ESL teachers and students alike had a hard time transitioning online when COVID-19 hit.
Benefits of Online Learning for Students
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Category Archives: Online learning
Have a Holly Jolly Practice!
You may be wondering if you need to send off students with some work over the holidays to make sure they keep practicing. The reality is that everyone wants to feel free for a couple of days! So why not make the practice fun for them?!
Due to COVID students probably are spending most of their time at home, so they may thrive watching fun movies or exploring websites. Here are some fun websites that your students could use to practice their English language skills for free:
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Social Presence in Online Learning
In a virtual or distance learning environment, social presence is essentially the feeling of being together. It can be quite challenging for both learners and instructors to project emotional and/or physical experiences in online learning, and this is a much-studied phenomenon. However, if we as instructors can consider this dimension of online learning in how we conduct our courses and interact with our students, we can help mitigate the stress and uncertainties of the sudden changeover to online delivery. Continue reading
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I fell off my chair during my online class!
Teachers have always been associated with having a lot of movement in their workplace. The nature of teaching and checking on students always allowed teachers to be ambulant and move around the classroom. However, COVID-19 has sent most ESL teachers home and behind their laptops all day long. Besides physical issues that sedentary behaviour can bring to everyone, it can affect the creativity and eagerness of teachers despite their good intentions. Here are five tips for those at home who feel the pain in their back and knees and want a change!
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Organizing Teaching Materials in Google Classroom
No matter how trivial it sounds, in an online class the organization of course content is absolutely essential. Let me share a few practical observations.
1. Materials and Assessments
The most basic organizational tenet of an online classroom stems from the platform itself: in my case it was Google Classroom which gives an opportunity to divide learning content into assignments, quiz assignments, questions, and materials within a section called Classwork. It is a slight deviation from the terminology usually employed in the LINC/ESL world, but one easy for learners to accept. Understanding the distinction between materials and the other options is primarily important for students.
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#TESLONCHAT + #CDNELTCHAT: JOIN THE CHAT ON FRIDAY!
If you’re a Twitter user, join the next #CdnELTchat (in partnership with #TESL ONchat) on Friday, October 23. Below is a recap of the September 29 chat written by #CdnELTchat moderator Jennifer Chow.
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Online Teaching Reflections
Some of my primary concerns about this current online world of teaching are the creation of community and how to effectively engage learners.
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I write, therefore I am? Go hybrid in online language teaching
As Eva Hoffman quipped, “We live forward, but we understand backwards.” Hence, I’ve done a recount of my experience as a LINC instructor of advanced online classes during the pandemic and a student myself of different online courses from Additional Basic Qualification courses at OISE, to my own French lessons, transformed during the pandemic into Zoom meetings. An issue that captured my special attention was the rationale for the hybrid mode of the remote ESL teaching.
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Teaching with Wet Paint
As the transformation to full online teaching continues, many instructors are unwittingly becoming instructional design-developers. Some are adding study sets to Quizlet, others are hastily making Kahoots, while still others are using more ambitious tools such as H5P, Hot Potatoes and ScreenCastify to create more complicated learning experiences that enhance their online lessons. To generate timely, interactive, engaging and diverse learning opportunities for our students, many of us are creating digital learning objects on the fly.
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#CdnELTchat: Join the Chat on Tuesday!
If you’re a Twitter user, join the next #CdnELTchat on Tuesday, September 29. Below is a recap of the September 15 chat written by #CdnELTchat moderator Bonnie Nicholas.
The #CdnELTchat community returned from our summer hiatus with a Welcome back! informal chat.
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