Illustrated Language

My younger daughter and I made croissants for breakfast today...a process which began yesterday. You can see the pics on Instagram. I'm posting the final one here! This is an example of how YouTube and face-to-face classes combine. I took a croissant class at Sur la Table last year; for me, it's really important to be able to feel and smell as I'm cooking, so YouTube alone is not enough. I've made croissants two or three times since then. Yesterday, I forgot exactly how to do one of the folds, so I checked with a pastry chef I've watched before on YouTube (Here's the link:  Classic French Croissants  ). That online reinforcement/review was croissant-saving! One of the ways of using social media with international students has to do with cooking. Many of the Saudi and Kuwaiti students I had a few years ago were young men who had never even boiled water. Alone in the US, they craved their moms' cooking, so they Skyped with their moms and followed direc

Slideshare on Implementing an International Online English Language Learning Program Having read articles on the use of social media in Thailand, the Republic of Georgia, South Korea and Ghana, I noticed some similarities with my own experience using Skype and Rosetta Stone to teach English in Madagascar, Honduras, and the US.  I joined I Want to Learn English, a 501 c(3) organization, as its sole employee and academic coordinator in 2010. My job was to develop the online English program the founders of the organization had started as a dream of providing English education to the people they had met during mission trips in Honduras and Madagascar. While IWLE was based in the Episcopal Church, it was not an evangelical organization; it was a purely educational endeavor. The premise of the program was the following: 1. Set up computer labs with internet access and Rosetta Stone licenses in three countries: Honduras, Madagascar, and Delray Beach, Florida. 2. Designa

I'm overwhelmed with communication tools at work. Why is she smiling?? Image from https://medium.freecodecamp.org/imagine-react-router-as-your-switchboard-operator-f4f1ac22188c

While I was working in the house today, I had the radio on in the background and heard this report from Freakonomics Radio . It is called "Boo...Who?" and it is about publicly registering displeasure by booing. I immediately thought about it being the offline version of posting a bad review to social media. In this podcast, which was recorded in 2011, contributors discussed this function in the realm of sports and artistic performance. What struck me when considering public booing in comparison to the online version is that the online version offers much more protection. While an opera-goer might hesitate to boo Pavarotti in person, surrounded by other opera attendees and facing the legend himself, he might not feel the need to hold back from behind a screen and a name like @NYOperaLover. As in the case of drivers who become incredibly aggressive while inside their cars, scathing attacks online come from a place of safety and anonymity. (Well, some online attacks...and I'

I love languages. For as long as I can remember, I begged my Irish-American parents to teach me Spanish. I had to settle for Sesame Street lessons until I was old enough to learn it in school. I took Spanish all through high school and practiced outside of class whenever I could. I have always felt that I did not really study Spanish; it feels like I am remembering it. I have spent most of my life in South Florida, where Spanish really is a second (or even first) language, and I lived just outside of Mexico City for five years. My husband is Mexican, and we are a bilingual family. Learning Spanish has served me well! In college, my major was chemistry, and my prescribed language choices were Russian, German, or French. I chose German, and those classes turned out to be the best classes I took at UF. I took Deutsch Intensiv, which meant all German (no translation allowed) from Day 1, two hours a day. Everyone in the class learned extremely quickly, and we all stayed together for mor

This coming year, I will be teaching two sections of ESL support in a local parochial high school. The courses are designed to provide international high school students (from 9th-12th grade) practice in speaking, comprehension (reading and listening), second language strategies, and writing. The job is not to teach an ELA class but to teach the communication skills necessary for students to pass their ELA and all other classes. For this reason, I found the Digital Native article especially interesting. I have a lot of leeway in deciding exactly how to run the class, but I do have a coursebook and have the expectation that after two years, students will be able to earn a 100 on the TOEFL iBT, a pretty high standard. Considering how to integrate Web 2.0 tools is an important part of what I am doing now to prepare for the school year, and this article gave me many more issues to consider. In the article, the authors discuss the reasons for the seeming lack of transfer of online abilit

I have been posting products on my Teachers Pay Teacher's (TPT) online store  ESL Solutions  for a few years. I post some free products and some paid products. All of my products are for the ESOL classroom, and all of them involve the use of art to illustrate the grammar of speaking and writing! I have made a little bit of money over the years, but not enough to fund my older daughter's dream of going to Yale; in fact, she's been more successful through her own endeavors! That said, my sales are greatest during the months of August/September and then again in January because this is when new English-learning students most commonly start school. My most successful product is a two-level series containing a set of books (student workbook, tutor manual) and flashcards for teaching survival English to newly-arrived elementary school kids, from grades 2-5. I developed this program when I was volunteering as an ESOL tutor at my local elementary school. I taught kids from Latin

