Week 1 - Intrduction to ELA

Within the new technological paradigm of teaching, more and more tools are being offered to teachers to help students enhance their learning. One of the tools that really stands out to me is the iPad. Its touch screen makes it very user friendly for younger students in the elementary school level. With the wide variety of apps available at your fingertips, there is an app or tool that can greatly help students of all different learning styles be successful in the classroom.

Reading:

With the iPad, you can download books that are level-appropriate for individual students with a variety of options to suit the students’ learning styles. There are options such as:

 “Read to me” where the book is read to the students while they follow along word by word. What’s great about this is that it’s not a robot voice just saying words, but it is a voice that the students enjoy hearing and each word is highlighted as the word is being said.  

“Languages for ESL Students” where students can read the book in their native language,

“Record your Voice” feature lets students record their voice while reading the story, and giving the teacher the option to save it. This is a great option to show growth within the students’ reading skills.

Writing:

With the iPad, there are different kinds of apps that improve a student’s writing abilities by taking notes, outlining, creating graphic organizers and even the basics of tracing your finger to make upper case and lower case letters.

Speaking/Listening:

Particular apps give students the opportunity to say things and record their voices for both fun and the use of the iPad in the classroom. With speaking and listening apps, the students can use a microphone located in the headphones, or use the microphone that is built into the iPad to hear their voice and listen to their recordings. These types of apps are very engaging for young learners and have no idea that they are learning!

Also, certain books give the user the option to read the story out loud and play it back to hear their voice. This is a great progress monitoring tool for teachers to record student data and to help them develop into better readers.

Language:

The possibilities for the use of the iPad are almost limitless! One can even learn how to speak another language just from using the iPad! These kinds of features are great for students either studying a language, want to improve the language of their native language or for ESL students that cannot communicate through the English language that well. There are features and apps that utilize the iPad’s capability to record voice narration and can narrate text in all different languages. The use of these tools is a great way to incorporate the iPad not only for instructional use, but for fun as well.

Media/Technology:

Since iPads are becoming more and more popular, it makes students very eager to use them in any setting (home or school). With that being said, why not utilize the iPad as much as possible in the classroom setting? There are a plethora of tools, techniques and apps to utilize student learning and development throughout the great use of this piece of technology. It gives the students motivation to learn kinesthetically rather than just pencil and paper techniques. They can conduct research for book reports, view interactive textbooks, and play games that enhance learning of all subjects!

ELA Teacher Interview:

I interviewed a colleague about the challenges of integrating technology in the teaching of ELA/Literacy. There are many challenges that she is facing with the use of technology in teaching ELA/Literacy. In her classroom, there is a SMARTboard, and two computers. These are the only pieces of technology that the school provides in the classroom. However, she likes to improvise when teaching. What this teacher likes to do is use a voice recorder as a microphone when telling stories. I think this is a great idea because it gives the students the feeling that they are on a stage and it gives the teacher ways to monitor language and reading throughout the year.

My school is currently in the process of incorporating iPads. There will be a cart with 25 iPads that teachers can sign up for to utilize the tools of this device. I’ll be sure to give you updates as the semester goes on!