My First TED Lesson & Reflections

Behold! My first Ted Lesson:)
William Shakespeare: Mini Biography

Objectives	Assessments
Students should be able to --Identify some basic facts about Shakespeare: including his personal information, experiences, as well as historical and cultural roles and so on.	In-classroom assessment: --Students answer multiple-choice questions correctly after self-study at home and in-class group discussion; --Each group indicates evidences of their choices in the video, and the teacher goes around the classroom and takes notes on how many correct evidences they can find in the video.
--Name some of his great works and identify in which periods they were finished	In-classroom Assessment: --Students answer the second question correctly in the lesson. After-class Assessment: --Students organize a given list of some of Shakespeare’s great works in a chronicle order, early, middle and later periods.
--Mainly understand how Shakespeare influenced the development of English language and literature	In-classroom Assessment: --Students discuss Shakespeare’s influences on English Language in groups, and the teacher go around the classroom, observe and assess individually. The group comes up with a list of the influences and share with the class. The teacher grades the list for each group. After-class Assessment: --Students post responses to discussion board online. One response should be at least two paragraphs, describing explicitly on one of Shakespeare’s main legacies on English language. The teacher should design a rubric for students to refer to.

Reflections on flipping a class:

1. I was concerned about how to make flipped classes aligned over a period of time. After creating a lesson myself, I changed my mind. I think flipped classes are not to be adopted for a whole semester or a certain period. They can be an integral part of a complete course. For example, in one course, there can be two or three flipped classes involved, with materials echoing the knowledge being taught at that time in a course. If we should try to make the entire course a flipped style, it would be extremely hard for teachers to find materials from the internet which are consistent and sequential in syllabus.

2. I was concerned about the quality of teaching materials for students to work on at home. My concern is solved now, since I have tried TED-Ed and realized that it can be used as a format or a rubric itself to make sure the teaching materials wouldn't fail to meet the demands for effective teaching outcomes. I am not saying that TED-Ed is the ultimate answer, but it is a good start to build up my confidence in solving the problem with the help of technologies.

3. I was concerned about the lack of supervision over students at home. With specific assessments in-classroom and after-class, the concern is gone. We can never supervise our students all the time, right? We should give them credits and give them the power, the power of learning and the power of self-regulating. Online learning is still not popular in China not because families can’t afford computers but because parents don't believe that their kids would use computers to study instead of playing games. If I keep thinking about how to control rather than how to trust, I would never be a good teacher. I was wrong, and I have learned from my own lesson.

Flipping your class

To flip a class is like to shuffle the order of teaching a course. The traditional order: the teacher teaches in class, students go back home and do homework and the teacher assesses students’ understandings and skills from students’ assignments and classroom performances. However, the flipped class order puts the homework-doing part ahead of the in-classroom teaching. The problem would be: how could students be able to finish the assignments before the teacher even teaches them the knowledge? The key point here is that the teacher must prepare students with sufficient and effective teaching materials for students to learn from at home. Therefore, the order of a flipped class is: students work at home (with teaching materials and home assignments), students work with peers and the teacher in class, and students continue to work after class. (references: Flipping Your EL Classroom: A Primer and Three Reasons to Flip Your Classroom

I haven’t flipped a class yet. But here are some concerns of mine:

1. How can we as teachers make sure that materials (video, audio and texts) we create for students to work at home before class are guiding them in the right way? Unlike teaching in class when we can see students’ responses while teaching, teaching a flipped class may cause extra time and energy at students’ costs if they couldn't make the most use of the materials if the materials are not designed to-the-point. The students may spend lots of time trying to figure out something on their own, only to find that they are thinking in the wrong way when they are communicating with the teacher in class. It is possible because for some knowledge, it could be hard to be explained in materials rather than teacher’s in-person instruction. Flipping a class relies hugely on the quality of materials given by the teacher, yet the materials are hard to be designed and aligned through a period of time.

2. Since students work on their own at home, it is hard for the teacher to supervise the process. If in a large class, it is hard for the teacher to assess the learning outcome of each student in class. If a student doesn't study at home and the teacher fails to assess that in class, the teacher would lose the control of tracking the learning of the student. How can we make sure that all students would go through all materials and study on their own at home?

3. How does the teacher assess the outcomes of students’ learning at home in class observations and after-class assignments?

4. Time is a big concern, too. The teacher may have to commit a lot of time to preparing the materials, not only keeping in mind the learning habits of his/her students but also taking into account the different proficiency levels of the students. Is there a rubric for designing materials for a flipped class?  

I hope I can answer these questions after I have flipped a lesion myself with TED. 

Two ways to use blogs in language education

I taught and will teach writing to students. So I mainly reflect on how to use blogs on writing classes. I don’t think we can use blogs too much IN a typical Chinese writing class which is too large to have students use blogs in a limited time-frame. We may use blogs in writing workshops which may also take place in classrooms yet are not considered as typical Chinese writing classes. I will talk about two ways I would use blogs with my students outside the physical classroom.

1. Blog is a forum. Students may post anything in English, for example, stories they like, poems they wrote, interesting news recently, their own feelings and confusions and so on. Others can comment and interact with the bloggers. It is like the way we are doing at LAI 590. I would suggest students to create things of their own not only to practice their writing skills but also to attract more comments. For example, students may keep diaries on their blogs, describe interesting photos they took and expressed their confusions about life. Since I think I will be teaching teenagers, I believe they have a lot of confusions to talk about.

2. Blog is a wiki. I may create a public blog for a workshop or a class. Students can write together. It is a cooperative writing blog. Students contribute a part of one task, mostly a story, individually. It could be fun. I always want to try that with Chinese students. I did it once with one student, but not on blog but on paper. We wrote a story together: at first it was an ordinary daily conversation between two girls, then it lost control and turned into a horror story. The twists were fun. I want to use a public blog as a big platform to involve more students on such tasks.

Performance indicators: Standard ESL.1.5-8.2

Students will listen, speak, read and write in English for literary response, enjoyment and expression.