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Reflective Blogs for Multiliteracies Class, May 3 2021

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Reflective Blogs for Multiliteracies Class, May 3 2021  In this module, we learned about designing curriculum using backwards design and about multiliteracies assessments. Backwards design doesn’t seem to be too difficult to understand as this is how I was trained when I taught at Kaplan in 2011, the second school where I taught English Comp, as well as at subsequent schools. (At the first school, I wasn’t given any training, just a grammar book to teach from, the core requirements of the number of essays and the types of essays, and the requirement to assign three additional books of my choosing.) However, it’s worth noting that the course objectives were created by the higher-ups in all schools where I taught, as I imagine they are for English Comp classes at most if not all accredited institutions since this has been part of the accreditation process—to have such things in place. I’m not sure, however, how accreditation works in Foreign Language programs, although I would surmise th
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Reflective Blog Module 2 for Multiliteracies Course, Feb. 28, 2021

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 Reflective Blog Module 2 for Multiliteracies Course, Feb. 28, 2021 In Module 2, I learned quite a bit about the Multiliteracies pedagogy that will be helpful to me as I move forward in my career, creating classroom materials and teaching. I particularly appreciated the examples given of the types of activities shown in  the website we reviewed in M2_2  for the Knowledge Processes described in Allen and Paesani’s (2010) article “Exploring the Feasibility of a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies in Introductory Foreign Language Courses.” Many of the activities I looked at seemed very feasible and some even corresponded closely with activities I have used when teaching English comp. More beneficial than just seeing activities, however, was seeing how they fit into a trajectory of learning, as the assignment M2_2 had us do. I am a fan of Bloom’s modified taxonomy (I believe they still call it Bloom’s taxonomy, but the one we use today was modified from his original by other scholars), so even tho
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Reflective Blog #1 from Multiliteracies Course Feb 1, 2021

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Reflective Blog #1 from Multiliteracies Course Feb 1, 2021  First, I will explain multiliteracies as I’ve come to understand it in the past couple weeks. It appears to a multimodal way to teach creating and reading, otherwise called meaning making. We want our students to be conversant with various forms of communication, including graphic text, video, audio, body language, spatial, as well as lexical, or language-based communication (The New London Group (NLG), 1996, p. 65)—all this in addition to multiple languages and cultures. For our students to be conversant, we, too, need to be, and thus we need a metalanguage—the description of which I will pick up later—for analyzing and describing the various modes of communication. The goals of such a pedagogy are to foster good community and feelings of equality, removing sources of hierarchies, including between teachers and students (p. 73), in part to prepare students for the changing nature of postFordist business structures (p. 66) as
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Miniature Fashion Show

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 I had this posted on Wyzant from several years ago, but they're shutting down their blog tool, so I'm reposting here.  Miniature Fashion Show  Edit Many online searches for lesson ideas and learning tools yield online activities, impossible to implement for in-home teaching. Nonetheless, I have found a few ideas. But some of the more fun ideas have been from innovation and adaptation of regular childhood games. Since I know other tutors might find it difficult to find things, I thought I'd share a few of the more fun ideas I've had as I've worked with a couple of young sisters learning French. One of the most recent fun activities was a fashion show. I had thought it would be a lot of fun if they could do a fashion show with their own clothes with themselves as models, but with only two girls, this would have taken a long time and therefore been less effective. Another thought I've toyed with has been using paper dolls since I loved them as a child, but they ar
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Reading Activity

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Puisque j'aime bien la littérature enfantine et que j'ai quelques livres de ce genre chez moi, je pensais qu'il serait amusant de faire une activité avec un tel. Alors, j'ai sorti quelques-uns que j'ai pensé serais bon. Cette liste comprenait « Les Aventures de Babar », « Madeleine », « Qui Suis-Je ? » (un livre qui donne des indices tout au long de la lecture pour que l'enfant puisse deviner que c'est un tigre.), et « Le Temps » (un livre basique sur, sans doute, le temps).  « Babar », je savais, puisque je l'ai étudié pour un cours dans mon ancien programme (pour mon MFA) utilise le temps présent, et donc, je pensais que cela pourrait marcher bien pour les débutants. Mais alors, je trouvais que le vocabulaire et d'autres structures seraient trop compliquées pour les débutants.  « Madeleine », j'ai découvert récemment, pour un devoir dans mon cours de grammaire anglais pour TESL, utilise "simple past" dans la version anglaise, et l
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Music and Online Teaching Tools

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Last semester in my practicum course, one of the assignments involved us choosing to create an activity in an online tool. I believe that we had three options, but if anyone did the third, I don't remember. In fact, I don't remember what it was if there was a third option. Most, if not everyone, used   or Earlier we did an assignment using  , which is a great tool, but that was relatively easy, so it wasn't an option for this assignment. Still, easy was popular, and most people chose PlayPosit. I didn't, though. Perhaps it didn't look as easy to me, or I didn't have any video in mind to use. I made a weather activity in H5P. A lot of people were surprised because they had thought H5P was much harder. There were some tricks to it, I agree, and it did take  , but it was kind of fun. I like looking for images more than videos, maybe? I had to work with pictures a lot when I worked at , helping teachers to find copyright-free images and/or helping them to get permi
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Online Teaching; It is Happening

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I took a training course in online teaching through Front Range Community College almost two years ago (summer 2018), hoping to teach English comp online, asynchronously. I never thought it made for the ideal class setting, but having those skills seemed pretty important in today's day and age. I had the chance to use them a little when I was a success coach a year ago (spring and summer 2019) for a developmental English comp class, and that was good experience. I learned a lot both of online teaching tools and skills but also about some of the developments in the psychology of learning. The unideal part was confirmed, though. I don't think I would recognize any of those students if I ran into them, and even if they told me their name and recognized me from the videos I made, I wouldn't be able to remember anything about them. But I generally did enjoy the teaching part of the coaching--preparing videos, editing some assignment descriptions (most of the assignments were pre
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