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Welcome to the USD 352 ESL/ELL wiki
What I hope to do here is share my ideas and thoughts with you and allow you to share your thoughts and ideas with me. Through collaboration we can accomplish much. Mr Raymer asked me the other day if our ESL students were all going to make AYP with the things that we are trying to do. I know he was kidding, I also know he, like myself, want to get off probation and stay off the states probation list. What teacher doesn't?

Some things are beyond our control so we have to concentrate on what we can control. We can meet each student with a smile and a hello. Yeah some are easier to smile at than others, but why have those that are hard to smile at become so hard? I wish I could answer that I can't. We can give every student the opportunity to learn. We can encourage every student. We can speak to every student. We can treat them the way we wish they would treat us and others. The list goes on and on but we can do some things.

As teachers most of us have come from a culture that values education, learning, each generation doing better than the generation before them, (that is what we need for our country to do well), we speak the same language (the language of learning). When we meet those that do not share our ideals/values we are sometimes at a loss for how to change their mind. Change is hard they must have a support system to effectively change but only if they want to change. Who is to say one culture is better than another? Just like language- educated people have what they call formal register and then we have several informal versions of the language or slang. They all get the message across and that is what communication does-it gets a message to someone else. Who is to say one way is better than another- society that's who. We are judged by our language so we must do our best to teach our students the formal language of our country so they will make a good first impression as we only get one chance to do so. A really good person will realize that first impressions can be very misleading some people will not get past the first impression.

Now on to the fun stuff sorry for the soap box stuff. You have an English Language Learner ELL in your classroom congratulations you have the opportunity to help this person learn English and English is quickly according to some becoming the language of business. Encourage them to continue to learn their native or first language. Why, because those that develop fluency in their first language have a better chance of developing fluency in their second. One thing we will sometimes see is students who can speak their first language but can not read or write it. This may be something that you will see in the second or third generation of the family after coming to America.

I know there will be some that will insist they speak English but to be honest with you, Americans do not speak the Queens English we speak an Americanized version of it. This version also varies by geographical location and economical/social status. We have also heard of Tex-Mex which is not really Spanish and not really English but a combination of both. Language evolves, it changes, words that had a very "nice" meaning when we were growing up now means something completely different. The term flip flops come to mind. That is not what my generation called those types of shoes.

English is a very complicated language. Look back at your own English experiences, and you grew up speaking it. You acquired it over years, we now know that it will take 5-7 years to develop fluency in English, 7-12 in some peoples views or research. We expect our students to learn it tomorrow or so it seems. Not only do we want them to learn our language over night but we also want them to pick up our culture overnight and I don't know about you but I know I still make sociocultural gaffes.

Now to what I am doing. I doesn't seem like much to be honest but each keynote presentation I make takes about an hour. I will go back and add voice to a version of the keynote presentation but I want to make them read and then they will listen and read. Plus you need a really quite place to do this and that is sometimes hard to find.

Two web sites I am starting to use and I think will be beneficial for all are1|http://www.spellingcity.com/Mrcraig and 1|http://www.quia.com/profiles/gcraig27. This is a first for me Wikis that is so be patient as I learn how to put in links. Please. I can not get Quia to work on FireFox but it works well on Safari. Give them a try and let me know what you think. Till later.

Well I have finally gotten the keynotes made for this week. The keynote presentation takes about an hour to an hour and a half to get done and will last about 4 minutes with the voice. Depends on how fast the student wants to read and click to get through the silent version. Several teachers have commented on spelling city, I think it is a good site to help students keep working on the words while doing a learning activity. Time will tell, I guess.

Till Later.

October 11,2009 I don't know what has been going round but I am tired of having it. Went to the doctor on Friday, got more medicine and told to go home and rest for the next few days. I have rested and taken the medicine but am still not feeling as good as I think I should so I hope this makes sense. I have been reading on use of the ipod in the classroom and have been reinforced with my idea that we can use this tool to help our students develop fluency in reading, as well as sequencing and grammar and well..... you will be limited by your imagination, or at least that is what I think. Will all of our ideas work out probably not but I think it should be noted that not all students learn the same way or at the same rate so make notes of ideas and review it from time to time. I also feel that the need to try something is very real. Nothing ventured nothing gained. I was reading one article and it suggested using usb hubs for synching more than one ipod at a time. Will it work? I don't know but I have the usb hub so why not try it? Only problem it is at school and I am home. I want to start using my ipods with my first graders to work on reading fluency. I will have the story on the ipod and they will bring in their book and read along as the story is read to them if they get behind they can hit the back button and start again. Will this help with word recognition also? I am inclined to believe it will but then again only time will tell.

The students seem to really enjoy spelling city and I need to start getting feedback from the teachers as to their spelling grades. One thing I don't won't the students to get into is that everything has to be in game format for them to learn. I do believe learning should be fun but not every student finds reading fun like I do.

I am anxious to get into the web building class as I hope to put my presentations on my website which I hope will help me with my getting things over to the laptops. I am using a jump drive now and while it works it does take time and a great deal of repitition. I mentioned this to Karla and she thought I might be disappointed with the time it takes to download the program from the site. Something I had not thought of, but something to be aware of for sure. Always good to bounce ideas off of other people as we don't all look at things from the same side. till later

I mentioned last week that I saw a web page that showed a person that was synching their ipods with one computer and then several usb hubs. Tried it with my usb hub ( a usb cable that plugs into the computers usb port and then allows you to plug in 4 other usb devices. I tried it and it took a long time over 3 hours to just put my stories on the three ipods that I had plugged in. It was definitely worth the time and if you just had three or four ipods then you could plug in over night and be set. It will quicker for me to do each ipod one at a time.

Trying a new site called lingt. It is supposed to allow foreign language teachers to create more innovative lessons. Time will tell. I can see uses for it but will have to play with it for a while before I can say more. till later

October 25 Started using the ipods and I am seeing lots of different levels of reading. Hope we can help improve fluency in reading by using them. Research says it works we will find out. Hope to start doing this with the 5th graders this week. It is a short week but got to start some time. Reports back from teachers are very encouraging and I really believe we are on the right track. Been thinking that once we get the reading series vocabulary into the program then comes math, science, grammar well, you get the idea this will be an ongoing and evolving project and there will always something to add or improve on.

On another subject, I have started using facebook not because I want to let everyone know what I am doing but to keep in contact with athletes and drivers ed students that I will no longer come into daily contact with, and it is doing what I wanted it to. The flip side is that students language is not what I expect in a social site. I am not talking about the text abbreviations but the cussing. I have mentioned it on a few occasions but it doesn't seem to change the behavior much. Any ideas?

February 6th Finally the web page development has started. I am really excited to start working on this project. What I want to do is to have my keynote presentations available via the web. I want students to have access to them anytime they can get online. I will also have some links to some educational activities. I hope to have the individual grades on my home page and then let you click on whatever class you need and then that will take you to the unit you want and from there find the story you are looking for. Be patient and if you have an idea to improve it let me know. My keynotes are not perfect, I will go back as time allows and fix them again be patient with me.

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