Crafting Your Narrative: A TEDEd Lesson

Crafting Your Narrative: A TEDEd Lesson

This week, I had the opportunity to explore TEDEd again and created my first personalized lesson plan for first year EFL college students entitled: Crafting Your Narrative: Using the Past Continuous Tense (Unit 2). I decided to choose the grammar point: the past continuous verb tense (aka, the past progressive). My EFL learners are just completing the second unit of our writing class, which is a beginner’s level chapter teaching the craft of writing a narrative. Most of the learners are able to easily write in the simple past, so I wanted them to see how they could incorporate the past continuous in their narrative assignments.

Language Learning Objectives of My TEDEd Lesson:

• By the end of the lesson, my students should be able to:
• Define the past continuous and identify its structure.
• Differentiate between the simple past and the past continuous.
• Recall when to use the past continuous.
• Compose sentences using the past continuous accurately.

How will I test to see if these learning objectives are met? 

I love the options registered users are given to create a lesson on TEDEd. There are various forms of assessments that a teacher can choose from, such as multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions, and discussion boards. I assigned my students 7 multiple-choice questions based on the video they are required to read, which are all aligned to my lesson’s language objectives. Additionally, I provided my students 2 links to articles/stories that further explain the past continuous and give examples of how this tense is used in a narrative. Lastly for the discussion board, I asked my learners to explain the benefit of using this tense in their narratives and suggested that they provide me examples of how they may use it in their first narrative writing assignment (that is actually due next week!). In their final narrative writing assignments, I can further see if they are able to compose sentences using the correct structure of the past continuous in the proper context. I hope my students find this TEDEd lesson beneficial. 

To Flip or Not to Flip? That is the Question...

To Flip or Not to Flip? That is the Question...

A few weeks ago, I was expanding my professional networks and posted that I joined the Flipped Learning Network, so this makes this post all the more relevant. In the article Three Reasons to Flip Your Classroom, Marshall discusses the benefits of flipping the language classroom. In a flipped classroom, “Direct instruction takes place out of class while practice and application take place in class, (Bergmann & Sams, 2012).” This relatively new approach to learning and instruction has benefits, but requires adequate preparation and may have some caveats. What I love about this method of teaching, is that it changes the traditional classroom setting and allows students to engage in more collaborative activities with feedback given to them by the teacher during class time. Though in a flipped classroom, it’s essential that the instructional videos (or text) students are learning from at home are on their levels, as learners do not have the option of asking for clarification on confusing matters at home. Nonetheless, with the at-home learning, students are able to study at their own individual pace until they comprehend the material, unlike the limited 45-minute period some of us educators may only have.  The flipped method gives students more responsibility and compels them to come to the classroom prepared for discussions, activities, and collaboration.

Before, reading the article Flipping Your EL Classroom: A Primer by John Graney, I was thinking to myself whether or not I can use the flip method to teach or introduce a grammar concept for my English 101 writing students who are ESL/EFL learners. When teaching grammar, I tend to use an inductive approach, which is more student-centered, however I never tried using the flipped classroom method in teaching a grammar point. When I read the above mentioned article, I was pleased to see that the first example of a lesson Graney discusses is a grammar lesson on subject-verb agreement. Students would watch a video on the topic (or study from a textbook, website, slideshow, etc.), come to class prepared to work individually, in pairs or groups, and get assessed and given feedback by their teachers. This lesson layout seems very doable and effective and I intend to try it out with my learners for their next grammar lesson on simple past and past continuous verbs.  All in all, I encourage language teachers to experiment with this approach with their students. Perhaps the effect of such a shift may change the language abilities of our learners.

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Twitter in Education

From my experience using Twitter this week and doing some research on how it can be utilized in education, I found that Twitter may be a social media outlet that I could use with my learners. This semester, I am teaching college EFL students English 101 courses: one oral skills course and two writing courses. For my Oral Skills 1 course, one of the objectives is for students to be able to present in front of an audience using proper academic English. The article “The Ultimate Guide to Using Twitter in Education” contains so much information on ways to utilize Twitter in the classroom. From what I read, I thought I could use Twitter’s polling feature to have my Oral Skills 1 course students take class polls on particular topics and issues. After the votes are complete, I could pair students up and have them discuss, interpret, and present the findings on their polls in front of the entire class.

            For my writing course students, Twitter can get their creative thoughts put into writing. In the article “Can Tweeting Help Your Teaching?”, it highlights a middle school teacher’s usage of Twitter with his students. Gary Mayo is an eighth grade teacher from Maryland, and he used Twitter by connecting his class with other students around the world via storytelling. They all collaborated on an ongoing story, which each student contributed to in a form of a tweet. I really love this idea for two main reasons. Firstly, it would allow my students to be creative and add their twists to an ongoing plot. Secondly, it would give my leaners the opportunity to interact with other students globally. Kudos to Gary Mayo and his project!