Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Webinar Review

Being an English teacher, I decided the webinar that would be the most interesting and applicable to my career was the first one on the list that talked about grammar rules and ways to include students' grammar. The webinar speaker, Jeff, discussed the ways in which the website, noredink.com can help include kids' grammer and make the lives of English teachers, like me, way easier. Throughout the webinar, Jeff went through the website talking about the cool and engaging feature of the website and how it greatly improves the lives of teachers and students!

There is so much that I could write about based on my feedback from watching the webinar. However, I will just focus on a couple of cool items that I saw. My initial reaction to the webinar was how cool it was to sit in my sweatpants listening to a bunch of other teachers interested in ways to improve grammar teaching skills and methods. It was like being at a conference, only sitting in my living room with a giant blanket. I can definitely see myself taking advantage of opportunities to watch and participate in webinars in the future. They are a great resource for getting new ideas and improving teaching methods, and I want to take advantage of that as much as I can.

In response to the website that Jeff discussed in the webinar, www.noredink.com, all I can say is that I was amazed. While I am not completely sold on too many online sources for teaching, this one was really cool. Jeff explained that the objective for the website is to promote students to be engaged in learning, and for students and teachers to see improvement easily. I was very impressed by how easy it is to see improvement on this website. There are several tables on different parts of the website where students' scores are kept so that teachers and students can easily see scores improving over the school year.

Another aspect of the website that I want to comment on is the quiz generating feature that it had. The website made it very easy for teachers to make quizzes based on specific grammar rules. For example, if students are struggling on specifically apostrophes, a teacher can generate a quiz on No Red Ink that is only on apostrophes. With the quizzes, teachers can go through their students and see individual progress, along with specific things like the time and number of tries it took a particular student to get an answer right. I thought this was really cool. If I know a student did really terrible on a quiz, I could go through and see exactly what they did wrong in each attempt of the quiz question along with how many tries it finally took them to get it right. This could really help teachers keep track of the struggling students. Anymore in education, so much emphasis is placed on improving the achievement gap and managing each of your students individually as much as possible. This website makes keeping track of individual students' learning pretty manageable, and I was impressed by this.

One downfall that I saw in regards to this website is the same downfall that comes along with any online resource/learning tool: There are always going to be students who don't have computers at home. I feel that the best use of this website would be for homework quizzes and assignments, and if there are some students who don't have computers at home, than it would be unfair to assign an online assessment. Furthermore, I would hesitate to use too much classroom time to go to a computer lab and work on the website. However, at the end of the day, I think that it is a good resource to have and use, especially for grammar. The instantaneous answers that the computer would give students would make it an efficient way to pick up on the patterns and rules of grammar, and to practice them.

My mentor teacher does grammar for the first 10 minutes of each class. She has the students write a sentence on a piece of paper and then trade sentences with a partner. From there, each student writes the parts of speech above each word in the sentence. This is an efficient, quick way to get a little bit of grammar/writing practice at the beginning of each class. However, it doesn't necessarily offer repetitive practice to the students who especially do not understand certain parts of speech. No Red Ink would offer those students the practice that they need and allow them to then do better putting it all together in the sentence activity. The website would be a good addition to my mentor teacher's classroom, and probably something that I will utilize in my future classroom.



1 comment:

  1. Excellent work, Abby! Detailed, references specifics, and makes a concrete connection to your classroom. Bravo!

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