Ladybug's Teacher Files Post 2

This next blog post was about a pretty simple topic, decorating a classroom. The blogger starts the post explaining her previous classroom set up. She used many different neon colors contrasted with black. Her students seemed to enjoy her classroom set up, but she worried that the many colors distracted her students. So she developed a system that color coded all of her different subjects. Orange was writing, green was science/history, pink was math, and yellow was reading. Now, she believed, it was less distracting for her students and it made it easier for both her and them to be organized. I think this is a good idea, as someone who is not very organized at my best and a complete mess at my worst anything that can help me is great. However, I have my doubts that a colorful un-color-coded classroom would be that distracting to students, especially 5th graders who should be old enough to not be distracted by something like that. So while I think this is a good idea, I don't believe it needed to be done.

Color Coding the Classroom

Ladybug's Teacher Files Post 1

I have found an interesting blog called the Ladybug's Teacher Files. It is written by a 5th grade ELL teacher. It has yet to be updated this school year, but her past posts have been interesting. This first post is about a blog post she wrote up in April called "Don't Answer Questions." What drew me to this post was the absurd nature of the title. Obviously as teachers you must feel compelled to answer questions students might have. However, her blog post was not about letting students have unanswered questions, but instead letting other students answer the question for her. This technique opens up discussion and critical thinking and does a lot more teaching than if she answered the question herself. More so, it creates an engaged classroom, which is perhaps the most important factor.

Don't Answer Questions!

ELT Notebook

In this blog they offer advice and tips to English language teachers, this includes English as a second language teachers as well as English as a foreign language. In this post a teacher in Japan posts about the importance of making her lessons fun. She only sees individual students up to 2 hours a week, so she tries to have her lessons stick after they leave her. When she first took her job, all that was given to her was a box of unorganized flash cards. She soon realized how bored this made her students, even the most well behaved students were bored. This inspired her to make a ton of activities. She made a crepe building station where students had to order a crepe from another student. This taught them food and numbers vocabulary. It also had them speaking in full sentences. She goes on further about all of the other activities she created for the students. This goes back to the gamification from the Horizon report. Students actively want to learn if they can have fun while doing it. While her classroom in the beginning sat there bored out of their mind while reciting flashcards they weren't learning much, but now they request to play games that actually teach them more then the flashcards ever taught them. I am completely impressed by the creativity of this teacher, she shows pictures on her blog of all the different activities she created and they are all well crafted. It is also impressive that she did this all without any guidance from her administration.

Early Learners want to play!

Horizon Report

After reading the 2014 Horizon report it is easy to be very excited about the future of technology in the classroom. I believe more technology in the classroom is better for both teacher and student. Technology enables teachers to personalize lesson plans to different types of learners in a way that they were never able to do before.

One of the technologies highlighted in the report is gamification. This is one technology I am especially excited about. When I was growing up, when everything was still on floppy disks there was always educational games. However this never had much of a penetration into the classroom. Now it looks like they are finally adapting this resource that has been around for decades. Though they cite examples in the report that are not strictly video games. For example they cite FourSquare as a structure in which the education field can structure lessons around. With FourSquare they were able to amass millions of users despite the main function being just letting people know where you are. They were able to do this by giving out titles and points that made it a game. By applying something simple like that to education, gamification can have a big impact on students interest in lessons and how much they get out of school. Using Minecraft in school is an exciting proposition as well. I have played the game once in my life, so I do not have much experience with it. However, while I was teaching in Korea, almost every boy in the class played Minecraft constantly. Also, they mention in the report that it can be used to introduce children to programming which I think is an excellent idea. I wish I had the opportunity to learn programming at an early age. I tried to teach myself a year or so ago and it was very hard to pick up without any background. If they can teach them at least simple tasks early, it will be much easier for them if they want to delve deeper into programming later.

The other technology that interested me the most was learning analytics. This one interested me because of the current state of education in the US. Right now the country is assessment crazy. Students have to take endless standardized tests. However, these tests are not being used in the right ways. Now they are being used to determine teachers' effectiveness or which schools are wasting resources. This is a terrible use of these tests. However, the technologies highlighted in the learning analytics section of the report use this assessment data the right way. This data is being used to craft lessons to different leveled learners. This technology enables us to craft a student's experience in the classroom to fit their needs. It also has long term uses as well. The article points out how using this data can show if a student is a high risk to drop out of high school in the future. So with the use of this data you can hopefully steer those high risk students in the right direction.

Welcome!

My name is Zach Tannoia. I have my B.A. in Historical Studies. I aspire to become an ESL Teacher in an Elementary School.