Last week, I completed another successful MAET course with a 4.0! This week, I am excited to start CEP 812: Applying Educational Technology to Practice.
My first assignment asked me to consider well-structured and ill-structured problems I may face during the process of my teaching, as well as possible tech tools to help me with those problems. I immediately thought about writing, as it is the subject that my language learning students struggle with the most. I also thought about specific writing tasks that students are required to complete on their annual language proficiency test, LAS Links.
I decided to focus on writing to tell about a picture. Even though many of my students struggle with writing conventions as well, conveying meaning is one of the biggest challenges my students face when learning a new language, especially when writing. I consider this task an ill-structured problem, becasue beyond the rules of mechanics, there is no one way to write a sentence to convey meaning from a picture. Looking at a picture of a butterfly, one student may write about its wings. Another student may write about what it is eating. Another could write about where it may fly next. All of their sentences are about the picture, but the meaning they convey is different. That is why words and writing are SO powerful!
Check out my screencast about PicLits, a great digital tool to help your students practice sentence writing to tell about a picture. Find this amazing tool online @ piclits.com
Hi Sara! That piclits site is very neat! I haven't seen that before. I think that my third graders would really enjoy using that to inspire meaning in their writing. We spend a good chunk of time early on in the year focusing on meaning, so that would be fun to incorporate!
ReplyDeleteI am glad you reminded me about this site! It is a great site and very engaging for the students. It is also a safe site for students to get images and use them. So many of the sites pull inappropriate pictures.
ReplyDeleteI have graded you in the Angel gradebook.
Melissa
I find it interesting that students have to write sentences about pictures. For the International Baccalaureate (or IB) testing in Language B (World Language), students must talk to the teacher in the target language for 10 minutes about an image. They only get 10 minutes to see the image and prepare. I love this site! What a great resource for us as teachers to find good quality photos that the students can then use to talk about in their oral presentations. Thanks so much for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThis really interested me. I love the idea that you have presented here. My classroom has quite a few ELL students and just getting them to talk sometimes is a challenge. I felt encouraged after reading and listening to your screencast. I want to try and help the students in my classroom using the technique you have described here. Writing is so hard for them with the language barrier. Thank you so much for this.
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