TESOL Course Certificate - Designing Interactive Activities for the Web

TESOL Course Certificate - Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar Online

TESOL Designing Interactive Activities for the Web Course Week 4

My final project

My initial idea was to set up a Web page with assignment prompts, examples, discussion boards, and so on for all the writing portfolio assignments students will be doing in my class in the fall.  In the end, that idea was overly ambitious, so I just created one assignment (narrative paragraph) integrated-skills lesson plan with online activities: Valuable Lessons. 

My goal is to have students create sites and post their writing (eportfolios).  Has anyone had experience with eportfolios, and if so, would you be willing to share any best practices, warnings, words of wisdom, suggestions/advice with me?  

I loved using Weebly - it's incredibly easy to use, so I may have students do their eportfolios there, but to best integrate with Google docs and my grand plan to give feedback with Kaizena, Google Sites (though tricky to use at times) is the other possibility I am exploring.

Instructor Susan Gaer's feedback on my final project:
WOW! What a great interactive lesson. I love the way you integrated tools into the lessons, covered all the skills of listening, reading and writing. I love that you gave the students examples. It was also nice to see your video on voice thread. My only suggestion is (it is very small) is that you remove the word Flubaroo where you embedded the quiz. Students don’t need to know that and it just might stump them.  The lesson looks visually appealing, has great interactivity and models for what your expectations are. If you have any more time to work on it, perhaps you good do a rubric activity to have students really understand how a rubric works. You don’t need to do this to pass the class. YOU HAVED PASSED WITH FLYING COLORS (think red, white and blue). It was wonderful having you in the class. You raised the bar on the level of discussion. I learned a lot from you!

TESOL Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar Online Course Week 4

This week was dedicated to the final project, a lesson plan.  Here's mine:  Career Choices.

These are the instructor's comments / feedback and grade:

PP104 – Week 4 – Lesson Plan    -Checklists to evaluate Teachers´ Lesson Plans

Name: Kristi Reyes                                                                                                                           

Total grade 29.5   /30

TESOL Designing Interactive Activities for the Web Course Week 3

My posts for this week:

I read the Brain Rules book a few months ago and have so many of the pages dog-eared. It's definitely worth a read.  The videos very briefly illustrate some of the main points of the book; however, if you're looking for a summer read, I definitely recommend the book because of all the anecdotes about people who have had brain injuries or who have brain anomalies - such as the guy who played something like 50 games of chess at once -- blindfolded -- and won all but one or two matches!

Anyway, the videos are interesting, too.  These are the three that I watched with the important point(s) and implications for us as teachers:

TESOL Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar Online Course Week 2

This week we worked on a group task, posted online on the course wiki.

TESOL Designing Interactive Activities for the Web Course Week 2

My Posts

Thinglink

I wrote an article on ThingLink for OTAN  back in February, and I think it has several exellent potential uses in ESL - both for F2F classes (student projects) and for online (teaching students vocabulary, for example). Thess are sample scenes I created for the article and in order to experiment with it:

Vegetables

Valentine’s Day

I think I would use it for a "All about Me" student project in which students provide links to Web sites and videos about the following:  Where I'm From, My Career/Education Goal, My Hobbies/Interests, etc.

In a way, it could be used for any sort of presentation that is put online.  Kind of like Prezi, viewers would have a choice of the order for viewing the content rather than the linear / sequential viewing that one does on PowerPoint or Google Slides.

TESOL Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar Online Course Week 1

TESOL Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar Online Course Week 1

Readings

5 Tips for helping students to really learn vocabulary

Teaching Vocabulary.

• Emerging Technologies. From memory palaces to spacing algorithms Approaches to Second-Language Vocabulary Learning
• What is grammar and how should we teach it?
• Video: Teaching Grammar in Today's Classroom-Part 1
• Video: Teaching Grammar in Today's Classroom-Part 2
• Teaching vocabulary and encouraging learner autonomy
• Promoting Learner Autonomy with Web 2.0 Tools
•  What is grammar and how should we teach it?
•  Dictogloss – another approach to teaching grammar

TESOL Designing Interactive Activities for the Web Course Week 1

Reading

·        Copyright for Kids 

·        Copyright Basics for Web Authors and Users

·        Copyright Free Pictures

·        Best Resources to Learn about Copyright

·        Creative Commons

·        Open Education Resources

·        Can I use that picture? (infographic) 

My post:

Copyright certainly is a tricky topic!  I didn’t used to be as conscious as I am now about using (and citing) images that are not my own in content I have published / posted online. However, nowadays I typically use copyright-free stock photo sites, Creative Commons, or take my own photos.  More often, though, I search for images on Google Images and filter by usage rights (select Search Tools – select the drop-down at “Usage Rights”).