This chapter contained so much great information
it was hard to narrow it down to three ideas on which to comment!
I couldn't let the online language translation services (pp.247-248) pass without
comment. A teaching colleague of mine
was given the opportunity to travel to Columbia as a representative of the
local Rotary Club. He was expected to
give a speech to his host group in Columbia, so he carefully thought out what
he wanted to say, wrote it down, put it through an online translation program
(he was the school technology specialist at the time), then gave the
translation to a bilingual teacher, who checked it for errors. His expression of thanks to the "Rotary
Club" translated into "gyrating cheerleaders"! Needless to say, he decided to go low tech
and have the teacher translate for him!
I'm sure programs have been updated and improved a lot since then, but I
think I would still prefer a live translator.
When discussing differentiated instruction (pp. 248-250), I appreciated the comment
about students who were NOT labeled ("normal" students?) falling
through the cracks. Early in the process
of ESOL training for teachers, about half-way through my career, I kept hearing
that all the strategies we were being taught for English language learners were
just GOOD TEACHING STRATEGIES. We need
to find out how a student learns best; we need to take a look at our classroom
for things that might hinder a student from learning, we need to consider a
student's background, their prior experiences (or lack thereof), what they face
when they leave school each day. As a
teacher, it is impossible to reach every child every day, but if that is truly
our goal, think how many more kids will be reached, and will succeed.
Handheld
calculators (pp. 257-259) used to be a much bigger issue than they are
today. I have to admit, I was one of the
anti-calculator group--mainly because I taught seventh graders, many of whom
had not yet learned how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide whole numbers,
fraction, and decimals. Much of what I
was teaching involved computation skills, not higher level concepts. Once I moved into teaching Pre-Algebra and
Algebra classes, I began to see the benefits of spending time on the PROCESS
and not on the COMPUTATION. When testing
certain concepts, calculator use was not only allowed but encouraged. To keep skills fresh, occasional tests and
quizzes were given involving computational skills, and calculators were banned
for those exercises. Estimation and
mental math were always encouraged to check for accuracy--"does your
answer make sense?". The key is to
ask yourself what you're teaching, and what you're testing. Then ask yourself,
"does it make sense to ban the calculator?".
Maloy,
Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin, Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly
Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies.
2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
