Since being awarded a Race to the Top grant, our county has set personalized learning as one of their main priorities in the strategic plan. All middle school students in our county will have tablets over the next couple of years which will be used as a tool to help personalize learning. We as teachers have been trained on the use of the tablets and the students will be receiving them in just a few weeks. Thrown in with the tablet training has been information on how we need to use the tablets to help us personalize learning.
Ok, so my concern is, if I am truly supposed to personalize learning, how the heck does it happen? In all the training, I have heard very few ideas about how to make this happen in my classroom. We’ve heard about what it is, how important it is and that this is a main focus and reason for us getting the tablets. I have read some articles about how the ultimate goal is to create an environment where the learner is in charge of his/her learning and the teacher is a partner. The learner is deciding what and how to learn, designing projects and the teacher is giving feedback. It sounds wonderful but I don’t understand how to get there. How do the twenty or so students I have in a middle school classroom teach themselves French (as complete beginners) and decide what they will learn? I was not taught French this way. I didn’t get to decide what vocabulary words I was going to learn or what grammar to work on. It was taught to me in bits and pieces. I practiced the concepts I was taught and somewhere along the way I learned how to communicate in another language. This idea of allowing the students to decide what they’re going to learn is a totally foreign concept to me.
I can understand flipping the classroom. I can understand giving the students choices for projects. I can even understand how you could give students choices about how to learn something using a tablet (i.e. give them the choice to watch a video about how to conjugate verbs, read instructions, or sit in a small group with a teacher to explain and model). What I don’t understand is how students would just pick and choose what they want to learn. So, if a student is more interested in sports and another is interested in animals they would be studying different vocabulary words? Another student wants to learn only how to write French but another student wants to learn only how to speak – how does that work?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this can’t work. I’m just saying this idea of personalized learning doesn’t make sense to me and I don’t know how to move my classroom into something that looks like this. If anyone out there has ideas on how this is done in a foreign language classroom, please post links, videos, anything! Help!!!
So, Guilford County Schools was one of 16 school districts in the country to win a federal “Race to the Top” grant giving us $30 million to spend on tablets, data subscriptions, and training for all our middle school students. From what we’ve heard half of the middle schools will get the tablets next year and the other half the next. I don’t know what will happen the following year for incoming 6th graders. It would make sense that additional money would need to be allocated to keep tablets coming for those kids also each year but who knows? We don’t know what kind of tablets they will be but we’re pretty excited. It will change the way we teach for sure–at least it will for me. What a great boon to know that every child will have a tablet with Internet access. I have to get my course on Moodle or something now so students can submit work digitally and we can get away from paper for the most part.
I would love to hear from others with a 1:1 program in their schools and how having these tablet has changed your classroom in a positive way. I know there are challenges such as students wanting to play games and be off task in that way but I know there have to be so many great things about students having their own devices too.
I’m in a workshop about using blogs and wikis in the classroom at the moment and just heard a great way to use a blog in the classroom. One of our 6th grade science teachers set up a blog where a zoologist (his fiancée) posted short articles about various animals or topics relating to zoology and his students would read the posts and comment. He talked about how excited the students were to see if the zoologist had responded to their comments. Some students even read, commented and corrected each others’ comments. What a great idea to connect with someone in the field!
My 7th and 8th grade students are getting ready to start emailing penpals in France with ePals. The teacher and I have been trying to think of a common project the students can do. Perhaps we will start a blog or a wiki to collaborate with each other. If anyone out there has done this type of a project with email penpals, I would love to hear about it.
I ran across this link on my resources page and there are some great ideas there! Enjoy!
Make a Video. Amazing Animated Video Maker – GoAnimate..
I have to try this soon! My kids will love it! Apparently, you can make cartoons that move and add voices! Here is an example:
Ok, maybe almost having bronchial pneumonia was a good thing for me this weekend. I have gone nuts catching up on blogs I love to follow, found some new blogs to follow, and writing up my own posts. I have missed my personal learning community or professional learning network or whatever it is you want to call it!
I went to the FLANC conference a few weeks ago and got lots of great ideas. I whipped out my handy little bag full of goodies today and found some things I’d like to post here that may help some other folks.
