Teacher Reflection 5

            I almost missed class on Tuesday before Thanksgiving break because I was going out of town, but I ended up being able to go because I thought Betsy’s presentation about using technology in the classroom was very interesting.  I learned a lot about new technology and the benefits and hope to implement it in my classroom.  I think a lot of the technology she showed us could be useful for both ESL and non-ESL students.  After class, I explored the website some more and played around with the different tools and found a lot that I could potentially use in the future.

The two tools that I thought would be most beneficial for ESL learners were the video dropboxes and scribble.  Video dropboxes would be useful in developing ELLs speaking skills because students would have to verbally express their opinions and answers.  I thought a good feature of this tool was that you could choose whether students had the opportunity to practice their video before posting.  You could use the no practice option if you wanted a general idea of where the students were at in their speaking ability.  If you were looking more for accurateness of the student’s answer, you would give them several attempts to practice before posting the video.  I thought the scribble tool would be particularly useful for ESL students who speak languages like Chinese and Arabic, where they have different characters than the English language.  With this tool students would have not only a picture of the characters, but also a visual of you hand drawing the character.  You can alter the speed at which the characters are drawn and use a grid as a template.  Teachers can post this on their class page so students can access this from home, which will be useful when they do their assignments. 

Another tool from the CLEAR website that I thought was cool, was QuizBreak!  This tool would be useful in either an ESL or non-ESL classroom and I definitely plan to use something like this in the future.  I have had many teachers who play Jeopardy in class, but go through the hassle of making the Jeopardy board through PowerPoint.  This tool is a competitive, fun way for students to review material and is easy for teachers to use, even the non-tech savvy.