 Thank you, everybody, for joining us on this cold day on the East Coast for webinar, a joint webinar between the Atlas Regional Comprehensive Center, the Mid-Atlantic Comprehensive Center at WestEd, and the Center for Innovations in Learning, kind of a unique partnership that we have today. For those of us who are joining us on screen, I have a couple things I wanted to point out. The first one being that we do have some handouts for today that you can download directly from the screen. All you need to do is click on either one of the handouts and then the Downloads button. We also have an option for people to take notes. If one of the presenters or one of the hosts would like to take notes, we could do that. You can actually download the notes afterwards if you found that helpful. And we will be using our chat feature a little bit today so people can interact and ask questions. And that, too, can also be archived and downloaded afterwards. Of those handouts, the first one is one that was created by one of our presenters, Janet Clyman, today on a bunch of different kinds of resources for English learners. You'll find a whole long list of not only apps but places that review apps so that you can keep learning and keep growing as the video apps come in. And also some great links to some publications on the topic. So that will be the first handout that we have for you today. Our second handout is a list of specific resources that are going to be organized by the way that our presenter, Carol Vinton, is going to present the categories of supporting English language learners today. I'm going to turn it over right now to Janet Clyman who's going to talk a little bit about our third resource, which is a web... So thanks, John. And welcome, everyone. And we're going to give you an even more second. We just wanted to get a little bit of the housekeeping out of the way just so you know what the various resources are. And so that resource, that third resource that John showed up, that web link or that URL will take you to a online collection of curated resources created by the Center on Innovations and Learning. And John, if you'd like to scroll down just a little bit, I just want to show folks that what we did for...in preparation for this webinar is one of the questions is on various tools and apps for English learners. But then as we go through the entire presentation, you're going to see we're going to talk about content curation apps or collaboration or how to increase active student responding. And so you can see that there's a whole list of courses based on those various categories that we'll be covering throughout through the webinar. So this is something that you guys can access after the webinar or any time that you want to find out about four tools. They're available. And I think we're ready to turn it over. You're welcome. I'm going to turn this over now to Dr. Caitlin Howley. Dr. Howley is the Director of the Appalachia Regional Coverage Center. And we're very fortunate to have her here today to welcome us and to introduce the webinar. Thanks, John. This is Caitlin. I'm the Director of the ARC as John just said. We serve Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. And we're warmly welcomed today on this nearing the occasion. This webinar is a collaboration between three comprehensive centers. In addition to the ARC, the webinar is sponsored by the Mid-Atlantic Comprehensive Center at WestEd or Mac at WestEd and the Center on Innovation and Learning. Mac at WestEd under the direction of Marty Orland, serves Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia. I'd also like to thank Carol Cohen of Mac at WestEd, for the opportunity to take this webinar and make available to participants from across the Mid-Atlantic region as well. And now I'd like to introduce you to our presenters. First up is Carol from Vincent, who is doing Duke Double Duty as a Tennessee State Coordinator at Forest Park. And is an organization that is more than constantly on Mac at WestEd. She started her career as an Anderson Seconds College teacher in the District of Columbia. She earned her doctorate in bilingual and multicultural education and her participation won three national awards, including one from the National Association for Bilingual Education. She served several federally funded technical assistance centers, addressing Title I and Title III as well. Next up is Janet Cuenan, who is the Director of Innovation and Technology at the Center on Innovations and Learning. A career educator, she is pretty much at every job from serving as a financial and elementary teacher to principal and administrator and university professor. She's also an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She's published and presented widely on evidence-based innovations in education and the systems that support them. And then finally, we've already met him, but John Roth is also a technical assistant specialist at the Arc, specializing in instructional technology and design. He's a former classroom teacher and author of Online Professional Development Design, Deliver and Succeed, which was adopted as a book the month for July 2011 by Learning Forward. Interesting, he's also co-author of the first college textbook to address the new national educational technology standards for teachers. Recent projects that are relevant here include a statewide online learning community of biops, and he designed instructions for a free online course on using the WEDA English Language Development Standards that now completely hosted by the most Carolina Department of Public Instruction. I'm going to turn it over now to folks from the Center on Innovations and Learning who will share with us more about what their center is up to these days. Thanks, Caitlin. So this is Janice Fineman again from the Center on Innovations and Learning, and we're just really excited and happy to be partnering with Arc and with the Mid-Atlantic Comprehensive Center for this webinar because it's just such an important topic, and it fits really well within the mission of the Center on Innovations and Learning. And the Center on Innovations and Learning is one of the seven content centers that work in partnership with all the