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Gamification in the ESL Classroom

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"Gamification is the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts.  Typical game elements include the use of leaderboards, avatars, points, levels, rewards and badges" (Pesce).  This teaching strategy is one of the best methods to engage students in their own learning process and create a classroom community.  One of the main reasons that I used to love using gamification in my classroom is that the competition usually overtakes the student's want to idly stand by and not participate in what activity we are doing that day.  Gaming has become integrated into many of our student's lives.  It is something that most of our students use as a leisure activity. When we incorporate aspects like this into our classroom we can reach our students in ways that we were unable to before. Gamification forms a strong bond between students in our classroom by building community but also builds the link between the our students and the content that we are ...
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Using Yammer in a High School Mathematics Classroom

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Since the origin of social media, our society has continued to use these technologies in new and different ways as our world evolves. Lately, these resources have become normalized in the educational setting and have been appearing more and more in the classroom.   If you have read some of my other Blogs or Discussion Posts, you will know that I am no longer a public school teacher, but now work for a large retail company as an Instructional Designer.  This topic was interesting for me because on the Learning and Development Team we use social media to interact and communicate with our 300 stores and their team members.  We use the Mircosoft platform called Yammer which integrates nicely with all the other Microsoft products that we use as a company.  Yammer is used to communicate messages, pictures or videos to a targeted group of people.  Some of the specific reasons that our company likes to use Yammer is to communicate a competition, or to give shout ou...
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Using Screencasting with our English Language Learners

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  Screencasting is a helpful educational technology that can be used in the classroom by students and teachers alike.  There are numerous ways of using screencasting in your classroom to engage students in their own learning process.  There are also several benefits and creative uses to using screencasting as a learning tool, it can be used to streamline giving instructions, provide feedback to individual students, create individualized learning environments for students, or create a video about a process.     For our ELLs specifically, screencasting can be a safe space for students to practice speaking and listening without an audience.  Screencasting is also helpful for students because multiple types of media can be used seamlessly to present a topic. To top it all off, Screencastify integrates with Youtube and you can easily add captions to your video once it is made.  All of these strategies would be helpful for most learners, but would help ...
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Using Podcasts to Engage Mathematics Students

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Throughout my career as a high school mathematics teacher, I taught a wide variety of middle and high school students.  For many of these children, mathematics is not their favorite class to come to.  As a former teacher, I was always trying to find ways of engaging and winning over these students and to get them to love math just a little bit more! Podcasts are a wonderful educational tool.  The benefits of using podcasts in your classroom are actually two-fold.  Podcasts can be beneficial for students to listen to, but they can also be helpful for students to research and record on their own.  Podcasts are also a helpful tool to help build vocabulary, practice reading and writing, and listening comprehension.  This week, I found a mathematics podcast that can be listened to by both students and teachers.  It is called "Math is Figure-out-able" and is recorded by Pam Harris.  This is exactly the message that I was consantly trying to portray to m...
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Using Blogging to Develop Writing Skills

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Blogging is a literary and social tool that has been used in classrooms for many years.  Since the beginning of blogging, its uses have evolved and broadened in the educational setting.  One huge benefit for students who use blogging in their classrooms, especially ELLs, is that they improve and develop their writing skills. Blogs can be incorporated into every type of classroom.  From young students, to high schoolers or from Art class to Science class, blogging proves to be a beneficial teaching strategy.  During a study by  Abdelaziz, it was found that   "writing skills and proficiency have shown improvement by active participation in blogs than by using traditional teaching" ( Abdelaziz, 2011).  It is clear that blogging has a way of engaging the student in their learning process and in turn, provides them with a more in-depth learning outcome.   Blogging is an instructional technology that is helpful for the general student populati...
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