Visual Literacy

Thinking about visual literacy and the ESL classroom...

As a future ESL teacher, the informatin provided on visual literacy was really interesting and useful. I think this would make a significant impact on my students comprehension and make them feel more comfortable. If they can't express an idea or thought using their target language, they will have the ability to describe it using a visual representation along with key words. This will help them build their vocabulary and gradual sentence structure. I plan to use these visual literacy ideas, because hopefully it will make my students less prone to feeling like they are falling behind in learning other content areas, because of the language barriers they first must overcome. As they are building their English skills, they will be able to understand the content of a text even if they don't understand each word. This will be a great resource for myself as a teacher and for my students.

To read about visual literacy click here

Here is a link to an attachment for a lesson plan. I found it while researching ESL and visual literacy. This is a comic strip that a teacher used for ESl students. They had to fill in the blanks with complete sentences and they had to correspond with the picture. Click HERE to see the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Tools to support organization and collaboration

We discussed how to use different tools in the classroom that help students organize and collaborate. I started thinking about how this could also work for the teacher. As future teachers we have realized from this class that technology is always changing and we must always remain up to date with the most recent practices. This will help keep us up to speed with our students and provide them with the best and most useful learning experience possible. So what kinds of tools are available for us as teachers to help work collaboratively with other teachers and quickly share ideas? I started researching and found a website that offers several different internet resources for keeping up to date internationally. This is even better than chatting with other teachers across the U.S. Sharing and discussing ideas about what events are happening across countries and seeing how other teachers are performing, is such a cool thing! One site in particular was a great way to engage with other teachers internationally, have discussions, share lesson plans, etc. it was called Groupsite.com Click here to view the site.

Technology and Collaboration

This article is a great example of how technology is getting kids to actually participate and have fun in class. Learning through techonology is becoming so much more "cool." If I would have been able to blog with students across the world, I would have loved attending class more and been more involved. The way that these students are using technology makes learning not seem so much like learning. Students don't realize when their learning, because it's not like the typical classroom. This type of teaching makes it easy for teachers, because students are really taking control of their learning and doing it on their own. I hope to incorporate the use of a community blog in my classroom someday and connecting my students with students across the US to learn about different ideas, points of view, and what's happening in other communities.

Click the following link to read the article: A Web 2.0 Class 

Project Learning Meets 1-to-1 laptop Tech.

I found this video to be very inspiring. I love how these teachers took the time to work together in coming up with project based lessons. They had lots of energy and were constantly thinking of new ideas to bring into the classroom. The students were able to include their creative ideas to each project and they all seemed very engaged! It makes sense that if they teachers put the time, energy, and excitiment into their classroom lessons, than the students will take notice and be interested as well.

student blog

My first blog

This is my first blog. I am very excited to be a blogger .