regional comprehensive centers to work with schools to improve teaching and learning outcomes across the nation. Our particular focus at the Center on Innovations and Learning is on personalized learning and changes in classroom and teaching practices and tools that actually result in an improved outcome for students. And so even though there's the word innovation in our title, we're really looking at our changes in instructional methodology, new curriculums and instruction, ways, perhaps various technological or digital tools, but it doesn't have to be so. But it's some type of innovation or change in practice and a measurably improved outcome for learners. And so that's what we do at the Center on Innovations and Learning. And the slide that's up there right now is directing you to three resources that are at our website that may be beneficial for folks interested in the topic of this webinar. The first one is a practice guide. And the practice guide is mobile devices in the classroom. It's also one of the files available downloaded from the webinar interface. It's the third one up in the files box. But this practice guide was, as a request of CIL, was created by Karen Mahon, Dr. Karen Mahon, who's been a lot of time. She runs an app evaluation site called Belfire Labs. It looks at sites to review apps. And so this practice guide really helps people figure out educators, so both classroom teachers, the building administrative or district level administrative people, in terms of how to select content for apps, what not to select, special considerations with regard to standards or accessibility or even information safety. So we really recommend that as a companion to this webinar. In addition, Karen produced two webinars for CIL that are archived on our site about this practice guide. And the great thing about those webinars is she talks about actual classroom strategies. And for example, if you have one iPad and a group of kids, how do you get some cooperative or collaborative learning across peers with a single device and those types of things? So I highly recommend the webinar, as well as the virtual learning rubric that we created together with some of the northeast states. And it's really more of a statewide or district-wide tool to help systems figure out why they might want to do virtual or blended learning, what some of the practices and policies are. So it can be useful to evaluate your blended learning or virtual learning system as well as plan for its implementation. And that's a different set on innovations and learning, so we can turn it back over to Carolyn. Thanks. Hi, everybody. I'm Carolyn. It's great to be with you all for a few minutes today to explore some of the opportunities that blended learning classrooms bring to the education of English learners. As you all know, the educational achievement of English learners has been a focus of attention since the first passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. First Title VII, now Title III. And in CLB, with its focus on aligning content standards and English language proficiency standards, as well as designating LEP students as an accountability group. All of this has brought a lot of attention to this population and its needs to achieve at higher levels. It's always been the case in our field that there have been districts and schools that have attained a high level of excellence in serving their English learners, but at the same time, many districts and schools have struggled. And those of you in the audience who are ESL or bilingual education practitioners, I don't know if you're like me, but with every education reform that comes along, I ask myself the question of, you know, hey, what can this do for English language learners? What's the benefit for us and for these students? And that's exactly the question that we're going to be addressing in today's webinar. So we're going to talk a little bit about some general principles of effective instruction, do a little bit of show and tell, do a few demos, and give you a little tour through this fabulous new world of serving English learners in blended learning classrooms. Before we jump in, though, let's start with Janet providing a little bit of information about what blended learning classrooms are. Hi, Janet. If you're on mute, we can't hear you. Oh, sorry. I was just saying that before we jump into the blended learning piece, I think there are several people that have been having difficulty logging on and because we have so many interactive gems for folks, do we want to say a little bit again about how to actually visualize how to see the screen? Or are we good? We can give out the URL. There isn't quite a lot of interaction going on today. So, Caitlin, can we just log in at arc.adobeconnect.com? I'm not sure if that will take them directly to our meeting room or not, but there are a number of letters and numbers that we can add on to that that will definitely get them to the meeting. Should we post that in the chat, maybe? And then I wonder... Oh, I can't see it. Of course, it can't be in the chat. I can read the URL. I can read it several times and then folks can try it out. Okay. So, the URL for that is arc.adobeconnect, which is one word, no spaces, dot com, backslash, and these are all lowercase, R9VQ97XVQ38. And I'll repeat that again. So, that's arc.adobeconnect, one word, dot com, backslash, R9VQ97XVQ38. We hope that you're able to use that link to join us online for really some stuff we're going to be able to demonstrate today for you. Great. Thanks for this. Some people may be able to log on. So, Janet, why don't you go ahead and continue thinking about blended learning. I don't think we have a lot of people who can chat at this point, but we can add them over time. Sure. Absolutely. So, it's folks that can see the screen. We have this question on screen. What do you think of when you hear the term blended learning? And we're hoping that some of you will share your thoughts in the chat box when somebody says blending learning, blended learning to you. What occurs to you? What do you think about? What type of reaction do you have to that? What do you think is involved? So, we're just going to spend a little bit of time hearing