“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
Malcom X
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Teaching and learning
Teaching and learning
On this page, you will find artifacts that speak to my teaching and learning experiences on the field over the last two years.
Padlet is a platform that I discovered on the field in 2020. At its most basic form, Padlet is a digital visual board where students and teachers can work collaboratively to create a variety of work stations. There is a wide array of boards that are already pre-made that individuals can adapt to their educational needs. I particularly find the 'World Map' option very useful in a classroom. This board allows users to submit entries all around the world, add text, and insert media. It is a great resource for an ESL classroom as it allows the teacher to monitor student writing and the final product usually shows entries all over the map, which can trigger a thought provoking discussion on diversity. As an example, last year, I used the ‘World Map’ from Padlet with my students, while we were online learning due to the pandemic. I asked my students to identify on the map the city they were born in, a city they have visited, and a city they would like to visit. In the picture above, you can see a screenshot of the final product, which shows the great diversity that existed in my classroom. I learned a lot about my students that day and we connected on a personal level while sharing our diverse backgrounds and experiences, which was greatly appreciated through screens. This activity shows my proficiency in enacting Professional Competency 7: Take into account student diversity. By asking students to share the city where they were born, I invite them to share an insight into their cultural background. However, they are free to write what they want about it, which does not force them to share information they would rather keep private. In addition, this activity encourages students that might feel like they have nothing interesting to share, as they can talk about places they aspire to visit someday. In addition, the use of this digital resource during online learning to enhance my students' experience demonstrate my development of Professional Competency 12: Mobilize digital technologies.
During my second field experience, I was tasked to create an activity for students on the topic of schools around the world, which was the topic of their final evaluation situation. While looking through the documents of this evaluation situation, I stumbled upon an activity that asked students to create a mind map with key words outlining the features of a school. I immediately noticed that it was not formatted in a way that is visually pleasing, and it was not easy to use for students. For this reason, I decided to incorporate a mind map in my activity, while making sure to create it in a way that is easier for students to use. I did some research and found the platform Venngage, which helps designers create graphics, such as mind maps. It is a great tool for teachers to use when they want to represent information and/or classroom content in a way that accessible for students with visual learning abilities. This thought towards different learning abilities demonstrates my enactment of Professional Competency 7: Take into account student diversity, as I adapt my resources for students’ different needs. The top image on the right is the mind map I created for the activity mentioned. The one on the bottom right is a pre-made graphic from the website that I would potentially use in my future teaching.
During my second field experience, which happened in May 2022, I entered classrooms that were starting their final evaluation situations for the end of the year. Due to the fact that I arrived at the end of the year, a crucial time for all teachers to collect evaluations and make final remarks on their students’ abilities and development, I had to closely follow the already established curriculum and projects put in place by my CT. During my initial observations on the field, as students worked on those final evaluation situations, I noticed that students of a same group were all at different levels of proficiency in English. This created situations where some students were way ahead in their work, while others were falling behind. For this reason, I created word search and crossword puzzle activities to use in class. These activities were on the subject of the final evaluation situation, in order to reinforce the vocabulary used. Furthermore, these were intended as ‘filler activities’ that serve a pedagogical purpose. The creation of these activities shows my thought toward Professional Competency 6: Manage how the classroom operates, as it kept students that had completed their work busy on a productive pedagogical task, rather than simply doing nothing, scrolling on their phones, bothering their classmates, or any other distracting and unhelpful behaviour.
Below, you will find the word search and crossword puzzle activities I created. There is one of each for the subject of Schools Around the World, and one of each for the subject of Teenagers’ Lives in the 1950’s.
crossword-schools-around-the-world.pdfSchools word search.pdfThe 1950s Crossword.pdfThe 1950's Word Search.pdfI used the following websites to create these activities.
https://worksheets.theteacherscorner.net/make-your-own/crossword/
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