May
21st 2015
May 21st 2015
Technology
in teaching is an integral part of AISC academic curriculum for both faculty
and students alike.
3 FOLD PLAN FOR THE YEAR:
TECHNOLOGY FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING:
I decided
right at the start of this year that I needed to incorporate more technology into my classroom both for teaching and student learning. My
knowledge of the latest tech tools and platforms being somewhat limited, I knew
I needed help from experts. I decided to collaborate throughout the year with
Tech integrator Ms. Geetha Venugopal whose patient one to one guidance
especially of tech tools new to me, was in line with my style of learning.
TECHNOLOGY AS VIRTUAL TOOL FOR
PRACTICE AT HOME AND REVISION:
My
next step was to make technology based learning available to students at home through Moodle. Blendspace, a tool for creating engaging multimedia lessons, came
to my rescue as a solution to curate readily available online video lessons and
on specific topics of my lessons. To check how well students understood the
various concepts they learnt daily, numerous sites like about.com, Frenchspanishonline.com. tolearnfrench.com and Quizlet
were used first for further explanation and
examples and later for online quizzes to test the skills of reading, writing and listening. For
my 6th graders, Duolingo an
online language learning platform was
introduced as a way to practice French in a fun way. I incorporated the
interactive Moodle Discussion Forum
towards the end of the year for review discussions under each unit and even
tried my hand at Poodle.
TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION TO SHOWCASE
STUDENT LEARNING:
To assess students at the end pf the year, I brought in a couple of projects
incorporating technology for both my French 2 students of high and middle
schools. Their project completed in the
first week of May was to create their own fairy tale/ story using two past
tenses adding visual supports like photos and sketches and having them to embed
their own recorded voices reading the story. The High school French 2 students
were also asked to do a final project as Semester 2 Exam on past holidays in a
French speaking country and are currently in the process of research, creating
electronic brochures and visual presentations.
GLOWS AND GROWS IN TECHNOLOGY :
1. MOODLE:
GLOWS:
I decided in August to first work on my
Moodle page to improve uniformity of fonts as suggested last year. When I look
at my Moodle pages today I know I have come a long way. I also worked on
improving the appearance and organization of my Moodle pages with different
folders.
An informal
student feedback survey on my Moodle showed me that most students were
satisfied with it and some even added that it is really helpful.
GROWS: Occasional hiccups in the form of inability
for students to access some links at home came up. I realize that I should have
incorporated the Discussion Forum earlier in the year and not just as a revision
discussion tool. Students also sometimes found the loading process of Moodle
page rather slow. Duolingo allowed
students to cheat to get points and hence I quickly changed it from a graded
homework to merely a practice tool. I had trouble understanding fully well how
the online game Classcraft
introduced to me by Ms.Hannah Kingsley works due to its complexity and hope to learn
to use it better in the future.
2. STORY TELLING
PROJECT:
GLOWS: Most students enjoyed doing this
project and some even drew their own pictures to add to their stories. They
presented their end products as using tools such as iMovie, Quick time player and Moviemaker
to create stunning versions! I am eagerly waiting to see the electronic
brochures of the semester exam project on past vacation.
GROWS: Typing the various French accents
while preparing the script using google doc was an ordeal for students without Mac and
corrections of the scripts was even more so for me as a teacher. Further, while
doing the story telling project, students first used Power points to record
their voices. But when it came to uploading them on google drive the audio did
not work. Hence students had to use other means of recording their voices as
all students were to read each other stories while listening simultaneously to
the audio versions. This technical limitation was a good learning experience!
Despite
technical glitches in the form of frequent slow connectivity and above
mentioned hindrances, incorporating technology into my curriculum and
instruction has been a great learning experience for me and I hope to take
bolder steps with it next year!
