Applying Badges in the Classroom

Society today is heavily focused on new innovations, and everyone desires to develop the best ideas. When it comes to the classroom a different notion has been considered, which is gamifying or using game elements in school to encourage students' learning. One aspect of this is using badges to reward students' behavior. In this post by Chris Aviles he describes how he has used badges or achievements as he calls them in the classroom, despite that many believe awarding students this way will, "intrinsic motivation to learn." He gives several examples and do's and don't's of using badges. A point that he makes that is valid is that educators should make badges as concrete as possible. Having badges along the lines of the friendliest student of the day or the most helpful makes it difficult to determine which student deserves the badge, and it can cause trouble between the students. Therefore, he suggests to make badges something more measurable, such as, giving rewards to those who hand in their homework early. The idea he presents does show that students will be inclined to want to participate in class. Chris also mentions that pupils should receive timely recognition for their achievements, because the child is more likely to repeat the good deed if they rewarded immediately or soon after they completed the achievement. With these aspects in mind it is possible to effectively use badges in the classroom. 

Helpful Classroom Apps

As technology becomes more available to everyone it is plausible to believe that these advancements will be used in the classroom. This week in señora Hitz's blog she makes note of the three apps that she has being using at school. One of them being Tap Roulette, which makes it easy for a teacher to choose a student or students that they need to volunteer. Each child places a finger on the iPad and the digital roulette wheel is spun. Then whosever finger appears with a red rim around it is chosen for the activity. The downside to this is that it will only work with a small class size, and unfortunately most classes are fairly large. Another app that she uses is called, Team Shake; this quickly divides the students into groups, and if a student is absent you can simply tap on their name to take them offline. Using Team Shake takes the time out of assigning pupils to groups, and does it randomly so they are not working with the same classmates repetitively. However, the app is not free. Lastly, she mentions an application named Touch Blur. What the app does is blur over a section of a picture just by tapping on which part of the picture you want blurred. Thus, educators can share pictures of their students without showing the faces of the children they teach. All of these apps provide handy tools for teachers that maximize time in the classroom.

Link to blog

Reflecting on Teaching and Tea's Blogpost

Since Marie O'Sullivan's post from this week provides a less interesting topic to my research of how to enhance teaching a world language, I decided to reflect on her post from September titled; Debates and Discussions in Language Lessons. In this post she remarks on the issue of involving students in class. Her solution to this is by giving opinionated questions or arguments that provoke students to give their own ideas. Then she goes into more detail about how she would construct a class using this concept. I found her suggests useful for teaching students if they have enough of a command of the language to do so. It would be difficult for students who do not know the language well enough to answer and discuss; "Is it too late to prevent, or even reverse, climate change?" A better way to do this is to ask these types of questions when or after students have learned helpful terms so that they can fully develop answers to these questions. Also, this technique would be difficult to do with younger children, because they do not have the information to talk about these topics. Overall, this is a proper way to engage students in class.

Link to blog:
http://www.sanako.com/language-teaching-blog/debates-and-discussions-in-language-lessons/

Thoughts on Sharing Lesson Plans and Juggling

Señora Hitz focuses on the struggles that can be an obstacle when not using a standard textbook method of teaching world languages. By sharing some of her lesson plans señora Hitz gives other teachers some possibilities to cut down the time that they must spend writing up lesson plans so that they can spend their time with their families or on other school work. One educator wrote a comment that by putting away the textbook and redoing her lessons plans to fit the curriculum was taking over her life, which makes sharing lesson plans the perfect way to feed off of other instructors and try methods that fit their way of teaching. This is more relevant with languages because the manner in which languages are taught is not conducted for learners to efficiently remember what they were taught in the classroom. When using other approaches pupils will be given different ways to grasping a concept making it possible for all students to understand the material. Making sharing ideas a beneficial method for educators to give alternatives to the standard way of teaching so that students will be able to truly learn another language rather than have only a few key phrases memorized.

Link to señora Hitz blog:
http://palmyraspanish1.blogspot.com.es/

Reflection on Blogpost from Back to School Night

This week's post by Señora Hitz was about how she conducted her back to school night. She explained to the parents how she uses TPRS (teaching proficiency through reading and storytelling) and CI (comprehensible input) in her classroom. What I found interesting from this post was that many parents appeared to be skeptical about this form of teaching. However, when Señora Hitz asked parents to finish this sentence; "I took four years of Spanish/French/German in high school and I..." they knew what she was implying. Most people who study a language throughout high school will not remember a large part of what they learned. With this form of instruction there are clear outputs in this case they are; timed writings, story recalls, and alternate endings. All of these outputs are reasonable for the students to achieve, and they are not the standard vocabulary and grammar tests. Through this approach the students can learn vocabulary and grammar in a nontraditional manner, which will allow them to better retain what they were taught. I believe with this and a combination of different teaching tactics will provide an excellent environment for children to learn another language.

Link to blog:
http://palmyraspanish1.blogspot.com.es/

Thoughts on the Article: George Lucas, Life on the Screen: Visual Literacy in Education

While reading this interview of George Lucas and his thoughts on the American education system, I realized that he made a plethora of valid points. First, he stated that our way of teaching dates back to the nineteenth-century while we are well into the twenty-first century. George mentions that students should be able to learn skills that will be useful for them in today's society, which is an accurate statement. How will our country advance if our youth is not educated to work in a modern and highly technological world? However, many school administrators see incorporating technology, filmmaking, and music as an extra aspect to the school day instead of essential to a child's learning process. Another point that George Lucas makes is that learning how to communicate is a circle, with math being the most straightforward, and music being more emotional, yet all are important for us to be able to communicate with one another. If this notion was implemented in schools it is likely that we would see a change in the way students behave, because they will be able to express themselves freely. With this being said there has been some small steps in regards to modernizing our education system, and hopefully there will be more actions taken to provide students with the best possible education.

Link to article:
http://www.edutopia.org/life-screen