All posts tagged: Online Teaching

Best Practices For Teaching During COVID-19

Published by

One of my favorite pictures of teaching in action. “Hey Google” “What are the best practices for teaching during Covid-19?” Spoiler alert: There are none. When my school district produced a mandatory professional development session that taught teachers how to transition to online learning, I became immediately skeptical. I was also frustrated at the utter hubris it takes to claim to know anything about online learning when your background is everything but, and then present it as a mandatory training module. While I did learn some things about Canvas that I was completely unaware of (which I am deeply grateful for), there was a lot of unnecessary stress added by the way the PD was rolled out. I want to make it very clear, I’m not frustrated with our district coaches. I’m frustrated with the administration that made the decisions and how it was rolled out in typical half-ass fashion, i.e., not having their poop in a group. Every year teachers are bombarded with crap. And I do mean crap. Between education corporations looking to sell you the latest …

Small Successes

Published by

I was going to come on here tonight and blast away at my problems and issues. This online learning thing is overwhelmingly anxiety inducing. But as I was avoiding writing by doing some grading, I noticed a trend that changed my attitude. My students are flourishing with the current work I have given them. Last week I decided to try an experiment. I saw a post from someone about how to use the 5 Es (engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate) to create lessons online. I took those five components and made one module out of each of them. On top of that, I did some serious brainstorming before creating modules. I did this because creating modules is time intensive. If one doesn’t work, you have just wasted quite a bit of time. The first thing I did was I created a bland google slides presentation. In each slide, I put one of the 5 Es as base slides. In each slide I took notes for ideas. For example, in the engagement slide, I wrote down ideas to engage. …

Working on it.

Published by

I am feeling relieved. I have discovered some great tools; things that are possible leads on some potential classroom tech that I think will be very creative and helpful to my students. I have also come up with some backup lesson plans just in case I discover that the plans will not work. However, I think this idea will work at the very least in a rudimentary way. My first idea came after playing around with recording the narration of the text we are currently reading. As I was recording I noticed I was making mistakes and getting interrupted. Not only am I not a trained audiobook narrator, I’m also not a great audio editor. I’m sure with some practice I could figure it out and make it work, but the mistakes I was making were hindering me and wasting time, and right now time is precious. As teachers we are being asked to do so much work and my anxiety has not made that easy. As I’ve said before in previous posts, I’ve wasted …

Distance Learning: Day 5 (Still Planning)

Published by

After having spent a disproportionate amount of time stress eating and fucking off, as the Brits would say, I am finally feeling productive. It’s difficult not to think about the challenges that I still face as well as the incredibly labor intensive task that online teaching presents, but I am incrementally getting comfortable and checking off items on the to-do list. I think the one thing that has helped the most has been to see and hear from other teachers (in online meetings) that they too are struggling. Instantaneously, I felt better knowing that I wasn’t alone in the struggle. It also helped that we were tossing ideas at each other, you know, like a team, and discussed options for resources.  One challenge I now face is trying to find an app or another digital means for students to annotate text or take notes on and simultaneously read the text, from one computer. However, this will have to be something I tackle tomorrow as the dishes are piling up, and I’m hungry and need to cook …

Distance Learning: Day 1 – Planning

Published by

Technically, this is day 2. However, yesterday I had just enough anxiety to make me productive . . . at reading and phone games. I did get a few things done near the end of the day, but the entire idea of online learning and all the things that my district is placing on us for training in the meantime has me a bit overwhelmed. In communication with other teachers, they are feeling the same. In some ways I am learning. I am gathering ideas for what to do. In other ways, I wish I could just get to work on my own classes without being hindered by district trainings, meetings, and check-ins. From a critical discourse analysis perspective, the message the district is sending is that they don’t trust us. They think we are going to waste these 8 days the governor has granted and not do any planning, as if we would let our students down like that. At the very least, I am finding the district training to be at least moderately helpful and …

Comfortable Un-certainty

Published by

We are all stressed. Every teacher in the nation, no matter how adapted to using technology in the classroom, is now being ordered by their respective governments to provide all content through various forms of distance learning. Every teacher is now being tasked with not only handling their own families and anxieties but also with the added pressure of moving all curriculum online. Curriculum which was never designed nor intended for such a move. In Minnesota, we have been granted 8 days from the governor to adjust to this system. From the ESL perspective, this is a monumental task only overshadowed by that of the SpED teachers. How can we effectively provide services to students, especially those who are new to country? The answers remain to be uncovered in the weeks and months following this national experiment.  At this point in time, teachers are being asked to decide what items need to be cut. Mind you, these types of decisions are typically made at a district or state level by teams of people. Now, individual teachers …

VIP Kid 2 Week Update

Published by

As of today, I hit my 14th day with VIP Kid, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. So today I thought I would post an update and share some tips for those who are thinking about joining or have recently joined. 2 Week Update After my first week, I was certified at Level 1, or Pre VIP. These are kids who are categorized not by English proficiency, but by age. The youngest children are 3, while the oldest you can be and still be categorized as Pre VIP is 6. I have heard from a lot of prospective teachers that they could never teach this group. I, however, enjoy this group a lot. For starters it’s mostly interactive materials. The kids get to drag and drop a lot of onscreen images, play music and sounds, and draw all over the board. This keeps the kids engaged and having fun just playing with their tablets and computers. The second thing I really like about this age group is that they are totally into being …

A New Endeavor

Published by

Recently, I accepted an online position for some extra time and money through VIP Kid. I fully intend to share updates with ups and downs. So this post will be a kind of baseline for how I am feeling, what I am seeing, and so forth. The first thing I would like to share is that teaching EFL (English as foreign language) is a completely different ball game compared to ESL. I am very glad that I noticed this difference now. My classroom students are expected to learn English as they live their everyday lives in school. They have to function in English. They also are acquiring English. Online, the majority of these students are not living in environments where English is spoken even a portion of the time. This means that you have to be extremely careful and selective in the language that you use in the session. At first, I thought that was going to be easy, but try as an experiment limiting your language to a handful of words and phrases, then …