Teacher Tech Training held Friday, March 15

Teacher Tech Training was held last Friday at Sunrise Tech Center, room 14, after the Home Group meeting. We did a really fun activity that could be used in your classroom. We used Google Slides to make an interactive slideshow for each person to create their own simple slide about their favorite things to do. (You could use any topic in your classroom:  foods and nutrition, countries, cultural traditions, the sky is the limit!)

Here's the link to what we did in the training. Click on the link and then you can run the slideshow by clicking "Present" at the top right next to "Share"   Click on:  Teachers Favorite Things to Do

Here's the link to:  How to Make an Interactive Slideshow so you can try this with your students. Let us know how it worked out. If you need help, let me know (linda.laymon@sanjuan.edu).

We also learned about:  Quizlet.com and how to make fun flashcards for our students to further their vocabulary practice. They can use Quizlet on their phones too with the free Quizlet app.

See Jody Barker's post below for a slideshow about "How to make a slideshow." This could be used with your students to help them make a simple slideshow about their country. You can click on her student examples, too.

Preparing for Heritage Day

Before Heritage Day, I had my students create simple Google slideshows and present them to class. The making of them took 2 class periods and presenting a few more. I have included the instructions I use to give my students for making the slideshow (However, I present it step-by-step on the presentation station and create it with them and include the slideshow instruction demo on my class website, in case they are absent or need to review the instructions). I require that they create at least 5 slides. Examples of content:

• name, city, and country
• favorite food
• celebrations or traditions
• favorite places
• hobbies
• a famous person
• future goals

Click on this for Instructions for making a Google slideshow

Examples of student work:

Beginning:

Saeda --Syria

Maria -- Mexico

Alex - Ukraine

Intermediate:

Mei Ni-- Indonesia

Elena-- Romania

Fabricio -- El Salvador

TDLS 2019 Conference March 1-2, 2019

Angela Rodriguez, our Vice Principal, Marisol Richmond, and Linda Laymon represented the San Juan Adult Ed ESL teachers at the TDLS 2019 Conference at Hacienda La Puente Adult Education (near West Covina in the greater Los Angeles area). TDLS=Technology and Distance Learning Symposium. This is the birthplace of OTAN and its 30th anniversary.

Besides the apps and websites previously posted, there was so much more for us to learn. The three of us did not get to everything. We were the presenters for "Google Blog to Keep Your Teachers in the Loop" on Saturday. The attendees were very interested. They came away with ideas for their schools and they had the chance to create a blog.

• Ask us how to sign out of Google Gmail and apps remotely.
• Ask us how to use Google's new feature to create a Google account using any email account such as a Yahoo username and password.
• Ask us about using the apps Adobe Spark or FlipGrid to allow students to create short video presentations on their phones to present in class.
• Ask us about Augmented Reality.

Some new phone apps and websites we learned about in the TDLS Conference.

wordhippo.com  website to help students practice vocabulary

sockpuppets.com  website help students make puppet shows to practice their pronunciation

Quizlet.com  website is a fun way to help students learn and practice vocabulary

Flipgrid app helps students make videos

Jobpro app series:  Get Hired!  Get Prepared!  Get Dressed!

Facebook Builds Student Confidence and Learning by Susan Angelis (February, 2019)

One of our San Juan Adult Ed teachers, Susan Angelis, uses Facebook as a technology tool for her students. Through using the Facebook app, the students learn job skills and preparation, available community resources, networking, confidence building, and collaboration. Susan uses her two private Facebook class groups as Distance Learning. Most of the listening, reading, and writing homework she assigns is done on Facebook. She and the students post the class lesson and board photos. The students can access the program using desktop computers, iPads, tablets, Chromebooks, and smart phones anywhere. The students make their posts in Facebook by navigating the Internet using multiple search engines, Google drive, and websites to research academic topics. They learn how to use the privacy settings. They use online dictionaries to do spell check and websites to do grammar checks and cameras on their smart phones to photograph important lessons that they can transfer to Facebook, to post photographs of class activities and family photos showing their assigned activity such as going to the Library. The also learn the concepts of timeliness, to follow the rules set up for the private group, how to post, edit, copy, paste and delete posts. They learn the basics about Internet scams, hackers and become more aware of internet safety. 

The Facebook curriculum teaches:

• keyboarding skills (capitalization, punctuation)
• research skills
• English skills (listening to videos, reading articles, writing sentences, asking questions, using new vocabulary)
• conversation skills
• social English (life events, jobs, successes)
• social interaction
• technology skills
• accountability (messages about why they were absent)
• independent learning (to learn about homework assignments, view the photos of the classroom board from the day before, read announcements, and study for tests)
• leadership skills (academic posts, correct one another's grammar and spelling mistakes, take on classroom jobs)
• team work and collaboration (students support one another and respond to each other's questions and posts)
• job interview and resume tips
• community resources available
• students to be more involved in their children's education, back to school nights, open house, library nights, field trips, etc.
• American laws, culture, and holiday information
• Networking amongst the class on Facebook (share job interview experiences, certification process for certain jobs, job openings, travel experiences

Using Facebook to build students' confidence

• learning English and practicing writing, reading, listening, and speaking
• students are encouraged, acknowledged and rewarded for their Facebook participation, performance, keyboarding skills, research skills, and language improvement
• compliments come from the teacher, classmates, even the Principal and Vice Principal
• and the students set examples for each other: for example, when a few students post photos of going to the library with their children, or read with their children, go to the park or museum with their children, many students follow and post the same with their families.

How could you use Facebook in your classroom? What surprises you about the success of this teacher in using Facebook as an instruction forum?

January Teacher Tech class

• We learned how to sign up for an OTAN online class as was discussed in the January 7 training. 
• We also registered for Ventures series if teachers hadn't registered yet.
• Then we explored the Ventures esources online to see what was available.
• And we learned how to find what we want to share with our students.
• We also played with the QR Codes in our books with our phones.
• In the first session, the teachers practiced posting a comment to the Teacher Blog.
• We also found the link to the Teacher Website and explored the website.
• The fun part was showing the teachers how to create a Kahoot quiz online 
• Kahoot is a great informal assessment tool. 
• Most of our students have phones, so it is a fun way to test your students' knowledge of a unit. 
• It also makes a fun teaching tool. 
• We discovered that you can add images (through Kahoot, Internet or download your own). 
• This would be a good tool for the lower level students with the images added. 

Here are some instructions to make a Kahoot.

Click on the link:

How to make a Kahoot Quiz

Teachers, Please share with all of us.

Did you do something special for Martin Luther King Day before or after the holiday? If yes, what did you do? Please share with us and let us know if it was successful and why or why not.

In Room 6 Beginning High at Sunrise Tech Center, I opened this link:
Martin Luther King video 9.37 min
and shared this kids' video about Martin Luther King's life. It is a cartoon, but there are a lot of words displayed large on the screen to help with understanding, plus it isn't too long (9.37 min). The students wanted me to play it twice. The second time, I handed out the transcript that I took from YouTube and added in all the proper punctuation (yes, that took awhile to do). I suggested that they read the transcript while watching and listening to the video. We went over the major new vocabulary words (i.e. boycott, demonstration). I also posted the video link on my class website so the students could watch and read again it over the long weekend. They seemed to like it, at least they said they did. I noticed one of the students got out her transcript again and was reading it while the other students were taking their CASAS tests. So I will deem the activity a success.