from folks what they think of when they hear the term blended learning, and then we'll talk about what the researchers say about it. So, please feel free to type into the chat now. So, again, there may be people maybe having a little bit of difficulty getting in or chatting, or there might not be a lot of people available. So, I'm just going to please type in as I talk about some of the things that I hear from people when I talk about blended learning to schools and various groups. But sometimes people think that blended learning, you know, it's just equivalent to online instruction. A lot of people think about the flipped classroom because that's a very popular term or Khan Academy jumps to mind when people think about blended learning. We've got Judy. I just missed her last name, but it was great. Just kind of gave us the formal definition, which we're going to share on the next screen. So, good job, Judy. Marilyn Murphy talks about a combination of in-person and online instruction. So, that's very, very true. So, blended learning, and I will go ahead and move on to the formal description. One of the most widely used or recognized definitions is from Staker and Horn and the references at the bottom of the slide and in our resource document. But they talk about how blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least on part through online delivery of content and instruction with some elements of student control over time, place, case, and path, as well as supervised brick and mortar locations. The reason I brought that up are the things that I want to really point out that identifies or defines blended learning are the two sentences about formal education program. That's really critical. A blended learning environment or a blended learning situation does require that formal education program to distinguish it from informal online learning. For example, I'm trying desperately to learn Spanish and I downloaded various apps, but that's not a formal learning program that can't be considered blended learning. The other term that I want to call your attention to is further down where you talk about content and instruction. Blended learning really does focus on the content and instruction and not just the use of Internet or online or digital tools. So, just using a digital tool doesn't make it blended learning. It really is a focus on content and instruction. And the blended piece comes from that combination of bricks and mortar or traditional classroom and school and some type of online or digital or technical. So that's what blended learning is. And in terms of how blended learning is done, there are several models for the blended learning classroom. And we won't go into a lot of detail or spend a lot of time in this. Folks that are interested in more detail and examples from across the nation can look at the resources provided. Basically, when you think about blended learning, you're thinking about a continuum from bricks and mortar and online learning. And I said a continuum, but what I really mean is a sampling of both, of bricks and mortar and online learning, from traditional instruction to something that is traditional with technology added to some informal online learning and to full-time online learning. All of those, when they get mixed together and there's that focus on content and instruction in a formal situation, that becomes blended learning. And the most common model that most people are used to on this slide, as you can see, is number one, the rotation model. And so that's where in a station rotation, I think many of us grew up in the elementary schools where we had stations and we rotated from station to station learning different things. We just didn't happen to have computers, at least back when I was growing up. And so that's that same model, that rotation from station to station, that station rotation model with blended learning, computers or online instruction are involved. The lab rotation model is where kids actually go to the lab for a portion of the instruction. It's a lot of people think about the lab being a separate place where students may go to do separate things, but when you blend that lab instruction with instruction that's happening in the classroom, you're blending that learning environment. The third one, the flipped classroom model, most people have heard of that and most people immediately think of Khan Academy. The fact is Khan Academy, if someone wanted to use that because it was instruction relevant to what they were doing, could use Khan Academy in any of these blended learning models in any of the rotation models. It's just most commonly used in the flipped classroom. And that's where students participate in a lot of the online learning offsite and come together to the bricks and mortar or the classroom for more face-to-face or guided practice. And then individual rotation is where kids independently go to any of the different devices or stations and work on the different things that they're going to work on. So again, I won't go through all of these models, but just do know that there are different ways to do blended learning. The Staker and Horn Resources is a wonderful tool to figure out how to do that. But what we want to leave you with is thinking about why does this matter? Why do I want to think about how to do blended learning? Why do I have to think about or what do I have to think about with regard to scheduling, staffing, resources, student facilities, and ultimately make sure that you're thinking about your instructional goal and that your blended learning model fits within your instructional goal. Thanks, Janet. So when I work with schools, I very often work on personalized or blended learning models with them. And so I developed this little scenario for teachers and even for school leaders to think about what early steps of blended learning might look like. So here we're looking at Amy Walker with her big smile on her face. And Amy's a teacher who's come to school on Monday or if she's teaching around me today, so she's there early. And she's there to get ready for the week. And as she's getting ready for her students, we're going to study a new unit on slope and algebra. And so what she's done is she's been