Our grade 5 students study the US government to give an introduction to the topic and to serve as a comparison to communism, dictatorship, socialism and monarchy. In my role as ESL teacher for grades 4 and 5, I often co-plan & co-teach the social studies lessons since these often have the most difficult vocabulary…
I first time I heard about Twitter was in some trashy magazine I picked up on an airplane (yes I read them; no I won’t pay for one) and read about a pop star ‘twittering‘ … something mundane, maybe what kind of sandwich this person’s SO was picking up for them. I dismissed this new…
I don’t know why, but the QR Codes in the Classroom session really stuck with me. It’s been marinating in the noggin ever since EARCOS and over these last few weeks, I’ve accumulated a list of ideas for its use on my iPhone notes app. as they came up. Some ideas were shared during the session…
Attending Jeff’s ‘Top 10 Web Tools’ session had me wishing I was teaching middle or HS students. Why? Well, many of the tools or sites discussed, such as Facebook, are impossible to use with our younger learners. Take the site www.polleverywhere.com; teachers can have students text in votes or answers, as a quick method of…
How early does your school teach good source citing practice? I’m sure some of you might reply that your kindergarten-ers have already published essays with full citations, and that would be great, but how were they taught and do they understand would be my next questions. According to Noodletools, we have to create a citing culture,…
I’m an elementary ESL teacher at SSIS. The session I attended with Kim Cofino, called “Hardware is Not Enough”, had thoughts churning right from the start – probably because of the parallels that kept popping up in my mind between the tech coach and the ESL teacher’s relationship with the classroom teacher. There are many…
Is it me or do Jeff and Kim speak more quickly than the rest of the human population? No, actually, I now think they are just compressing so much new information (for me) into every sentence – which makes it feel like they are speaking at a faster pace. No matter – I’m having a…