Musser ESOL Tech Blog

Personalization: It's the word on the tip of everyone's tongue in education right now, but honestly, how many of us know what it really looks like?  How often are we able to truly personalize instruction on the individual level?  I mean differentiating assignments for several different small groups of students within a class is challenging enough. How can we consistently tailor our teaching and assignments to each of our individual students, especially when we might see up to 120 of them everyday? I read an excellent article from Edweek.org this week entitled, " Defining Personalization: Students As Agents and Teachers As Coaches ," in which the author explores a number of key aspects of what it means to truly personalize instruction.  The author related personalization to differentiation and explained that in a truly personalized classroom, " students become active agents  involved in determining  what  they learn (content),  how and how fast  ...

The most interesting piece to come across my google alert digests this week was a Master's Thesis entitled, “Put it in your Story”: Digital Storytelling in Instagram and Snapchat Stories"  in which the author explores the narrative structure and patterns of digital stories created through Snapchat and Instagram.  The author identifies several typical story topics, including eating, animals, people, self-portraits, environment, interacting, and demonstrating emotions.  When I read through this list, I immediately thought of how these basic categories cover much of what constitutes an individual's culture, and as such reflect the societal culture in which the stories are created.  If this is true, then to my mind this paper lends even more credence to the idea of using digital storytelling in the L2 classroom, since it not only represents an effective way to explore cultural identity but one that is organic to the lifestyles of many of our socially-connected students. ...

An interesting piece that came across in my daily digests this week was an article by Laura Hamilton from Scotland's National Newspaper, The Scotsman, entitled " Brands and Storytelling in the Digital Age ."   I was struck by the second sentence in this piece, which states, " In our hyper-connected society, we consume information more quickly and vociferously than ever before but also increasingly in a more cynical and critical manner." Now, I am sure we've all heard truisms about how we're all suffering from information overload before, but the opening sentence of Hamilton's piece got me thinking about just how much information is out there, which led me to this interesting nugget from a TechCrunch article: We now create more information in 2 days times as we did from the dawn of civilization until the year 2003. ( https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/ ) Now that's a lot of data!   According to Hamilton, the way to break though all t...

The highlight of this week's Google alert daily digests for me was an article from The News Herald about a personalized learning symposium taking place in Northeast Ohio this week. The article itself was just your basic "5W" piece on the event itself, but it linked back to an earlier piece in Education Week that attempted to define the key traits of personalized learning, and it was that article that I found quite thought provoking. According to the Education Week piece, personalized learning is competency-based and flexible while making some use of both personalized learning pathways and learner profiles. Each of these facets represents some serious pedagogical questions that I would be willing to wager most educators (if they were being completely honest) would struggle to answer.  I could devote and entire blog post to each of these facets  (Maybe in future weeks?) but today I'd like to focus on the competency-based piece. About the ONLY place in my district ...

This week I read about a pretty wide variety of things. I began the week with an article on a public library in Edmonton, CA that held a festival to connect local authors and readers.  The main thrust of the program was to empower people to tell their own stories, and one way this was done was through an introduction to digital storytelling. I found myself nodding in agreement as I read this piece, since I know digital storytelling to be an incredibly powerful means of expression that can open up students who are reluctant to write by broadening their perspective on what storytelling and "writing" is really all about. Another piece that popped up in my alert digest was a press release from the "Digital Narrative Alliance" promoting the upcoming Narrative Summit in the SF Bay area.  The goal of this group is to discuss, "di gital storytelling and methods for implementing change through evolving channels for distracted audiences."  I found this line interest...