Global Collaboration

One of the sites that I could use in the classroom is KidLink. It is a good way for the students to share their view with other students from around the world about about certain topics and issues. It is also a good way to get students started with blogging about their personal feelings as well without having to set up a blog account just yet.

Jeremiah 29_11

Jeremiah 29_11
Originally uploaded by Click♥a♥dee Chick

God is good all the time!!! All the time God is good!!

Just Added to My Delicious Network

This person had a few sites that we had in common. The one that I linked to is a site of ESL activities being developed by Hofstra University. There is a collection of lesson plans and a chatroom, but the link to that is not active yet. I would think that this site would come in handy for me when planning for my future ESOL students.

They Just Want to be Loved

This post said a lot about my thinking about the children that I teach everyday. I agree with many of the points that were made in the post. Many parents have fallen short of their responsibility as parents and have shucked much of that on the teacher. Many children are starving for attention and love and school may be the only place some can really find it. So, I will hug my students if they need a hug even though it may no longer be acceptable.

Explicit Strategy Instruction

This blog post is a good one for reading teachers because it gives two resources to help teachers teach reading strategies. It has a strategy "cheat sheet" that has the strategies, definitions and sentences to help the teacher teach the strategy. The other resource is a worksheet that was developed to help the students with taking comprehension tests QAR (question/answer relationship) worksheet .

Nik's Techie Blog

The posts I read had to do with chat ,collaborative learning, and music . In the chat post, it talked about a program called Chatmaker and how to use it with your students. When I hear the word online chat I think about a whole bunch of strangers in a room chatting about nothing. This post helped me understand that chat rooms can also be set up to help in classroom. You can post different topics or questions for students to chat about or provide different skills for the students to practice during the chat session. There have to be certain things to consider first though before setting up the chatroom. The collaborative learning post dealt with setting up a social network for students and/or teachers on Ning. Social networks are good for collaborative/collective projects because it cuts down on having to meet face to face. Social networks take lots of time, so you have to make sure that you have to time and also have interesting things to collaborate on. The music post I learned how to use RedKaraoke, which allows to start a social network for music. This site can help ELLs because music is a good motivator for learning language. This also sounds like a fun way to get the students to interact with each other and at the same time be immersed in the language.

Larry's Resource Sites for ESL/EFL Teachers

This blog includes sites for teacher resources to use to help educate English Language Learners. Some of the picks listed are EFL Classroom 2.0, the Peace Corps site, The Internet TESL Journal, Teaching English from the British Council, and Ideas at Dave's ESL Cafe. Two Listservs are also mentioned, Teachers of English as a Second Language (TESL) and National Institute For Literacy (NIFL). Most of these sites are free of charge to use.