Luddite No Longer

What is guided reading? Very simply, guided reading is small group literacy instruction. It's purpose it to provided  guided  instruction to students at their level with a focus on their specific needs. Like other centers, grouping is done based on an individual students needs at the moment, meaning groupings are fluid and constantly changing. The students I work with in my Blue Group on Fiction may not be in the same group when I switch to Nonfiction. How do you decide who is it what group? A variety of strategies can be used to determine who goes in what group. Primarily, I use the F&P levels as determined by the Benchmark Assessment (BAS) to determine my students reading levels. Next I think about other specific strengths and weaknesses: who reads independently, who works well together, what skills do we need to improve, what tools and strategies are missing in their toolboxes. I then use those strengths and weaknesses to build my centers for the week. What c...

What is a digital native? A digital immigrant? In his article, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1 , Marc Prensky identifies the new generation of students as "native speakers" of the digital language of computers, video games, and the internet. Prensky labels those of us who were not born into the digital world but have dabbled in it as digital immigrants. His article explains that teachers, as digital immigrants, have to adjust in order to teach their digital native students. This is not the first time I have heard of the digital immigrant vs. digital native argument, as a teacher of mostly K-3 graders I am significantly more advanced in years. My students were born in a different time, things have certainly changed since I was a Kindergartner. Students are now required to use technology at younger ages. Often times we assume they come to us with knowledge of technology and computers that they don't have. Yes, they maybe be digital natives but that doesn...

Today you are in for a real treat. I dabbled in podcasting and have created my first ever podcast! I know, I know, you are thrilled that you can now look forward to hearing my voice on yet another platform. I am pretty excited about podcasting and my new friend Audacity which helped me eliminate my stammering. Not sure about podcasting on a regular basis, but for a first attempt, it's not too bad. Enjoy! Khan and Bock:Talking about Videos in the Flipped Classroom

Hallo! Heute werde ich über Podcasting schreiben. This week I explored Podcasting and it's benefits and uses in the classroom. Podcasts are simply a series of episodes that you can stream or download. More often than not they are audio files but occasionally there are videos or documents to accompany the audio. Podcasts are commonly subscribed to and listed to on a weekly basis. Podcasts are a part of my daily life. As a commuter I spend three hours of my day in my car. Podcasts help the time go bye quickly and also help me stay up-to-date on what's going on in the world. Some of the podcasts I subscribe to are: Pop Culture Happy Hour , TEDTalks Education , Unqualified , and the one we will be discussing today: Coffee Break German . One of the harder parts of learning German is the grammar as it differs greatly from English. Verb placement and verb conjugation tend to be extremely difficult. Haben and sein , the verbs for to have and to be are particularly challeng...

To follow up on my flipped classroom introduction, I created my first TED-Ed lesson. As I debated what to create a lesson about I started to think about the last time I had a flipped classroom. My first and only experiences with Flipped Classrooms happened while I was living and teaching in China.  Students working on Flipped Classroom Assignments in my office at Shenyang Normal University The courses I taught were for second language users who were studying to be teachers of English as a foreign language in China. I relied on the flipped classroom to get through a higher quantity of dense materials.  One of the weaknesses that my students had was their listening ability. Students had strong reactions to this video but also had difficulty understanding the fast-paced spoken language. For whatever reason I didn't use TED-Ed lessons in China and I wish I had, thus I created this lesson with a video I had used previously in my methodology course in China. Student-...

Image Not Mine Be careful that first step is a doozey!   Have you ever felt like you have fallen down a rabbit hole? You followed the White Rabbit down and now you are falling, falling, falling... Once you reach level ground, it's not quite what you expected. It's different...odd...challenging. Eventually you start to feel more comfortable. Not at home, mind you, but comfortable. It's not as scary as you initially thought. And then you meet the Red Queen and she's shouting, "OFF WITH YOUR HEAD!" That's how I feel about technology. I fell down into this rabbit hole of Web 2.0, social media, blogs, Twitter feeds, and digital citizenship. I am starting to get my bearings and become more confident in my own netizenship. And then the Flipped Classroom appears out of left field with it's own demands, "OFF WITH YOUR HEAD" and your free-time! For those of you new to the flipped classroom, it is best explained by one of my favorite educati...

It's a Small Small World: Not My Image Part of my job as an English Language Teacher (ELT) is to make language and content more accessible. Honestly it's the most important (read: satisfying) parts of my job. Students arrive at school not knowing English, not understanding American culture, or the American school system. They walk in overwhelmed and confused. It's my responsibility to make them feel welcome, comfortable, understood, and hopefully a little less confused.  Fortunately, since we live in 2017 there are many resources at our fingertips. This week I spent time exploring Twitter and how it can help me bridge the gap between home and school; to make connections. To start my exploration I went to one of my favorite educational websites: Edutopia . (if you aren't familiar, you should be, it's like Wikipedia for teachers!) I searched Edutopia for Twitter and found two great articles:  Making Connections through Twitter  and 100 Twitter Tips for Teachers ...