- PowerPoint and Motivation in the Classroom – This session had some great ideas on how juice up PowerPoint for your classroom. One neat idea in particular was how to embed a Flash timer in your PowerPoint. This might come in really handy for me as I like to put all my warm-ups on PowerPoint. The kids need something to get them moving as they like to chatter and then before I know it, I’ve lost class time due to so many taking so long to do a short warm-up. You will need to scroll down a bit to find the presentation she did at FLANC on 10/14/2011.
- Blog it! How to Implement and Use Communicative Blogging in the FL Classroom – Awesome session from a school where the foreign language department has every student set up with a Google account. The students then use blogs as digital portfolios so they can publish their work.
- What’s Cooking in World Languages? – Interesting presentation on how to cook simple foods in class and combine that activity with teaching grammar along the way. They had an interesting take on using the culture and interest in the food to make grammar (teaching imperative etc.) more palatable for students (no pun intended).
- Teachers as Advertisers – I didn’t go to this session but another teacher passed the presenter’s link to me. She has some neat ideas here about teachers being advertisers and teaching foreign language from that point of view.
I have one more that I would like to share but am waiting for a link to the materials. Enjoy!
This is the system I have in my classroom. It's the Epson BrightLink with Easiteach software.
I read this great post on tweenteacher.com about interactive whiteboards. I am blessed to be in a great classroom with a mounted projector and an interactive whiteboard (it’s interactive with a stylus not by touch) but I have been struggling to find ways to use the interactive whiteboard bit and I couldn’t figure out why that is. Isn’t it every teacher’s dream to have a setup like this in their classroom? I think Heather from tweenteacher.com put into words why I’m frustrated.
The big clunky forward facing, whole class method of lesson delivery via Interactive Whiteboard, I believe, is the Laserdiscof educational technology. The overpriced fad of Interactive Whiteboards (whether Smart or Promethean) is imperfect in their current incarnation. Sure, we all imagine classrooms with“Iron Man2”:-esque 3-D touch sensitive lessons, but inherently these pieces of equipment do not illustrate the spirit of technology in information delivery: all-access, collaborative, open, interactive, etc…
Currently, they are only as engaging as the lessons created, and those lessons are tedious to create and time-suckers in their efficiency. The prep time to create charts that utilize any effects over-and-above what you would already do with a laptop and LCD projector feels clearly developed by those with a disconnect to the precious time we have in education and the many hats we already wear.
The few times I have found ways to use the interactive whiteboard have mostly been teacher-centric and I have felt guilty afterwards. The kids are enthralled because it is different but, especially in middle school, this kind of thrill does not last long. So I have tried preparing some activities where the students get the stylus and go to the board but, again, only one person at a time can use the board. I get the kids to hand the “baton” of the stylus to the next student so I try to keep them engaged through the anticipation of getting to go up and use the board. This is still not ideal particularly if it takes a student a while to figure out the answer. I start to lose those kids already on the fringe and they start misbehaving out of boredom.
I think the interactive whiteboard has its place but I am really struggling to:
- find activities that are engaging enough to keep the whole class interested
- find activities that are easy and quick to make
- find web-based activity makers as I can’t download any software on my teacher computer
I don’t think we should dismiss IWBs altogether as they do have their place in the classroom and I know they can be used to create some great components to lessons (I just haven’t been uber successful with this yet). I agree with Heather that mobile technology is the way to go. I would much rather my kids have tablets or even laptops on a 1 to 1 program and be allowed to buzz in with their cellphones to a poll question in the classroom. Since our school is far from that, I will keep trying to think of ways to make my lessons better and more student-centric using the technology I have at hand.
Infographic Of The Day: How Our Students Stack Up Against The World | Co. Design.
Interesting infograph comparing students around the world and how we stack up.
I heard Tom Brokaw on David Letterman last night talk about how Asian students were at the school doors before daylight and studied late into the night with flashlights. I have a hard time getting my students to do two or three little practice activities for homework that should take them no longer than 10-15 minutes. What can we do differently to motivate our students? I don’t know the answer to that question but if we don’t figure it out we’re going to be in big trouble in this country one day.