I checked out Devorah Arvukin’s capstone project which was about differentiation in the classroom, without the need to make different lesson plans. It was definitely aimed at fellow educators to show them that you can teach students of varying abilities within the same classroom. I really liked the video introduction on the home page as it set the tone for what the project was about. On her learn more page, I thought it was great to have links to the best tools/apps, but on the right where she listed what you will find on her site, I really wish that those had been live links too. I instinctively tried to click on them and open them, but it wasn’t possible. The graphics on the right hand side denoting lessons, how-tos, references and assessment really drew me in – these were great links! I clicked on the lesson link and it gave me in depth ideas on how I might go about designing a different types of differentiated lesson plans for my students, which was really helpful. I found it quite difficult to navigate my way to her research project, maybe the layout of her capstone website could be improved a little. Lovely links on the standards page and good explanations on what was being presented. She was certainly effective in presenting her project to her target audience on most pages.
The second capstone I reviewed was Ellison’s, which I loved. The graphics were so appealing and the web pages looked so welcoming. Throughout the site there were small graphics which really helped me to understand the topics she was addressing and it helped break up the text into more manageable chunks to read. This capstone too is definitely aimed at the educator, as it talks about teachers needing to up their game and use more tech tools in their lessons as opposed to just students being familiar with them. The author breathed so much enthusiasm into the words that she wrote, it really made me feel as if I would like to try out some of her gaming strategies right away. The webpages within her website really seemed to flow together well.
0 Comments
I have been thinking more and more about my capstone project lately and how it relates to the research that I did previously. When I first started the Masters’ program I was interested in finding out the effects of using Quizlet in the classroom and if that made any difference to student achievement and their engagement. When the results of that study came through, the test scores did not really show that students had learned more than they did when only traditional teaching methods were used. The lower student scores did go up a grade, but the higher scoring students didn’t seem to score quite as well when using Quizlet which was interesting. However, when they were surveyed as how they felt about using technology tools over traditional teaching methods, students overwhelming said that they felt Quizlet and other apps helped them learn more effectively.
Due to these results, I decided to widen my search to include music and song as the source of learning to see if this would help students retain more and for longer. Students were asked to choose a song in the target language and then to select 15 key words that they thought should be learned as they would able their audience to be able to better understand the song. Initially, they circled all the words they already knew in the song and then wrote the English alongside, so that this could be compared with what they knew after they had studied the song. They made an Adobe Spark presentation to present those 15 words to their audience and will then be making a karaoke video so that others can sing along to their song which they will access via a QR code. Once their project is complete, students will fill out a survey about their experiences, & say if music with technology has made a difference in what they learned. The research that I am doing is for fellow educators so that they too can do something similar if it is found that student engagement is improved and if students better retain vocabulary compared to regular teaching methods. (1st study). |