Hello and welcome to my first blog post!
I will admit that I am a little nervous because I have never created a blog or a blog post before. I do use social media but this is much more involved that posting statuses on Facebook. That being said, I feel that blogging will prove to be a much more useful tool.
Some background information about me: I teach Business in PA and I am currently in my fifth year teaching. My wife teaches Biology in a neighboring school district. We have three dogs (just adopted the third two weeks ago). For fun, I like to read, watch movies, play board games, and some video games.
Onto my research, one of the first things I found this week was from the Tennessee Department of Education. They released a statement, in which they said: "Tennessee students speak more than 140 languages..." (Tennessee Department of Education). I found this number quite large but I am sure that there are states with many more languages spoken. After seeing this statement, I talked with my school's ESL teachers and they informed me that our school alone has over twenty-six languages. On the door they have a greeting written in each of the students' native language. We only have two teachers in our ESL department. They have a lot of students they work with and they have to coordinate resources and strategies with all of their students' other teachers. I feel that by exploring technology solutions and improving my own toolbox I will be able to share what I have learned and, hopefully, alleviate some of their massive workload.
The technology I want to focus on in this blog post is Fiskkit, Fiskkit Classroom is currently in beta and you have to have a sign up code to use it. I have reached out to the developers and I will update this post later to explain how to get a code. Once obtaining a code and fiddling with the website a bit, I plan on using Fiskkit with my students. The website allows teachers to post an article and their students can then rate any sentence inside of the article. They can also provide comments to explain why they rated it as they did. You can also have students use the comment section of Fiskkit to highlight confusing sentences or topics they did not understand in the article. After all students have had time to view the article Fiskkit provides a graphic that shows you how students evaluated the article. I think this would be a great tool for L2 students because the rating aspect of Fiskkit requires them to think about the authenticity of the article instead of just the content. I also like that students are able to comment on specific sentences so you can see the parts of the article that were difficult to comprehend.
That's all for this blog post, please let me know what you think. Have a fantastic day!
Resource: Fiskkit
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Last year our district announced how many languages our students speak and I think it was somewhere around 60, which amazes me! What amazes me even more is that our EL teachers teach these students without knowing the language they speak. I would venture to say it is close if not completely impossible to know 60 languages, but it takes talent to be able to communicate with someone without being able to understand them. That counts for both teachers and students. Kudos to them!
ReplyDeleteWe have one ESL teacher that we share between buildings. She only gets to see the kids in the afternoon. I worked in another district that was similar, one ESL teacher shared between buildings. I would imagine it would be a very difficult role, working with so many different languages and trying to provide tools to a wide variety of teachers.
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