Why Telecollatorate?

I chose to focus on this because of the nature of my proposal for A.T. Jones Charter School.  Their tech teacher wants to use this activity with his K-5 students.  I learned this activity "is a curriculum-focus activity involving collaboration among teachers and students in distant locations." It exposes students globally to different viewpoints while communicating with other students around the world. 18 framework activities have been already set up to help teachers use these activities. Many projects have already been set up to join. I looked on the websites provided by Dr. Rogers and they were very friendly sites giving various projects to join and how to join the classes long distance. By reviewing the values for both students and teachers, it is clear that telecollaborative activities will be successful teaching strategies for our 21st century learners :

Values for students:

1. learning extends beyond their own classroom
2. communication extents to real-world
3. influence extends into the community
4. expands their technology proficiency for use in their future jobs
5. connect with experts in their subjects giving them new source of knowledge
6. increases motivation, engagement, and interest
7. encourages peer teaching
8. increases their communication skills
9. stimulates additional intelligences to satisfy different learners
10. involves critical thinking skills
11. provides clear organizational skills
12. 150 projects to choose from 
13. meaningful learning opportunities
14. opportunities to develop any new projects

Values for teacher:

1. effective application of curriculum explaining the use of technology
2. watch student voice their thoughts while they go through the inquiry process
3. access to more resources
4. students are more engaged
5. engage in professional development
6. provide better learning experience for their students
7. learn how to assist and guide students to tellecollaborate
8. connect more to other teachers and administrators
9. expands awareness of others in their communities as valuable information sources
10. more aware of the broad community of learners around the world
11. provides organization and scaffolds
12. 150 projects are available to choose from through iEARN

"Principals for Teaching ELL Students" from an inspiring teacher....

I so appreciate her listing the ESL Links to better obtaining Reading, Listening, Speaking, and Writing. She is getting "bookmarked" on my computer for future reference.  I find her blog amazingly communicative.  Because it is happy, I was drawn to him. Good lesson there for me.. Her years of teaching experience, the countries she has taught in, and the cultural background she has herself shows what an interesting learning environment can be created with the expertise she brings to the table as an educator.  I can assume her classrooms are fun to learn in and that her students are drawn to her personality. 

ListServe: What English Should be Taught (from a US perspective overseas)

I went to American Schools while living in 6 different Latin American countries and we had English teachers with British, New York, Southern, Texan, Australian, and Hispanic accents.  One develops an ear for these accents. You learn to use them socially, academically, and professionally.  I have classmates here in grad school who do not have good Spanish pronunciations and will be future Spanish teachers.  They know their grammar and writing skills excellently.  Again, I feel students and parents have a say-so in what accent they want to be taught with but we really did not have the choice. It was what we were given and we made the best of what we had.  What we learned through the different accents were the various cultures that were different and similar to our own.  We learned that globally, we are all alike and that we have different accents that will not take away from our jobs, our academics, or our own culture.

ListServe: What English Should be Taught...

Since pronunciations do vary with teachers depending where they are from or where they learned their English, I believe it is important that the students have choices in choosing their teachers.  It depends what they will be using their L2 for:  work?  pleasure? travel? academia?  Testing? Teaching a language has to be very clear, enunciated clearly and correctly.  With this comes some flexibility with the pronunciation.  English is world-spoken and can have many dialects.  I had a USF Statistics teachers assistant teach attempt to be a good teacher. I had to drop the course and choose another math course to pass my state boards for the GKT.  When the pronunciation hinders learning, something is definitely wrong.  Hiring and placing these teachers has to be thoughtfully considered

Internet Reciprocal Teaching - for World Language Classrooms

This PPT covers how to teach our students about internet searches.  Very interesting about Boolean searching uses
OR- synonymous terms
AND- the more concepts we combine, the few results we will retrieve
NOT- excludes records from our search results.

I have a paper to prepare and will utilize this method to narrow down my searches so I can learn how to teach my students the same method.  I will DEFINITELY use this in my world (not foreign) language classrooms because I believe it will hold their attention and help them create thorough reports.  I will teach them note-taking strategies (important skill to use at their jobs), teach them how to be IRT operators and guide them through their Internet research, and watch for skills they might need to read the Internet well such as;
1- how to make up good questions,
2- how to select key words and web sites,
3- how to evaluate reliable and trustworthy web sites,
4- how to take good notes on sites, and
5- to make sure they post their reports correctly and share with their peers.
I will have to monitor their use very carefully and will collect the Internet permission slips beforehand. I'll circulate actively from table to table looking for quality dialogues and trustworthy Internet searches.

I learned not only to use the Boolean Logic, but practiced using the implied Boolean logic and was excited to use the space and the minus sign to retrieve specific searches.
Lot's to practice and learn!

Chapter 5 Review: Distance Learning

Before reviewing my chapter, I wanted to share that I have recently received feedback from two adolescent high school students who took a DL Spanish course.  Both opinions were the same: they thought it was a waste of time to learn to speak the language even if the grammar and writing skills were learned.  They felt the conversation was more important but were obligated to take these courses.  I doubt the efficiency of this teaching strategy. I would have to speak with Spanish teachers who have experience with this to have a more open view. 

Learning a foreign language through distance learning was covered in this chapter. I was surprised to learn that online learning has a 9.7 percent (specifically in the association institutions) growth rate versus the 1.5 percent growth in the rest of higher education. I don't think teaching a world language via DL will ever replace the face-to-face with native speakers in order to reach advanced proficiency levels.

The author believes the U.S. needs to produce more bilinguals and take advantage of the rich bilingualism that already exists among our international communities. I believe our country needs to work hard on wiping out prejudices that accept these communities as our neighbors. 

I believe it is imperative that universities push their study abroad programs because I witnessed advanced proficiency in my now 27 year old daughter who spent 5 weeks in Morelia, Mexico.  She lived with a family who had a 5 year old daughter that taught my daughter more Spanish than anyone had ever in the past and she comes from a bilingual home.

Enhancing the use of Technology for Teaching

This site provides hallmark information for using technology while teaching, the tools necessary, and projects they are currently working on from Carnegie Mellon University with access to course materials and content.  They show us how their Blackboard is set up, how they teach using “Clickers” and how to use valuable tools to prepare a lesson.  I can see how the students and teachers enjoy using clickers together.  There is positive feedback and provides a little more energy, more discussion and more interest.  The students seem to appreciate this from their teachers. Students seem to participate more.