ESL Teacher

I attended the Tapped in session called “Teacher Tools that Integrate Technology.” The purpose of this chat was to discuss three hosting sites where teachers and instructors can publish to the web not only for free, but also, in a very easy way. The three sites discussed were Instructional Architect (IA), Teacher Tube and Filamentality.

            The session was led by Kimberly S. Lightle, who is on the staff at Ohio State University in the college of education. She works with with in-service and pre-service math and science teachers - one of her projects in the NSDL Middle School Portal.

Both IA and Filamentality offer templates for designing and publishing web pages. Additionally, Filamentality has templates for Treasure Hunts, Samplers, Scrapbooks, and Web Quests. With IA, teachers can build folders similar to Favorites in Internet Explorer that allow them to organize links, add introductions, questions, and instructions for students. Teacher Tube is a fun tool to use. With this means teachers can upload videos and attach files, such as lessons, tasks, projects, assessments, and video notes.

I found this session very beneficial not only for me, but also for my other colleagues at school. Teachers can use any of these hosting sites to upload some of their lessons for students and parents to have access to them when needed. Another possible way for teachers to use any of these hosting sites is to show their own videotapes about specific topics or concepts and have them available for students and their families to watch them at home.

Interactive Power Point presentations definitely contribute to the engagement of the students into the learning process in an interactive and dynamic way. Additionally, it is a valuable technology tool to be used by teachers in the classroom.  However, I consider it important to come up with a well prepared PowerPoint presentation that helps all the students to acquire the concepts and assimilate them in an effective and timely manner.

I found useful the idea of including hyperlinks in the power point presentations because this diminishes the need of preparing too many slides for presenting a specific topic. The hyperlinks transform the presentation into a non-linear interactive tool that allows the users to go back to a previous slide or surf into a webpage that provides details or simply supports the main topic in depth.

 I am convinced that the incorporation of interactive power point presentations in my classes will lead my students to the pleasure of learning while having fun.   A great use of power point could be the elaboration of games and quizzes. These activities lower the students’ affective filters and help to build students’ self confidence.

Finally, power point presentations are not only to be created by the teachers, but also the students can benefit from the use of this tool in order to show their knowledge on an assigned or already known area.  Additionally, Interactive power point presentations are good scaffoldings, especially for those students who feel afraid of participating in class or delivering speeches before audiences.

Podcasting is definitely a very useful technology tool to be implemented in education. After having the opportunity of creating my own podcast I am eager to incorporate the use of podcasting in my ESL classes. I am pretty sure that this is an interactive activity that my ESL students will tremendously enjoy. I think this would be a way to encourage my students to first practice listening skills by listening to some podcasts made by English native speakers, and second, by practicing their reading aloud and speaking skills. They can start by reading a paragraph, a story, a poem or even a song in English in order to practice their pronunciation. Later on, they can come up with their own creations where they can first write their scripts and then podcast them on the web. To engage my students in this activity I would motivate them to come up with a list of topics that they would like to share with their friends and people not only inside but also outside the classroom.

I also found this tool beneficial for me as a teacher. Now that I have my own web portfolio, I would like to podcast and share some of my essays and journal responses on education with my colleagues and friends not only from this country but also with the ones from Colombia. I am pretty sure that some of these articles will enhance them to reflect on their teaching experiences and will encourage them to be updated on the use of new technology resources.