Changing the Gears of my Teaching

How has last semesters’ CoeTail courses changed my teaching? Well it definitely has helped me to get a grade 6 EAL teaching position this year!
I guess … My Age, quite old, My Teaching Experience a lot but all over the place literally in many different locations, holding teaching positions from Pre-K – grade 8, and My Flexibility, yes thanks to the CoeTail courses and the awesome tech people that work here @ ISB, I now feel so much more comfortable using technology in my classes, has qualified me to be part of the ONE-TO-ONE LAPTOP program in grade 6. To have kids in your classroom whom are digital natives equipped with a tool that makes daily school life so much more easier makes me as an educator even more eager to explore its endless possibilities and discover the language powers with in it.

My grade 8 EAL students worked last semester for hours and hours, even after school at the MAC lab on their movie documentary using the iMovie program. This years grade 6 kids have their own MacBook Pro. How neat is that? One of the most important things I learned is to give it a GO when doing something new I’m not sure of technology wise because there’s always a way to figure it out and the kids are of course great at that. Most importantly, my English language learners really feel that they benefit from projects for which educational technology is used, as is evident reading some of their reflective learning blog posts. When I asked how information technology (flip camera, digital camera, internet, I movie) could help your learning I’ll share some of the responses from my students:
“The all of information technology (flip camera, digital camera, internet, I movie) was really helped me as learning because for flip camera and digital camera, we could watch again and again until we completely understand what Ms. Warner said. For using internet we could not make such as effective movie like ours without internet because pictures made the movie more interesting and effective for audiences. For using I movie, it was very convenience and made the videos more interesting by good editing. These information technologies were really helped us!!”
Mizuki Awamura

“I always wanted to learn more about technology and use technology for learning and studying. If we didn’t use any technology for this interview, I think it wouldn’t be an interesting project. I think the listeners will be bored but we used some images and flip cameras so, we can see and listen at the movie and the listeners will be more attracted to it. Using technology can be useful to show what we want to tell to the audience. For an example, if we only used the PowerPoint, we couldn’t put any movies so we couldn’t tell the listeners what we were like during the interview. All of the technologies we used were all very useful to show what we want to tell the listeners.”

Moeka Kawamura