able to access her school learning management platform. This is an example of using Edmodo, where she's going to post two different lessons from a master course that her district makes available to her students. But that wasn't good enough for her, she's found a couple of other things including this activity online about buying a car, which would use the concept of slope in a real-time situation. And she's also going to post a couple of math games for her kids to work on independently, either in class or at home. So she knows that she'll probably have to present some of the information at the beginning, maybe through a lecture, maybe through some modeling, pulling up some different apps or a graphing calculator. And then she eventually wants to get to her return on investment lesson when she's not buying a car. She knows her kids like to work together, so she's going to rotate her kids through the different devices that are available in her school, and some schools at the computer lab, some schools at a lab on wheels, so you might have pads or tablets or a laptop cart. After kids are getting close to the end of the lesson, she's found a quiz that she can post online. She's allowed to hide it from all the kids until they're ready for it, or she can actually make it available throughout the entire time so kids can use it as a practice quiz, either at home or in school or during times during the day if they go to the library or the computer lab. So while her kids are coming in, she knows she's ready for the week. She's got different opportunities for her kids to access content in her classroom and beyond the classroom, and that's why she sees such a big smile on her face. So with that scenario, I would like to turn this over to Carolyn Vincent, who's going to help us understand what does this mean for students who are English learners? Thanks, John and Janet, for setting the stage, and indeed, let's now turn our attention to the question of why blended learning classrooms are helpful to English learners. And well, let's start with a notion really foundational to our field that English learners have a double task. That is, they have to learn the same content that all students do, and they have to acquire proficiency in reading, writing, listening, and speaking English at the same time. In order to take on this challenge, it's widely recognized that effective instruction must be provided by all teachers having contact with the student all day every day. So on the slide, you see a listing of some of the general characteristics of effective instruction for English learners. Our intention was to select a small number of high-level instructional features that are widely accepted and widely used. Each of these that you see on the slide has implications for teaching language and content at the same time. Each of these may have its place in a blended learning classroom. So now we're going to take a look one by one, first describing what they mean, and then showing some of those examples and demos that we were talking about. Next slide. Let's jump in by talking about comprehensive input. This concept originated with Stephen Krashen and represents the idea that students will acquire language best when they're exposed to language in use that's just beyond their current level of linguistic competence. English learners need to be able to understand, at least to some degree, the content and language that's used in instruction in order to be able to profit from instruction and to continue to learn. The goal has been to maintain grade-level content and reduce language load. A primary means of reducing language load has been and is using other channels to communicate information, for example, visuals, graphics, the student's home language, and the like. This occurs throughout the instructional cycle, including developing and activating student background knowledge, presenting new information, developing instructional activities, and assessing progress. And this has been known for quite some time, the value of communicating information through visuals, et cetera. The challenge for teachers has always been time to pull the materials together or simply lack of availability of resources at their fingertips. This is where technology can come in. Technology can make the gathering of materials so much easier in the form of curated collections and search tools. And going a step further, teachers now have options for presenting information in ways that aren't bound to the physical classroom in the school day. Lots of tools make it possible to present content any time, any place. And that means that more time in the class can be spent with teachers and students interacting, and that's a great thing. So let's take a look at some examples that support comprehensible input. Thanks, Carolyn. So there are so many different kinds of resources that are available. So having the framework of the five characteristics I thought was a very helpful way of organizing them. And so one way we've done that is on one of that, is on hand down to Google, which I'll pull up. But if you're thinking about how can we meet the idea of providing, making content more comprehensible to students, as Carolyn mentioned, there's a variety of different ways to incorporate media. Well, right now, not only can you find different media images, videos, et cetera, but your students can also make them. There are many different free and easy website creators that are available for online. There are different kinds of tools that combine information very quickly and easily in an online setting. And of course, you can create content maps, infographics, videos. I think every teacher could have their own free YouTube channel, or a teacher tube, or school tube, and upload videos there to help contact their kids outside of the school walls. Screen capturing is very popular, and you can capture and share what's on your screen, whether your screen is a tablet or an iPad, or actually your monitor from your desktop. And of course, using a learning management system, like the one mentioned in our scenario, is a great way to help students access content whenever and wherever they need to be. So there's something we're going to take just a short time