Luddite No Longer

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 ...

Oh Twitter, how long has it been? 3 years? 4? It has been awhile since a spent way too much time scrolling through your feeds and overusing hashtags. I'm back now and better then before because now I can waste time on Twitter and call it professional development. (If only I got CTLE credits for it!) Did you know you can use Twitter for PD? You can! This week I explored live chats on Twitter. Look at this crazy mess of Twitter PD!!! While I saw some really interesting and neat ideas, quotes, and resources, I was disappointed with the scheduling of these chats. My schedule this past week was crazy! Monday: Holiday= I am outside not sitting at a computer Tuesday: Meeting after school, home at 9pm Wednesday: Attempt #ELTchat but I was too late, stuck in traffic till 6pm Thursday: Attempt #langchat, it's every other week, not this week. I did briefly follow #games4ed but it was a little over my head Friday: Who wants to PD chat on a Friday night after working all w...

Ever notice how a lot of the news and advertising you see on Facebook is similar or identical to previous things you have explored. For me this comes in the form of environmentally friendly period products and emotionally driven videos that aim to make you cry, in addition to  more leftest leaning news. Eli Pariser names this phenomenon "filter bubbles". And Facebook isn't the only company using algorithms to enhance your web browsing experience. Yahoo, Google, The New York Times, and Huffington Post all use variations of filter bubbles to provide you with exactly the kinds of things you want to see. Originally Pariser believed an algorithm was responsible for the content shown on your browsers. Facebook did a study to prove that while the algorithm does play a role, it is who you are friends with on Facebook who provide a larger data set for them to use. Facebook has also taken steps to change their algorithm to have less tunnel vision. (See:  Article  Did Facebo...

Back in the olden days when I was a student, we didn't have e-mail or cell phones. We didn't even have computers in the classrooms. In second grade we had a word processor (aka a glorified typewriter) to type stories on during ELA. We went to the computer lab once a week to play games from 5 1/2 inch floppy disks and learn about the abacus. Image Not Mine Image Not Mine When it came time to do a letter writing unit we painstakingly wrote draft after draft until the teacher was satisfied not only with out spelling and grammar but more importantly it seemed, our penmanship. Image Not Mine Oh how the times have changed! Letter writing units are so much more fun with computers, tablets, and Google. I can simultaneously correct students writing in Google Docs while 2 peers are doing the same. The stress of writing the perfectly spaced and spelled handwritten letter is gone. Pen-pals are no longer of the pen but of the keyboard. Qwerty-friends? ePals  is an online p...

While exploring some Pinterests boards I came across this article:  What kind of teacher are you?  As a fan of infographics I was naturally intrigued. As I read the descriptions of the different teachers I recognized some, identified with others, and thought about the kind of teacher I want to be. Knowing my own strengths and weaknesses is important, but building on them and developing new strengths, and working around or above those weaknesses is also important. This is where PLNs come in. PLNs, or Professional Learning Networks for those of you not stuck in the same Alphabet Soup, are communities where like-interested professionals can share ideas. The Educator's PLN  is an online social media site that connects teachers to other teachers. Now if you are an ESOL/ENL/TESOL* professional like myself then you spend all day with other teachers. So why would you want to spend your down time with more teachers? Because if you ARE like me and my school community then you h...