Luddite No Longer

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 ...

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...

"Life is like a box of chocolates" and Learners are like Teachers Connectivism in Education What is connectivism? Connectivism is a learning theory that sees knowledge as networked and outside of an individual learner. "Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical." (Siemens)   In traditional educational models teachers filled their students with knowledge, knowledge that didn't change or adapt. Students were empty vessels waiting for knowledge to be dumped in by their teachers. Image Not Mine In today's system, or at least in my classroom, that belief of teachers as gatekeepers and holders of knowledge has changed. Teachers are no lon...

Do you visit many websites throughout the day? Have you ever been on a site and thought to yourself, "Wow, this is really interesting/neat/cool." So you saved that site to a word document or to a list of websites on your browser or you hand-write it on a post-it note at your desk. Then a few days or weeks or months go by and you remember that awesome website you found, only now you cannot remember where you saved it. If this has happened to you, not to worry, you are not alone. I, myself, have been known to save websites on a word document, write them on a post-it note only to lose the post-it, and save them in a huge list of bookmarks that I forget about. Social Bookmarking is an online tool for organizing and saving URLs and other content. Not only can you save all of those websites in one place, but you can also share them with others.        VS.                 ...

Coming back to teaching in the States has been in some ways very relieving. Youtube isn't blocked. I can access my g-mail. Internet speeds are fast. And I am no longer covered in chalk. If you take a look at the picture you will notice lots of things, but I want to focus on the large green monstrosity in the center of the image. China has one of the largest populations on the planet. It also has some of the most cell phone dependent people I have met in my life. Not a day went by where I didn't witness someone run into something or someone, trip, or fall because of their focus and dedication to whatever was happening on their phone. So how come a country with billions of people and a culture full of dedicated cell phone users has no technology in their classrooms? Now that isn't true of every school or every classroom. The universities I taught in had projectors and occasionally internet access. Training schools are also well equipped. For the most part, however, most o...