Here is a link to my pinterest board on Street Painting . This has been my hobby since I returned to the States in 2006, and it is exactly the kind of art I like: ephemeral and social. When it rains during a festival, whether it is while I'm painting or overnight between painting days, I am not so excited about the temporal nature of chalk on pavement. However, on the Monday after the festival weekend, I have no problem with cars, bikes, and pedestrians, human and animal, passing over my paintings. In terms of being social, chalk artists paint on blocked off streets during festival weekends; people walk up, ask questions, comment on the design or colors, and talk about life in general. I have met some very interesting beings: tourists from overseas, local immigrants who are happy to find a Spanish-speaker to answer their questions, children, and lots of dogs. I love dogs! I have always been interested in Pinterest, but I had never tried it until this week. I love having the abi

I have spent the past two days of my training working exclusively with 6 other ESL instructors. All of us will be going to different schools to run an ESL program for a well-funded and extremely well-staffed start-up which began only last year with a single school at which the teaching component of their program was functioning. There is a lot up in the air, a lot of questions with no answers, and seemingly a lot of work to be done by all of us. In order to lighten our load, we have all agreed to pool our varied experience and share whatever we "create" (in quotes...see Erick's blog and his comments and links on remixes) with each other: Kahoot! quizzes, worksheets, project ideas, assessment series, etc. We will be building off of materials compiled in our course textbook, activities we might have learned during our studies or from mentors, and lesson plans we might have overheard in the lunchroom or while walking by a classroom. Since we will be building and uploading o

I made this infographic on easel.ly to visualize the number of tools that I have used since arriving here on Monday. It's pretty mind-boggling...especially when you consider the number of usernames and passwords I need to remember. For some of these, I can use my new work account; for others, I use Google whenever possible. I have two more days...more apps to come!

I am at a week-long training session in Chicago for my new job. Here is a list of the tools I have used from finding the job, going through interviews (5 of them), and now attending training: LinkedIn.com (my account, upgraded to premium level, general job search, applied to the job through this tool, investigated the company) Indeed.com (general job search) Skype (interviews) Zoom (interviews) Gmail.com Box.com MyNGConnect (textbook publisher's online materials) YouTube (company information, legal training) Inflection (HR, accounting) AMTRAV ticket verification AA.com (flight info/text updates, boarding pass) Amerigoeducation.com Uber Lyft

I have been an ESL instructor at FAU for the better part of 20 years. I started when we still had blackboards and a cart with a TV and VCR. Pretty scary, I know. I left FAU a few times...once for 5 years when we moved to Mexico City and two more times when I felt that I would never get experience on more than a physical blackboard! I moved to FAU's University Center for Excellence in Writing for one year...we did in-person and Skype tutoring. I also left to be the academic director at a non-profit devoted to teaching English online via Skype (no video allowed though...can you imagine!!!) with Rosetta Stone as our course materials. Aside from using Skype, I learned how to build a website with Wordpress, get onto a computer half-way around the world (teamviewer) and fix their Rosetta Stone and general computer issues, and use two online language learning programs (Livemocha and Rosetta Stone). This course is my next push to stay current and keep moving forward. So far, it has been ve

In the "Thriving as a Networked Individual" chapter of Networked , the authors define a set of new literacies: graphic, navigation, context/connections, focus, multi-tasking, skepticism, and ethical literacy. These are not new to teaching, whether you teach ESL or any other subject, but the fact that the mastery of these literacies now takes place in the online world, in which the relative weight of each differs from what it is in the tangible world, should make us rethink our lessons. Here are some ideas I have for ESL classrooms...please feel free to add/suggest changes! Graphic Literacy: In addition to evaluating the infographics which are now part of many new ESL textbooks ( 21st Century Communication comes to mind), it would be helpful for students to learn to make their own visual representations of information. Students can be asked to sign up for the free version of a  easelly   and create their own infographics to share ideas and perspectives on environmental issu

The readings, videos, and voicethreads this week have been interesting. I am a pretty private person; I communicate with family and a few close friends a lot, but I do not feel so comfortable reaching out beyond that group to people I know only marginally. When that circle expands to the online world where "marginally" becomes exponentially smaller, I am even more reticent about sharing information. On the one hand, I find it easy to contribute a restaurant review on tripadvisor (Here's one I wrote for the Pasta Garage in Lexington, KY...if you're ever in Lexington, make the effort to have lunch there!!). I like being able to recognize an amazing chef. Sometimes, though, I find open-ended tools like Twitter off-putting. I really don't feel that everyone I know and everyone don't know will be better off if they hear my opinion about everything from immigration policy to a local music festival to World Cup soccer. ...and vice versa!  I think that the article by

I have spent a lot of time over the past few days looking at my social media interaction in terms of being a contributor or a lurker. I think that labeling those who just watch with words with such a negative connotation...lurker or free-rider...is a little unfair. There are good reasons for being a lurker, some of which have been noted in our discussion thread, like being in the silent learning phase. Also, if we all spoke all the time, we'd crash websites daily. I think we are all lurkers and contributors to different degrees on different sites, so rather than labeling one as bad and the other as good, I think I will call those who don't speak "viewers" or "observers."

Hello Unicorn S, This is for you...A picture of my daughters at the Museum of Ice Cream...I mentioned it in my response on your blog!

It has been extremely informative to read the posts of all of my classmates. I  have already learned so much! I am very grateful to be part of this course...and I know that my own students will benefit from the knowledge I gain.