My Old Blog

There is growing discussion around the term "personalized learning" in British Columbia. The idea behind personalized learning is that students can have their learning experiences and instruction customized to fit their abilities and learning preferences.  I like to think of personalized learning as a buffet of several choices of items that the learner can choose from.  The intent is to ensure the learner is getting the most out of his/her learning journey. basykeyes (Flickr) When I think of personalized learning, what comes to mind is a student being able to listen to an audio version of a chapter in a book on her mp3 player while reading along; she can then go to Khan Academy and watch a video on adding fractions with different denominators while taking notes.  She can replay the video as many times as needed.  She can then go into a learning management platform such as Moodle or Edmodo to ask her peers a question about today's video lecture on the Econom...

Since my last post about using Storybird in the classroom, I must admit that the excitement among students in using this site has begun to wane.  What is interesting to note is that it seems the male students in my class are the ones expressing dissatisfaction.  My female students, on the other hand, seem to generally still show enthusiasm about it all. When asking some of the girls in the class why they like Storybird, the common response is the illustrations.  They love the colorful, cute images.  This got me thinking about what it is the boys would find appealing.  I have boys in my class who love to draw in class.  One of my students has even gone to the lengths of drawing a character representing every boy in my class! So after some searching, I stumbled upon Story Jumper.  This site allows students to design their own illustrations and write stories.  The boys were all over this new site!  Everything from wizards to robots appea...

I have been playing with Symbaloo , a tool used to organize your web spaces.  I see so much benefit to creating a web mix for language learners.  I have created 2 web mixes for French and Spanish classes.  I have created a row of tiles for different categories of resources in my class.  In the French webmix, the first row takes students to our blog and wiki.  The second takes them to the Language Guide's site and Google Translate (for vocabulary help).   The third row takes them to images for their writing prompts.  The fourth row is reserved for reading resources.  The last row is for links to videos that help develop listening skills in French. You can choose to share your webmix with the public or privately with friends.  Symbaloo lets you share via Twitter or Facebook, too. You can customize the appearance of your tiles (change colors, upload your own images). It's your own web mix so why not have fun personalizing it? I h...