ELD & Technology

“The Power of Video” My next blog is from a website based in another country. It’s about a freelancer from the U.K. named Antonia Clarke who wrote about “The Power of Video” which is essentially “the revolution of video in English Language Teaching” (Sunanda, 2018, paragraph 1). I thought this was perfect for this week because we are learning about digital storytelling in our graduate class. She found that “video is found everywhere” (paragraph 1). In fact, “over recent years, YouTube has become the second most popular site on the internet, beaten only by Google” (paragraph 1). Since video is prominent the author advises instructors to use videos in the classroom. Actually, in India they have such a shortage of teachers that they have started a digital classroom. In the digital classroom the students learn through watching videos made by the staff. Dr. Sunanda, the author, then shared benefits of using video in the classroom especially with English Learners. The benefits inclu...

When I came across this article it immediately grabbed my attention because it talks about Flipped Classrooms. At my school, I have a very “techy” 5 th grade teacher that has a flipped classroom. I taught 4 th grade for 3 years in this building before I became an ELD/ESL teacher, so I was very intrigued to learn more about it especially how it would look in the ESL classroom. In first paragraph the author, Synodavis, explained the difference between a traditional classroom and flipped classroom by using the following example: Traditional Classroom Teacher: Teaches basic lessons on new subject matter in the classroom. Student: Does practice exercises and other homework independently at home. Flipped Classroom Student: Learns basic lessons on new subject matter individually at home. Teacher: Does practice exercises and other reinforcement material in the classroom. The article then explains how a flipped classroom make the most sense because the students are lear...

In my first post I wanted to reflect and summarize on an article I read titled "Preparing ELLs to be 21st-Century Learners" by Khristina Robertson. Khristina started with an amazing quote by Linda Ellberbee (a Journalist and TV Producer). It said that in this century its not a luxury for students to use technology it's a necessity. This really set the tone of the importance for technology in not just the ESL classroom, but all classrooms in the world.  The next section of the article shared a very upsetting story about a beginning English Learner (EL) that was in a class where the teacher overused unknown language and vocabulary to the point that not only did the learner not understand what to do, but sadly gave up on trying to understand. This was during a technology lesson that by nature is motivating and student-centered, but the teacher did too much telling and not enough showing.  As you can tell from this story, teachers of ELs need to understand how they l...