to show you a couple of different tools to kind of wench your appetite and get you thinking about how you might make content more comprehensible One way is to think about digital storytelling, and there are a lot of different storytelling apps as well as resources available online. One of my favorites is Storybird, primarily because of the beautiful artwork that you can see. So this is actually a short story that I think we're so excited to give you a presentation. That's alright. This is a second. Back to Storybird is a short story about using phonics that I created very quickly. You can actually share the document. You can have kids create their own stories. The artwork in Storybird is really quite tremendous, and all this can be used either at school or at home. Concept mapping is a great way to gather information about what kids know and how they're changing their learning. Topwood is just many different kinds of concept mapping applications that are available. One that I used recently was I was working with teachers and we were trying to think about how do we use formative assessment strategies. And so if you could think of a new strategy here and just simply link it to our main idea. Things like this very often extend images, links to URLs, videos, all kinds of things. And now one more thing to think about on the screen hopefully by iPad and there are a variety of different screen capturing applications that can be used in different ways. I'm going to very quickly use this one here called Educreations. You can under Educreations insert different kinds of images so we could actually go to our photo library. Mine will just be pictures of Christmas and cats so we'll just ignore that one. But using the tools the kids can actually write on the screen and then record what they know. So for example, I'm going to press record and I'm going to say Gato the cat I can bring in some of those pictures if I want to and then I can actually share that I can share that video or share that lesson and the kids can do it. I can do it. You could do any kind of in any content area the kids can then start to communicate with you. So that's just real quick. There are a lot of different applications that we listed on the handouts so as we go through and we're talking about so many things if you see some that you find interesting you can also check out the links on the handouts. They'll take you directly to some of these services. So I'm going to turn this over to Carolyn. Thanks, John. Our second principle of effective instruction for English learners is meeting individual needs. It's clear that English learners will be at different starting places and will guard both to academic achievement and English language proficiency. So meeting individual needs is a key concern. Students will have attained a range of levels of content mastery. Competency based curriculum and assessment may need to identify and address content gaps and move students forward apace. English learners in a given classroom will likely always be at different English proficiency levels from beginning to advanced to more work in some language domains reading, writing, listening, and speaking than others. Whether using computer stations, mobile devices in the classroom or at home there are a number of intervention and practice applications available through technology that may be useful. Use of intervention and practice programs assumes that student levels and needs have been identified and that ongoing progress is assessed. Assessment may be closely woven into instruction promoting finer-grained understanding of student needs and capabilities and further targeting of instructional activities to make them as effective as possible for each English learner. Next slide. So thanks, Helen. In terms of thinking about digital resources to meet the needs of students, the individual needs of students, there are a range of apps that are available that specifically support language acquisition. They could be websites and computers as well as apps that students can interact with by speaking, typing, listening to. There are also tools that support language such as text readers on your screen or grammar checkers and there's some really great grammar checkers that are out there now where kids can actually input their writing and get feedback on readability as well as actual errors. There are classroom response systems what many people call clickers so we'll look at some of those later today. So those allow you to interact with students without having them to speak up in class if they feel intimidated or they feel uncomfortable. You can actually also take the pulse of the class to see how kids feel or understand the topic. And of course, journaling is a big idea, is a big concept that we can use in developing language and there are online journals, there are website seeking users journals and apps as well. I'm going to ask my colleague Janet to share some of the ideas she has around meeting the needs of individual students. Thanks, Sean. So the website that we're going to show you next is called Literably and it fits in with meeting the individual needs of students in the sense that students are reading passages and it keys the teacher into each individual student's schedule and what types of reading errors they make and also what types of comprehension difficulties they may have. And so John's going to go ahead and go to the literally website to the account that I've created and so just to let folks know, this is a free online web resource. The teacher can have up to 10 records graded per month for free and when I say records, when you see it, you're going to see that it's very, very much like a running record, which I would do in class, but now it's actually computer scored or computer generated. So John, I'm going to walk you through how we do this demo. John's controlling the screen. What everyone sees right now is as if I created my own class with my demo students and what maybe, and I just chose that they were at the fourth grade reading level. Basically, you can choose whatever reading level your students are at. I chose everyone at fourth. So I'm going to click the next reading maybe for the students. We're going to come back