New Blooms
Will Richardson‘s comment on the new look of Bloom’s Taxonomy and SEGA Tech‘s post on the periodic table of visualization methods could not have come at a better time. I am in the midst of planning a new course to help teachers focus on the needs of our ELL students. More precisely how they can use the resources and tools already at their disposal to provide learning supports for these students. These resources include materials (CDs, DVDs, Websites) provided by the text publishers, atomic learning, netTrekker di, unitedstreaming, moodle and other online resources. Ultimately it comes down to reflecting on good basic teaching skills. You need to determine what the students already know, what you want them to know, and how you will know when they get there. These two tools, the new take on Bloom’s taxonomy and visualization methods, can foster some good discussion on what we are actually asking kids to accomplish and offer ways for us to determine what they know.
2 thoughts on “New Blooms”
Hi, Beth,
I think it is key to determine what the ELL student already knows; that is the difficult part. Whether their “underachievement” is based on language or lack thereof, a learning disability or simply laziness; ELL at any age can learn English if given a variety of learning tools and styles. I am a new assistant to the ELL student and am very interested in learning about any and all tech resources for ELL students. But my next step would be to integrate these tools with other learning tools so as not to have students learning exclusively online and sitting at a computer.
Furthermore, don’t you agree that there is quite a difference between teaching English to foreigners in their country and teaching young students in schools in the USA? These are the things I am exploring at this point in my education/workplace experience.
I think the idea of the course is to help teachers focus on what are the needs of their students, what resources do I have at my disposal (including tech), how do they work, and what resources are best for meeting the student’s need. As you know many teachers are overwhelmed by daily tasks. The course is to help them become familiar with them so they can have more options.
The resources we will look at are the textbook and publisher provided materials (CDs DVDs), atomic learning, unitedstreaming, nettrekker, moodle, online resources, and read & write gold among others.
I taught overseas for many years and fond that most students were very eager to learn English it was seen as a tool to success. But there was not so much eagerness to learn languages other then English too few learned the languages of our host countries.