Utilizing ShowMe with an ELL student

Thanks to Angie, I had an opportunity to work with an ELL student Nazo with the utilization of technology.

Nazo is a third grader from Iraq. Before attending school in America, she didn't have any learning experience in English.

I planned to use google translate as a media to start conversation with her. However, there is no Kurdish available. Originally, I thought Arabic would be similar to Kurdish, since I had not encountered these two languages before but from the geographical locations, they are probably related to each other. But I failed after tried two days. Nazo didn't give any reaction towards Arabic translation on second day. So the utilization of technology with her was in a hard time in a degree.

Based on limited conversation between us, we barely made brief introductions with ShowMe. Nazo's teacher Miss Angie Zulkoski told me that she is doing letter tracing recently. So I tried to let Nazo look for words with certain letters and she looks for the picture on web to see what the visual meaning that word delivers. Thanks to ShowMe, whose recording function records the learning process of Nazo's and her pronunciations towards the words she found. I found her voice becomes louder and louder after several days.

The pictures attached below are Nazo looking for words, search pictures on web and her products on ShowMe.

Learner Control with Multimedia Learning

With further study of utilizing technology in k-12 classes, leaner control environment becomes a teaching goal with the facilitation of technology in modern classrooms.

In my 259 sections, we've experienced how to use shorebird, prezi, google slides, powtoon, voki, cacoo, google doc, google form, kahoot, as well as various online education games. With various functions, how to make use of them to meet the goal of learner control environment?

According to researches conducted, an effective learner control environment means four aspects:
















and finally, we expect





To make an effective learner control environment happen, we have to meet two factors:

21st century Literacy

Technology enables students read and write with more creativity. In my class of Instructional Technology this week, my students are required to create their own virtual classes on Edmodo.
The classes are created based on lesson plan with google doc, outline with cacoo.com, presentation with voki.com as an audio introduction and slides with powtoon/prezi/google slides/storybird, self-designed assessment and a survey of the class teaching for students with google form.

The outline created with cacoo.com is new introduced recently. Students had made a couple outline/diagram with it last week, the attached is one example:

Another fresh product is the audio introduction with voki:

users can select characters from available options, change backgrounds and edit words with typing or speaking through microphone. For the spoken language, there are many options of languages, English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean so on and so forth, besides the various languages, users can also choose accents and gender of speakers. 

Flipping Classrooms

This week I used educreations.com to create a class of "Chinese Spring Festival", the link is attached below:

https://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/chinese-spring-festival/29910413/?ref=link

This is a lead-in part of my lesson. By viewing the educreation video, students are encouraged to make their own project with shadow puppet or show me to introduce a holiday of their cultures.
While they are creating the projects, I am able to facilitate them.

Digital Citizenship

On the website of Digital Citizenship, it lists eight topics of Scope and Sequence. One of them is "Information and Literacy", under which students are capable to search pictures online based on descriptions, conduct online conversations with typing language, make their perspectives, make photos, learn about fair use and copyright, so on and so forth.

To embed the features into my classes, we implement an app called Heads Up or Charades and a website called Pedlet (pedlet.com), which is an on-line collaboration tool, in my class on Mar 4.

At beginning, students tried to play the word game with Head up, but it didn't work well while my iPad mini connecting with Apple TV, we switched it to Charades. The popularity of this sort of app was out of my expectation. my students were obsessed with it and insisted playing it after we have done three-round two-group competition. Hence, I let them work within their groups on a padlet to list what advantages of using Heads Up or Charades in the class, what are the disadvantages, how to apply this kind of app into their own classes in the future and how to deal with the disadvantages. And here are their padlets:

I really enjoyed the process that students played Charades, which, as they depicted, is an ice-breaker.
As to the use of padlet, it allows students to calm down from the fun and think about how to utilize  engaging apps into their career. This is just a start :)

Shadow Puppet Experience

This is my first try with the app "Shadow Puppet" with a 2nd grader in Rousseau Elementary school. Thanks Mrs. Kutilek and Dr. Trainin for giving me the opportunity.

The two pictures attached below are the app Shadow Puppet.