to this dashboard. What I want John to do is click on demo student and he's, whoops, if you don't mind going back, John, we're going to, I'm sorry, up at the top, we're going to log in as demo student. I made my instructions to you with a very, very top blue button, log in as demo student and you're going to click the I in the student and he's going to enter JSTWI which just happens to be my account. So what's going to come up after John does this is a passage for me to read. And so I'm going to do this with you guys on screen. And so it's a passage about Martin Luther King. It's one that was selected based on my level. You can hit the start button, John. And what's happening is the program is recording my reading. If it could hear me, I actually don't know if that technology works. But anyway, the program is recording the students as they're reading. And so the students reading two or three pages and then after they read the section and the teacher is going to determine if it's a minute timing or a longer reading then they answer comprehensively. So we're done with that. And John, at the very top you should be able to log out as a demo student. Yep. Well, you can log out, that's fine. Now, if you click on demo student then off to the right, there's Vasco DiBala. This is... Go back to that main screen, please. Thanks, John. So you can actually click on the story, DiBala. Baboa, excuse me. And that's a story I read earlier this morning that was automatically scored a program. So you can see I actually repeated the name. I said, joined instead of joined. I said the cooling instead of becoming. So basically it's keeping a running record, letting me know that I read it 97 words per minute, what type of accuracy and all the types of errors that I made with my one-minute timing. And the recording button up at the top right, that playback, is where the teacher could actually hear that story reading that the trial just did. So you're welcome to go ahead and get out of that. And these information, these reports can be sent to parents or whatever it's like to be. You can just hit the back button. That's fine. And it also scores the comprehension questions at the end. So you'll see that on the comprehension questions I got two out of four. And so it's flags that I'm still working on the accuracy of my reading. Whereas my demo student above did pretty well on the comprehension questions and now it's just working on reading fluency. So that's an example of a free online tool that teachers can use for individualized learning. Another one for you guys. Yes. So this is Duolingo. And like Janet, I'm trying to work on like Spanish. So we're going to see some Spanish examples. But all the studies provide different kinds of ways for kids to both read, write, and speak language that the app will actually pay attention to. So here you'll hear the computer read this sentence for you. Yeah, okay. So I have to figure out what that means. I hope it says. Oh, I got that one right. It's also very interesting. So notice that when I fill this I don't put in the correct type of N. It gives me a little feedback that I actually put the four correct letters but I didn't use the N. Yeah. So maybe I'll get it right this time. So now I got it completely correct. Duolingo. And then you can actually I'm trying to get to one. Okay. So here in this example it's actually reading the words out but later on it'll ask the student to read into or to speak into the microphone and it'll score how they've performed that way. So just a really quick doolingo is very popular for learning languages as well as for English learners. I'm going to stop sharing and go back to Carolyn here. Okay, great. Thanks. Our third principle of effective instruction for English learners is peer learning. Peer-based learning has an established place in effective strategies for English learners and some peer-based learning programs have even earned high marks for their work's clearing house ratings. In general though many types of student cooperative learning activities are a beneficial strategy. These work best when English learners are explicitly taught how to engage in peer activities and the teacher is thoughtful in forming pairs or groups based on the content and language levels of the students. Heterogeneous groups are usually recommended so that means students with more advanced proficiency can help those with developing proficiency or students who have the same native language can work together or grouping strategies may be used that are based on particular student needs or strengths. The overall goal is to promote comprehension and engagement in a wide range of instructional activities from simple practice to group activities that use higher-order thinking skills and all the language domains so there are many many different kinds of tools that students can use to work with their peers there are many different kinds of ways the students can collaborate online or through apps either synchronously or asynchronously and these include very common things like Google Docs and Office 365 which are productivity tools that most kids are familiar with when they go to school and of course they can conduct a web or a video conference like we are doing right now free video conferencing through Skype or doing a Google Hangout sometimes we forget that there are some really simple tools like calendars that are on our phone or online either Outlook or a Google Calendar that can be used to support a class and we can actually post announcements and have kids sign up for them and get those announcements through email or reminders in other ways text messages and such and of course one good way for teachers to collect and curate the best resources available and we're going to show you a few options of those one of the most popular tools I see in classrooms today is Padlet Padlet works pretty much like a simple cork board the idea is you post different kinds of things to the cork board here you can see this was a Padlet I used working with teachers outside of Austin, Texas who were discovering and working on the concept of deeper learning and all you have to do is double click on the poster board and they can add text they can add links to URLs you see