Week 6

This week in Language Skills through ICT, we were given a series of useful classroom tools that pertain to English speaking and writing. Many of these tools struck me as engaging and clever. Here are five that I especially liked:

The first is Spelling City. The site allows you to punch in your own vocabulary set, from which it produces a series of games that you can choose from. I tested it with a bunch of my own words. It was able to recognize all of them, and it even recognized words that have similar phonics but different spellings (e.g. know, note). This will be great to use with my weaker learners for when we have some extra time.

Another resource that I liked was IDebate. IDebate offers thousands of debate topics, each of which you can browse and read user-submitted arguments and counterarguments in favor and against. I think this is perfect for my students in sixth grade. Instead of organizing an activity based on vocab or grammar, I'll split the group into two teams, assigning each team to take a side on a particular topic. I'll provide each team with a brief article in support of their side. Both teams will get practice in reading and comprehending authentic articles, and using new information to formulate claims and arguments in English.


For younger students, this story generator from the British Council is very cool. The generator allows the user to choose a genre (fairy tale, sci-fi, or horror), and then it creates a plot based upon user-selected details. Similar to a Mad-Lib. It works students' knowledge of simple adjectives (big, strange), and present-tense verbs (fly, run).

My favorite among the tools is The Hemingway App. The Hemingway App interprets text and returns feedback to promote simplicity and brevity.

This tool is great for teachers who are weary of their own use of the English language, like me. Many teachers who develop lesson plans fail to test the user-friendliness of their lessons. The Hemingway App is a simple place to start.

Lastly, BBC Skilswise had an excellent selection of games and short videos for introducing spelling concepts, such as plural endings, prefixes and suffixes, and homophones. There was one memory game I liked especially, where the user must find matching homophones (e.g. pair/pear, rain/reign), etc.

Week 4

This week's topic, between the technology in education blogs and our unit in class, seems to revolve around a central question: how does one engage students effectively in the classroom?

English educator and author Steve Wheeler sees a solution in asking "unGoogleable" questions. In a world where a near-complete encyclopedia of all human knowledge is totally accessible to everyone, all the time, why should a student even bother listening? Perhaps if a teacher really were so interesting, students might put their phones down for a moment. Wheeler suggests that teachers should ask their students questions that cannot necessarily be Googled:

As with all unGoogleable questions, the challenge is to provide students with a significant challenge, after which the process of learning will escalate to a point where students are critically questioning and analyzing their knowledge.

To ask difficult, thought-provoking, open-ended, and insightful questions is certainly a necessary facet of productive learning. Questions that beg easily-researchable answers get boring. But Wheeler's idea is narrow. Questions whose answers are impossible, ridiculous, or too difficult can lead students to give up––what's the point to solving an unanswerable riddle?

On the other hand, is it solely the responsibility of the teacher to engage the student? When, if ever, is it the student's responsibility to be focused and present and engaged and listening? Terry Heick at TeachThought posits this question. Heick admits that it's touchy given the potential socioeconomic, geographical, or health-related variances among students that might affect learning. But he's talking about the issue of free will in the classroom. Heick describes education and learning as emotional processes. Therefore, an appeal to emotion ought to grab a student's attention.

The use of pictures and imagery can be most effective in engaging a classroom, if used creatively. David Deubelbeiss, creator of EFL Classroom 2.0, writes:

Pictures are the fundamental “intermediary” for context in language teaching. That can be the pictures in a textbook, those in flashcards, on the board, in a power point or through video. They bridge the bewilderment of sound and give it meaning.

Deubelbeiss' teaching blog is fascinating. He borrows techniques from special education to assist in TEFL. He provides a series of printable cards, each of which associates a small picture with a word or phrase.

 

There are a thousand ways to incorporate something like this into the classroom. I circle back to Wheeler's argument: if a teacher were to offer something so interesting into the classroom, students might put their phones down for a moment.