about growing up in the U.S. in an immigrant family. She does a brilliant job of contextualizing the personal in the larger policy and legal issues of the different times she writes about. This is a must read for teachers of immigrant children. You can check out all of the articles at Flecha’s blog and tell me what other gems I missed.

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