Category Archives: Designing

Web Accessibility for Language Teachers


Written by - John Allan @mrpottz

Educational digital accessibility is often viewed as a set of practices  dedicated that assist disabled individuals with challenges to participate in online and blended courses.  In fact, accessibility practices endeavor to more than eliminate barriers to education; they ensure that digital content is enhanced for everyone. Digital accessibility practices are something we all should practice because: 

  • they remove barriers to education and training
  • legislation requires accessibility across Canada 
  • many Canadians live with at least 1 disability 
  • they improve all digital resources for all users 
  • it is the right thing to do 

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SAMR Says, Part II


Written by - Sarah Langridge
Image taken from: Schoology

SAMR Says

Change is never comfortable, but, as we all know, it is necessary. The SAMR model is flexible and easy to use at all levels of education. To read about ‘Substitution’ and ‘Augmentation,’ please check out SAMR Says, Part I, where we discussed these stages of ‘Enhancement’ and some simple and fast tools you can find to help you move from paper to online without much stress or extra work. Using technology tools that enhance your class, as per the SAMR model, means that you are enhancing yourself, the material, and the students’ experience too.

In this blog, we will be discussing the stages of ‘Transformation’ and how to modify and redefine your approach to allow for more technology in your class.

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Good Habits for Managing Learning Material


Written by - John Allan @mrpottz
Image taken from: Unsplash

Introduction

Over the past months, thousands of language instructors across Canada have been unwittingly or intentionally taking on instructional developer responsibilities. They have been cobbling together, rearranging, and refining digital resources and activities from various sources to meet the needs of their students. Many instructors have been generating original learning resources to fill in gaps that appear while teaching online.

Usually, learning materials are prepared ‘on-the-fly’ to anticipate or adapt to challenges that arise from our classroom lessons. What happens to these documents? Often, they are forgotten on a computer drive and discovered on a slow day when you are considering which files to remove to free up hard drive space. These files are hastily named, filed, and saved, so they are lost.  Sometimes, it is too much trouble to save and properly file a document that is created just before your online class is about to start. If you are currently teaching online, I am sure you will agree with this! Continue reading →

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Effective Online Tools & Resources for Teachers and Learners


Written by - Guest Contributor
Education, distance education, internet studying, e-learning flat vector illustration. Online classes, training courses, tutorials, online education design for mobile and web graphics
Image source: www.bigstockphoto.com

Over the past two years, I have been attending a lot of webinars, presentations, conferences, dialogues and online courses. I’ve also been reading blogs and articles as well as doing presentations and writing blogposts. I’ve gained knowledge and collected remarkable resources. Tools like the ones below can help us design tasks that will engage and motivate our learners.

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I fell off my chair during my online class!


Written by - Azi Pordel
Happy Asian woman in hijab raising arms and stretching body while working with laptop in cozy cafe
Image Source: Bigstockphoto.com

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


Written by - Guest Contributor
E-learning graphic organizer depicting a computer screen.
Image by B_A from Pixabay

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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Teaching with Wet Paint


Written by - John Allan @mrpottz
image source: unsplash.com Amauri Mejia

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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Summary of the #EdTech discussion with John Allan


Written by - teslontario

September 4, 2020 marked another successful and fruitful discussion on Twitter, through the #teslONchat hashtag. We discussed #EdTech with John Allan – @mrpottz

This chat explored the topic of education technology in terms of instructors and administrators rethinking their previous choices of edtech for online teaching. Continue reading →

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Adapting lesson plans for online teaching


Written by - Azi Pordel
A PowerPoint slide titled, "PowerPoint Design," illustrating design ideas from PowerPoint
Image source: Jessica Freitag via PowerPoint Design

Awkward silence and staring at the screen while not knowing what happens next are what students may experience during an online session. On the other side, however, the instructor is trying hard to pull up a file for the next activity. You may think naming the activities of the day will do the job, but perhaps a bit of visual aid helps keeping the plan in mind both for the students and teachers. This is where an electronic version of a lesson plan might play a role.

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