they've also added pictures so not only can students collaborate as a classroom this way but students also can do group projects and present all their information this way and just share the URL Padlet is a simple compliant so compliant with the Children's Act because they don't need an email address to log into it so teachers can have this private and share them only with the classes they want to share it with I did mention web curation and I'm going to go very quickly and say my favorite web curation tool now happens to be Dego and the reason I like it is let's say I'm out on a website somewhere and I find some information like this website about how blended learning works in ELL instruction which is an article from District Administration I actually have a plugin on my browser where I can go and I can add this information to my Dego library all I have to do is tell it what tags to use to save this and now any computer I go to you'll see this will show up in my list any computer I go to now I can find those foot marks I can also share those foot marks with groups and with kids and they can create their own foot marks for group projects one of the easier ones that I think for kids to navigate is Symbolu Symbolu uses this metaphor of different tiles in which people can go and I wish you could set up as a launch page for all of your students so kids who are learning language may not want that text heavy Dego page to go find something here Symbolu very quickly very easily provides just links of different things that kids can get to such as this link here to Voice Thread which Janet will talk about later in fact it's now time to turn this over to Janet and make sure I don't have her muted if they do yes I do I'm sorry about that Janet Janet you are no longer... I was actually saying what a great little segue over to Voice Thread and what John is actually going to do is set up a page from the Voice Thread website because Voice Thread is actually an app and it also is something that you can use on your computer in the browser but Voice Thread is nice because there's now a whole community of educators using and you can see off to the left under categories one of the very first categories is ESL and so there are several teachers that have posted some of their lessons they've done you can say they talk about the lesson that's the text in the first half John if you scroll down to the bottom what is there is actually just a little a little capture of the Voice Thread that teacher did with her students these are kindergarteners and an English language learning class John you're more than welcome to go ahead and hit the first play button yep that's perfect and I'll talk over it if we can hear it go ahead so here are the students they've written stories about the polar bear and now they're describing what they've read in their stories I'll be quiet now let's see if we can hear one more sure let's hear one more it's a little bit hard to hear over some of the technology basically the students we can stop it now John thanks the students have written stories about these stories are reading their sentences the great thing about Voice Thread together to be one book that's produced by the class so that you have that peer collaboration and then other educators and parents can comment on the book and Voice Thread and so it's just a nice little tool that we wanted to share with you guys and I think Carolyn's now going to talk to us about active learning so our fourth principle of effective instruction is active learning by students engaged in activities or problem solving that promotes analysis, synthesis and evaluation of class content active learning techniques range from the simple for example pausing during presentation of information for students to summarize or clarify what they've understood to more complex activities like role-playing, developing case studies conducting inquiry and participation in experiential learning active learning includes strategies for self and peer assessment to help clarify desired outcome and be explicit about what performance represents achievement of the outcome one additional benefit of active learning is that English learners can be encouraged to bring knowledge from their family and community context into their schoolwork this contributes to cross cultural understanding and supports the value of the diverse communities represented by English learners in the classroom so Carolyn mentioned project-based learning and project-based learning which are not necessarily technology dependent however there are some great technology resources out there to support that for places such as high tech high in San Diego and many people are familiar with the Buck Institute of Education and performance tasks are becoming much more popular now they're not a new idea they're familiar with the instructional design model understanding by design they've been out for a while but because of the new types of assessments that are coming out there will be more performance-based tasks actually on different provided online to students as an assessment so I wanted to share a quick story of working with schools on using performance-based tasks that I thought was actually very relevant to what the kids were doing as Carolyn said we were working with the school of Virginia to better understand the idea of using a performance task that's complex, that's open-ended it's real world-based and after looking at their standards we needed to come up with a problem which kids use fractions and then use percentages to solve a real world problem and then write something persuasive to an audience and the audience in this particular case actually designed a new sandwich because the new nutritional guidelines came out and they were upset that they had to eat they couldn't eat their white bread anymore they were eating whole grain bread so we gave them a list of different types of sandwich meat and wrappers they could use, the vegetables and they actually had to figure out what sandwich they could make in their school cafeteria that met the new nutrition guidelines also met the COBS guidelines and they had a presentation to their principal to show why they should pick their sandwich and at the end