Video Reactions

Educational Change Challenge  

The Educational Change Challenge video was short, but made a lot of great points about staying up to date and relevant in teaching. "Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way" (George Evans) This quote at the beginning of the video was very thought provoking to me. As a teacher with a background in special education, I am very aware of the different learning styles and types of learners that teachers can encounter. However, thinking from an ESL standpoint, I am thinking about even great complexities and differences amongst ESL learners that I will encounter who bring with them even more unique learning styles from their own background and culture that may be very different from what I am used to. 

This quote also struck a chord with me - "In education, the use it or lose it rule may be that if you don't use technology for learning, you may lose relevance; an educator must be relevant. Teachers need to exist in the space the students exist, understand their culture, you have no credibility if you're not where they are. Because the generation of students that I am teaching is at instant putting the drive thru, microwave, downloaded from the internet, media driven generation, I know that I must be innovative to keep their interest and to inspire in them creative curiosity" (Martin). I have grown up with technology and have learned to use it pretty well, but I will admit that during my student teaching, I was having students help me with the SmartBoard technology as well as with some work on the iPad. I needed to include technology into my lessons because that was what the students knew. As a student in elementary school, my teachers used very little technology, so that was why it was hard for me at first to integrate it into my own teaching. However, as this video states, we as teachers must get on the same playing field as our students, and utilize the technology that they all have right at their fingertips. Not using technology in our lessons and daily teaching will simply make us irrelevant in the world's of our students. Not only with technology, but with all aspects of our teaching. We must find a way to get our students to buy into what we are teaching them; we must find ways to keep them engaged. I chose this image from Dead Poets Society because John Keating (Robin Williams) finds ways throughout the movie to connect with his students and keep them hanging on his every word. I find this moving inspiring to me as a future teacher, and it's also just a very great film!

Social Media Revolution 2011

The Social Media Revolution video was again a short clip, but it held a very powerful message. Social is so big, that our world is getting "smaller". We can communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world, in a matter of seconds. A teacher in America can FaceTime with students in China to teach a lesson. Entire college courses, just as this one, can be taught online, with out any physical interaction between professor and students. It is amazing what social media and technology can do, but it is also a bit scary how important it is becoming to society. 

As a teacher, it almost impossible to run a classroom with out being relevant on social media. Even if you're a kindergarten teacher, and your students don't use social media, their parents definitely do, and sometimes that is the only way parents can communicate with teachers. It is to the utmost advantage of us teachers to become comfortable with using social media as a tool in our classrooms, because it is not going anywhere anytime soon. The one quote from this video that I really liked was, "We don't have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it" (Erik Qualman). 

A girl that I student taught with was teaching third grade, and did a whole character study on a book the class read using Facebook as the inspiration behind the project - the students each had to choose a character from the book and create a Facebook page for their character, and then they each had to post on other characters' walls from the point of view of their character. It sounds complicated, but the third graders did an amazing job, because the material was presented to them on a platform that they were familiar and comfortable with - social media. 

As our world grows smaller and our students become more diverse, we as teachers can use technology and social media as a beneficial classroom resource that can help us and our students connect not only with each other, but with other resources around the world that can give them new insights, information, and strategies. 

The picture that I chose for this video is pretty self-explanatory. Most of the tools that were once used in a classroom, even something as simple as a pencil, are becoming obsolete. The majority of learning and teaching are beginning to come in the form of a screen that is attached to the rest of our world. 

Blogging and the ESL classroom

Hi everyone! I am new to this whole blogging experience, but I am excited to begin this journey.

In today's society, it is almost impossible to avoid the idea of using technology in the classroom. Technology is something that most of our students have grown up with and known their whole lives. It only makes sense to incorporate something so prominent into the learning experience.

I think that one way for students to utilize blogging in the classroom would be to use blogs as a place for ongoing discussion boards, similar to how we use them on UBLearns. Students can use their blogs for communication in group work, they can use it as a place to ask for help with assignments or to discuss assignments with peers, and they can also use it to communicate with the teacher. Students can also use their blog simply as a journal, that they can share with the teacher, other students, or just with themselves.
Just getting students comfortable with using the medium of a blog can be helpful in enhancing their communication skills, as it gives them another way to communicate instead of just f2f communication.

Some of the NYS learning standards address using language and communication in a variety of different forms (www.nylearns.org):

Performance Indicator - ESL.E.2-4.4.1.1:Students use a variety of oral, print, and electronic forms for social communication and for writing to or for self, applying the convention of social writing.

Performance Indicator - ESL.E.2-4.4.1.6: Students understand and use a variety of oral and communication strategies in American English for various social and academic purposes.



Aside from being very useful to the students, I also believe that blogs can be very important to professional development. Teachers can use blogs to share ideas and thoughts with others, to create a portfolio that other teachers can access and use for fresh ideas, as well as to communicate with other team members and with administration.

I think it would be helpful for teachers to use a blog as the students use it also, so that way, teachers and students are on the same page, and are experiencing something new together.