While some in our TESL Ontario community continue working through March Break (perhaps you had your break in February if you work in higher education), many of us will be taking a breather from our classes. Whether you will be enjoying time to relax at home, or will be getting away from it all, March Break is a great time to take a few moments to catch up on some blogs you missed.
To that end, here are a few more recent blogs that we hope will be beneficial to your practice: Continue reading
“Active learning engages students in the process of learning through activities and/or discussion in class, as opposed to passively listening to an expert” (Freeman et al., 2014).
One tool that has made active learning more possible in my classes is Mentimeter.
Whether we teach a class in person or we teach an online synchronous course, Mentimeter can accommodate engaging large groups of audiences. If we teach a class implementing Bloom’s Taxonomy approach, Mentimeter can be a great tool in developing a successful and engaging lesson. Continue reading
If you do not have a permanent, year-round teaching contract in Ontario, I am sure that you have considered alternative careers or income streams from time to time. We all have our own reasons for our professional situations whether they are extrinsic or intrinsic. As I see it, there are five paths forward for short-term, contract ESL instructors in our sector:
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Written by Reza Mazloom-Farzaghy, Accreditation Services Manager, TESL Ontario
Equipped with OCELT (Ontario Certified English Language Teacher) certification, job seekers have access to employment opportunities across a broad spectrum of teaching sectors in Ontario and beyond.
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Introduction
In 2018, Beth Beardall posted that reading advances learner grammar comprehension, vocabulary, writing skills, critical thinking skills and speaking fluency in the post Reading, Reading, Reading. Why it is so important! One way to assist your learners with reading is to encourage them to use the Microsoft Immersive Reader tool.
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In my last blog, I wrote about the educational movements and how they have encouraged new methods of viewing teaching and learning. They have also made room for new forms of content delivery to be developed. One of the more recent developments in content delivery, which is becoming popular in language teaching, is Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), or “learning by doing.” Learning by doing can be defined as performing an action, i.e. enactment; in comparison, other ways of learning something are learning by viewing or learning by listening (Steffens et al., 2015). There is a general assumption that learning by doing creates better memories of an event or action, and so styles like TBLT are becoming more popular.
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Teaching research writing and communication courses has been one of the best experiences I have had in my teaching career so far. One of the challenges, however, has been encouraging students to read articles before joining classes. These reading articles are a prerequisite for our students to complete a series of reflective reading and writing practices. Therefore, I have started taking advantage of TED Talks as a not so state-of-the-art, but practical resource for a college communication course. Here are a few ways I use this resource in my classes:
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Is it possible for a language to become outdated? Daniel Tammet (2018) answered this question in Every Word Is A Bird: “Language never stops.” “Language evolves over time to reflect the way understanding and beliefs change” (Lellman, 2021). Some expressions that were common a few years ago might not be so common now. This has made choosing good materials more challenging when it comes to real-world language learning.
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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:
H5P has become a buzzword since we adapted to online learning. It has been touted as a way to integrate interactive, self-assessing, and media-rich learning objects into an online course. This is true, but many instructors quickly learned that even though H5P presents a relatively intuitive authoring method, the number of tools and associated options make this process overwhelming.
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