Last night, I had the pleasure of hosting a prize-winning American author, Joan Leegant, at my end-of-semester meeting for faculty. We are grateful to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv for bringing Joan to the country and funding her work with our lecturers and students. What an exciting way to conclude one of our most challenging semesters. We met on Zoom to be inspired by Joan and to process our thoughts, emotions and memories in writing. Joan provided spectacular creative visuals and literary pieces as prompts. As a group, we observed unique, thought-provoking images and listened to beautiful poetry and song lyrics. In response, we took the time to reflect…
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Meet Nearpod: A game-changing tool for student engagement – EARLI 2023
Thessaloniki August 2023 This week I will be presenting at the 20th Biennial EARLI Conference, hosted by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Macedonia, Greece. The conference theme is “Education as a Hope in Uncertain Times”. I will be presenting a 90-minute ICT demonstration and sharing my work with Nearpod interactive presentations. I will share all of the materials relevant to the presentation here and will share this post with the audience at the conference. My session is on Friday, August 25th, from 8:00 – 9:30. ICT DEMONSTRATION Meet Nearpod: A game-changing tool for student engagement Abstract In this hands-on, interactive techno-pedagogical demonstration, we will explore Nearpod, a…
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Stay on top of online learning: A game
Here is a game I made for my undergraduate students during the pandemic. As we moved rapidly to online teaching and learning, we spoke explicitly about independent learning strategies. I feel a need to return to this game now in my online courses. I made the game on the free LearningApps.org site. You can access the game here with the QR code. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you play or share the game with students.
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One of my favourite digital tools – Quizizz
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Weekly emails: Helping students stay on track
Throughout the last academic year, I sent students weekly emails in each of my courses; I aimed to keep students connected during the period of extreme social distancing. Some of my courses were asynchronous, some were synchronous (via Zoom), and others were a flipped classroom format (asynchronous study units in preparation for synchronous classes on Zoom). I spent time and effort creating those emails and was determined that they wouldn’t get lost in the tsunami of correspondence that students receive from the college and beyond. I am happy to report that in interviews for my research, I heard from several students that the emails were helpful and supportive during the…
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Chat stations: Moving a favourite teaching strategy online
I am always searching for ways to encourage my students to be active and involved in the lesson; I aim for all to be engaged in the discussion. A whole-class discussion usually means a few students contributing, directing most of the comments to the teacher ping pong style. Even if the teacher decides to hear every group member, it can only ever be a short statement because of time limitations.I follow and deeply admire Jennifer Gonzales, a teacher blogger at Cult of Pedagogy. A few years ago, Gonzales wrote a post on ‘chat stations’, a teaching strategy that resonated with me, and I adopted it immediately. The simple idea involves…
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It’s not homework!
This morning I want to share one of the issues I grappled with this year in my online flipped learning courses for pre-service teachers. For those unfamiliar with the concept of flipped learning, here is a short explanation: Before I describe my experience, I will remind myself and my readers that this wasn’t a routine online learning situation; this was learning forced online in response to the pandemic. My students were learning 100% online for most of the year and were participating in a wide range of courses presented in different ways. Many students were struggling academically and financially, some were juggling study with small children present, and others were working…
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Building community through student choice
I have just finished teaching ‘Rhetoric Skills: Theory and Practice’. It’s the first time I have taught the semester-long course for first-year BA and preservice teachers and retraining students studying towards their teaching certificate in EFL. Due to the college closure and three periods of lockdown during the semester, I taught the course online. I have already written about my informal meetings with some of the students here. The cohort made up of 42 students was heterogeneous and included students from many Israeli cultural groups. Meeting with Jewish students, both religious and secular, Christians and Muslims from a broad geographical radius in the north of Israel, made the experience richer…
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Is reaching out to each student viable?
This week, a fortnight before the end of the semester, I wondered about one of my students. I wasn’t sure that he is up to date with the tasks, although he certainly was earlier in the semester. I began scanning the units of individual work to check on him. I was right! I saw that he stopped doing the tasks a few weeks ago. Is there a problem? Maybe he is sick or in quarantine? Questions were racing through my head, and then it dawned on me that there might be other students in the same position. Going through the lists of tasks and student names, I decided to write…
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Classroom observation 2020: As bizarre as it gets!
This week I observed one of my pre-service teachers in an English lesson. It was the student’s first observation, and I was eager to see how she is progressing. I thought I knew what to expect; after all, this is my third year working with students in their school practicum. What did I know in advance? I knew the student would teach via Zoom, as she teaches in another school and because of COVID 19, can’t be exposed to other groups of pupils. She has never met the pupils face-to-face. After reading the lesson plan and giving feedback twice, I knew what material the class would learn and how. I…
