My Digital Classroom

Today I taught my other year 7 English class using a lesson I had prepared for the IWB. This is part of an Action Learning project we are undertaking on enhancing the teaching of the Reading to Learn scaffolding program using the IWB.

Reading to Learn is a program in which all students are scaffolded so they are able to successfully read and write age appropriate texts. The class looks at a key passage from the text and the teacher directs them to important words, phrases and language features in the text, which are then highlighted by the students.

The passage we were looking at came from the Roald Dahl book, Boy as it is a good text for teaching the students how to write reflectively. I had a copy of the passage on the IWB with buttons above certain words which, when clicked, took you to another page which gave more insight into that particular word, place or thing. On one page was a series of maps and photographs showing the location of the Bristol channel and Weston-super-Mare. On another was a sound file for the word ’swooshing’ and a bit of detail and other examples of onomatopoeia. I then had a picture of a paddle steamer which was linked to a video of a paddle steamer leaving a pier.

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Allowing a student to control the whiteboard enabled me to move around the classroom freely, and the incentive of extra homeroom points meant that I had everyone in the class answering the different questions. It was something I should have offered my homeroom when I did it with them last Wednesday as I had far fewer contributors, although as it was the last lesson and they had just finished a test, I might have been asking too much.

What was also good about today was that the lesson was well received by the teachers in my class, as well as by the two DPs who visited the class of another teacher who was using the file. I just wish the file didn’t take so long to make!

One of the things for which I want to use this blog is as a record of the good things I have gained from different PDs. On the 20th May, I went along to the Secondary Literacy Network at the Treacy Centre in Parkville.

The first keynote speaker was Dianne Cullen from the school of Education at ACU, talking about how ESL fits in with the current teaching courses on offer. One of the best things I got out of her talk was finding out about the Language & Multicultural Education Resource Centre (LMERC) in Carlton. This facility contains a huge range of materials in the areas of LOTE & ESL, and is available to all Victorian teachers once you join (membership is free).

Another thing which I felt I needed to include was this excerpt by Chris Davison about ESL learners, which appeared in TESOL in Context vol.1 1990:

“In terms of classroom procedures, they need much more repetition and practice, more explicit instruction and concept-checking, more careful paraphrasing of difficult vocabulary, more demonstration and modelling, more highly structured and sensitive elicitation of existing knowledge, more opportunities for controlled teacher-student and student-student interaction and more time to absorb the rhythms and patterns of the target language development, not just opportunities for use.”

Although this was written back in 1990, the information contained within rings just as true today as it did back then. While this is not new (obviously, if it was written 18 years ago) it is still a good reminder of what we need to be doing to ensure that our ESL students, and indeed all our students with weak literacy, succeed in our classroom.

The other keynote speaker on the day was Associate Professor Pauline Gibbons from the University of Technology in Sydney, talking about setting ESL students up for success in an intellectually challenging classroom. At the centre of her presentation was the message that if you don’t understand the language, you can’t learn the subject. This is so true and is what I’ve been trying to get across to the different faculties here at school.

It was interesting to hear about the 7 intellectual practices, although what made it better than many of the presentations that I have seen, was that she also included real classroom examples on how each of these practices have been implemented.

One of the best things I came away with yesterday was a list of integrated literacy activities that could be done with students across all subject areas. These included some things we already do, but also others I had never heard of like dictogloss, split dictation, sentence matching and barrier crossword.

I came away from the day with a lot of new things that I can’t wait to introduce in my class, and hopefully the classes of others around the school.