Dutt's thoughts

This week I decided to research NoRedInk a little bit. Our regular education ELA classes use this website in their classrooms, and I have been meaning to look into it a little more. NoRedInk is an online program, free and premium versions available, where students can practice various skills as they relate to English Language Arts.  Summary of reading:  I found a dissertation titled, Exploring the Use of NoRedInk as a Tool for Composition Instruction written by Alyson Snowe. Her dissertation is 211 pages, so admittedly I didn’t read it cover to cover, but I was particularly interested in the 5th chapter: Students respond to NoRedInk. In her paper, Snowe notes that all students with the exception of one was able to make progress on their grammar skills. I also enjoyed reading the comments the students made on the program, and they said they wish NoRedInk would add an audio component that will read feedback aloud to you when you get something wrong.  The appeal:  I hav...

My Ramblings (in other words, an intro):  This week I read a few articles about digital literacy and how to promote that in my classroom. In class I was assigned to read, Empowering English Language Learners through Digital Literacies: Research complexities, and Implications. For me this article brought up a bunch of different connections to my own experiences. The second article I read was, Preparing ELLs to be 21st- Century Learners, and this article gave me a myriad of different things to consider.  Summary of the articles:  Empowering English Language Learners through Digital Literacies: Research complexities, and Implications. - In this article the focus was on the need to incorporate student culture to create more meaningful learning experiences for our ELL students. These students need to be supported and not just overlooked.  Preparing ELLs to be 21st- Century Learners- This article gave a lot of strategies and “How to’s” to support your ELL students in ...

I have gone easy on myself this week and the article I have chosen was only 6 pages! Even though it was a much shorter article than the others I have read so far for class, it was just as beneficial. This article was titled, “Augmented Reality Game(ARG), 21st Century Skills and ESL classroom.” A few things popped into my head as I read the title. One, I love augmented reality games, so I’m sure students will too. And two, I haven’t heard 21st century skills pop up in my PD sessions on inservice days in a while. It seems that while we are still teaching students the skills to be a 21st century learner the buzz word might be fizzling out.  The Summary:  In the Article Karmila Rafiq and Harwati Hashim talk about the success ARG has with ESL students. The article discussed an example of ARG which was Pokemon Go. The authors explain that games like these allow the user to gain real world skills by using maps, books, and tools. The article discussed the lack of real world skills peo...

The Article:  This week brought me back to Google scholar to find an article that would interest me. The article I landed on was Exploring the Impact of Blended, Flipped, and Traditional Teaching Strategies for Teaching Grammar on Iranian EFL Learners by Farzaneh Khodabandeh and Mohammad Hassan Tahririan. This was another 41 page article, so I skimmed through the article and tried to make sense of the information presented.  The Summary:  The article was a study to compare the different types of teaching in an online class setting. In the article they compared the flipped classroom to the blended learning environment and the traditional learning environment. There was a pretest and post test of grammar skills. In the Traditionally taught group, there wasn’t a significant difference between the pretest and the post test. On the other hand in the blended and flipped classroom there was a significant improvement between the two tests. So which method was the best? Well, when...