we actually did take all the students products together we picked the top ten and I had no idea who the students were and the principal looked at me and he said that's really interesting he said because we gave them the option to pick what they wanted to pick and how they could put that together we ended up having, on the top ten an IP who had struggled with more traditional types of assessments I'm also going to show a new tool that Jana has introduced us to look at my iPad again this one's called Utaba and it's kind of a game for kids to play so multiple kids can join and when they when they play they're given pictures and the first kid who picked the correct word for that picture will get points so let's say that one there oh police okay police is the right answer over here the yellow gets it right so they get a point and then we'll go birds so just a very simple and easy way for kids to work together and collaborate together you can have us a four players play at the same time so if you have a larger iPad that could be for kids and then the other nice thing about that tool is that of course with a paid account the teachers can incorporate their own vocabulary lists and pictures okay thanks and last but not least a high level of student engagement so we've seen a lot of interesting things so far and it should be obvious by this point that digital learning strategies, English learners should mean that any empty time for English learners when limited comprehension precludes engagement in instructional activities should be a thing of the past technology is also often fun as we could see from the game that John was just demonstrating but the games the discovery, the creativity and approaching tasks all of these aspects are not only instructionally beneficial but also quite enjoyable so for English learners the fun factor means that their culture will be low students will be less self-conscious in using new language and engaging in instruction when there are many ways to participate and they have a high level of motivation and last but not least English learners especially if they're coming into a US school from another country may need to learn how to be students in a US school that is the procedures and routines of the school and the classroom these skills that they may need to perfect while many students and including native speakers may need these skills they can be especially beneficial to English learners when they are explicitly taught and practiced and then they will really promote the school success of those students Thanks Carolyn I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that there are a wide variety of games that are available for students to both learn content and to also understand the skills and of course the gaming and the gaming aspect should support the learning outcomes that you want for whatever content area you're working on and of course drill and practice is important especially for kids who are novices in a content area like language so we've seen a couple of those different apps and resources they could use today and we do talk about classroom response systems so we're very close to time I just wanted to very quickly show that they are very popular, they are free that teachers could use immediately the first one is Socrates and here we see I've created this little quiz as a teacher so you can see here I am as a teacher I'm also logged in on my iPad and as I answer questions the teacher's quiz will update another really quick, very quick fun game for kids to do that teachers can create all different kinds of questions is Kahoot Kahoot really is a hoop and so the kids can you can create all different kinds of it's almost like a game show online where kids can actually create their own questions and you can put them into one Kahoot or a teacher can create the Kahoot themselves so I'm sorry that's kind of a quick rush through those things but those are two very popular ways to gather input from kids in your classroom regardless of I'm going to turn this over to Janet and just very quickly allow her to wrap us up Sure, I think Carolyn and I will both do that but we want you guys to there's a lot of information and as Caitlin's been saying this will be emailed to folks that signed up for the webinar it will be available online but we want you to think about you've heard this presentation you've seen the resources now what what are you going to do and so we've offered a few suggestions for you with regard to always consider what your instructional goal is think about your management plan and how you're going to actually do what it is you want to do the mobile devices in the classroom practice guide should help with that we encourage you to try the resources from the various from all the different and experiment with them and then stay informed use the blogs and curation sites to refine your toolbox and your practices so those are some of our suggestions about what to do next we definitely want you guys to think about what you want to do next and how to do things and we also have some questions and we'll look for some comments from you guys we're just a couple of minutes over so we could entertain maybe just a brief question about chat or what we would really like to know from you are a couple of things one is what are the future topics that you would like to see addressed in a webinar and if you could use your chat function to enter that information we'd be very grateful to have it as we're planning our upcoming events and if you can hold on for just a minute or so longer after this slide there will be a link to an evaluation your feedback is extremely helpful to us we apologize for the technical difficulties and otherwise look forward to hearing from you so let's see we've got a few things that are coming in in the chat oh that's nice you guys are so nice okay wonderful and don't forget of course that this will be archived so you can go back at your leisure to review and I believe I've seen in the chat that several people have asked for information to be sent through email so we'll certainly do that thank you so much for your participation today on a snowy day on the east coast I hope the sun is shining where you are okay thank you everyone