Thinking about the end of course 4 and a transition to course 5 could seem deeply overwhelming but putting this Certificate in Ed Tech into perspective everything was prepped for this great moment. Instead of being overwhelmed at the task at hand I find a sense of relief that I’ve/I’m shifting from where I was to where I am to where I will be. COETAIL has been a huge transformative process, which is what I have been yearning more and more with other colleagues and in the process had raised some eyebrows.
In the EAL classroom I have been fortunate enough to write curriculum for the past two years and have the flexibility of shifting the EAL classes away from the mainstream content towards a curriculum geared towards proficiency. In teaching towards these speaking, listening, reading and writing proficiencies and skills units have been met and taught through themes. I recently finished a unit on Autumn, am currently in a Thanksgiving and Christmas theme and will move to a Winter unit after the holiday break. If you Google winter lesson activities, units, etc. there is a plethora of information and plans for any year level. However, the delivery of these lessons typically happens in class and the way the content is used can be shifted towards the accommodation and integration of 21st century skills.
I’ll look to Flip the classroom and give students more exposure and opportunities to view media such as videos and pictures. Classroom discussions will be longer and more meaningful since we are more able to engage in student ideas rather than lesson delivery. Any of these can be used as the summative assessment piece. Also, students can increase their writing skills through basic sentence starters being sent home with various vocabulary lists to fill in the blanks for their sentences. From there students can create their own flashcards through apps like Flashcardlet or Flashcards*. Other ideas I have are that would for students to create their own videos at home and use different tools such as various apps to create medias whether that be photo streams, videos, flashcards, or iBooks. The process of creating leads to an increased remembering. Create to remember versus remembering to create- a flip on the classic Bloom’s Taxonomy.
This type of unit and shift in homework and pedagogy approach will require some flexibility among students, parents, and the teacher. Having mainly north Asian students in my class the homework approach in classes like Chinese is to memorize, memorize, memorize. I’m asking students to create. This will take some time to get used to but hopefully there will be many positive outcomes and a lots of constructive criticism to align my teaching with best practices.
Look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas. This is a very rough sketch of what I think I’ll be doing and I’m sure there will be a lot of changes. Thanks Rebekah, Brandon and Jeff for a great course 4, see you in 2014, course 5, Twitter, and wherever our networks may meet.