I was assigned to help a lovely girl make her animal introduction with  "Shadow Puppet". She likes dolphin and had done a writing about dolphin earlier. We collaborated to select pictures and record the voice together.

"Shadow Puppet" allows us to select pictures from website, which is convenient comparing to some apps only allowing pictures from photo library. Further more, we can edit texts and emoticon on each picture and make animation effect of them, which interests the student I helped with. As we record the voice, we can pause and move to next picture whenever needed. The girl I helped with had a good rhythm control after we finished recording at the first time and could pay attention to the instructions from Shadow Puppet. However,  when typing the text, Shadow Puppet breaks down relative long words in two lines according to the width of pictures, such as conclusion-> concl+usion, which will confuse the audience.  I am thinking of using it for a higher level study and ELL students as it is a great tool for a combination of speech practice and writing practice.

Twitter Chat Experience

It seems fierce while I am joining the topic What is School on twitter today from 5pm-6pm. My twitter was registered in 2010, but never got chance to twit anything. Within the one hour, I have twitted 21 twits and following four cool guys from this topic, simultaneously, the number of followers increased to 21.

There are six questions relating to the topic: What is School? (http://mrkempnz.com/2015/02/what-is-school-ethical-and-safe-learning-environments.html)

1) What are the most important elements of a safe & ethical learning environment?

2) What does your current learning environment look and feel like?

3) What does your ideal/dream learning environment look and feel like?

4) What ethical considerations are important when establishing a learning environment?

5) How do you ensure your learning environment is safe for everyone?

6) How can you use student voice to create the ‘ultimate learning environment’?

My twitter responses: 

It was an enjoyable experience of discussing with twitter. I have subscribed this topic and followed this person, Craig Kemp. Highly recommend! 

Worked Examples with Spontaneous Projects

              This week in my class, we have talked about the principles of worked examples. From the reading we did before the class, The Worked Examples Principle in Multimedia Learning by Alexander Renkl (University of Freiburg), which lists six principles of utilizing multimedia in classes design as attached below.

            Based on the principles,  students are encouraged to make an introduction video with iMovie. They have the flexibility to choose what topic they like to present in the classes. In the aim to create spontaneous projects, students have to master the principles listed in the reading and apply them to the video projects. Simultaneously,  I tried the  websites of spontaneous projects listed in the article Preparing Students for the 21st Century, and Kidproj stimulate an idea that my students could share their video projects with the real-field teachers there. And the website offers many professional topics:
http://kidlink.org and teachers could join the discussion in specific Facebook groups.

In this way, they are not get ideas from class readings, but also could get connection with teachers all over the world. I am looking forward to see how it works in my class. 

How to "Make" a Meaningful Learner with Multimedia Instruction

" How to make a meaningful learner?" this question stays in my mind these days.

in a fortuitous situation, I encountered the book Cambridge Multimedia Learning Handbook, which inspired me with utilizing technology in classroom teaching. "Meaningful Learner" is a term mentioned in the book. "How to make students meaningful learners in K-12 level teaching" becomes a question in my classes recently. 

Besides "meaningful learner", students and I also discussed "multimedia learning and instruction", "behavioral activity vs. cognitive activity", " Technology-centered vs. Learner-centered", " two goals of learning" and "three kinds of multimedia learning outcomes"

I asked each student to teach me a word within 20 seconds using multimedia instruction. And I learned "bae", "emoji", "exotic", "syzygy", "swag", "xenphobic", "impavid", "pyrophoric" and "pretzel". 

However, I haven't reached "meaningful learning" yet, which asks for a good remembering as well as good understanding. But my students and I are going to "dig" it more with multimedia teaching/learning

The picture attached is the word "emoji" presented with multimedia. 

Goals of Taking 880J

The topic of TEAC880J is Technology Integration on Language Arts. As the rapid development of technology as well as its gradual-vital role in education field,  integrating technological teaching strategies is a research-worthy and practical-worth area. Furthermore, the learning of utilizing technology into classroom teaching and learning never ceases. I am interested in learning how to integrate technology into classroom teaching and what the difficulties teachers and students encounter in the high-tech literacy environment.