TESOL Highlights

Friday, March 30, fieldwork observations from 11:15 till 1:20. My Social Studies undergraduate students, groups 1 & 2 were giving their last lessons of their mini-unit plans in the 4th and 2nd grades. I was pleased with their creative ideas and the use of our course projects implemented in the fieldwork. I will discuss this more later but now... I was in a hurry to leave. Nellie and I wrote a proposal for the TESOL conference and we got a conformation later back in December, I think:
Dear EV Fair Presenter, Congratulations! Your proposal has been accepted for the Computer-Aided Language Learning Interest Section (CALL-IS) Electronic Village Fairs at TESOL in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 28-31, 2011.... We have attached a copy of the EV Fairs schedule to this message. Please check the date and time of your presentation in the schedule..
Our workshop was scheduled on Saturday and we were leaving Goshen, NY at the rush hour.
It took us 4 hours to get to Philadelphia. I met Nellie in the lobby. She came the night before and had already participated in a panel session.

We had a nice reunion dinner and discussed how we will run our workshop the next day.
Here is a link to our Presentation "Pedagogy of Collective Intelligence: Promoting Authentic Learning With Moodle for teachers (M4T) on IT4ALL"
It was a great success. We had a lot of interested people in using Moodle for teaching.

New Projects in the Social Studies Methods class

This year I added a new project to the course. It is a Book Trailer on one of the books for social studies reading. Teacher candidates were assigned to select a book connected to the Unit plan theme or to one of the grade level concepts and create a book trailer on it. There are a lot of resources, tutorials, presentations and youtube examples with book trailers designed by the authors of the books, teachers and students. Here is one of the presentations, Rock with Book Trailers I shared with my students. I am curious what will they come up with, what programs will they use? I recommended Animoto, MovieMaker, Photostory3, iMovie (Mac), Voicethread.

Test Your Geography Knowledge- USA

Test Your Geography Knowledge- USA:

this test has 50 questions and it is interactive. Using it regularly in class can develop students' understanding and knowledge of the states and their capitals. Try it out!