Teacher's Toolkit

Today I checked out the ELA Standards and Technology Matrix for grades 11-12. The standard that I chose to look at was LAFS.1112.L.3.4. This standard is the ability to deduce the meaning of an unfamiliar term through context clues and familiar words that may help. I feel prepared to teach this standard because having learned English as a foreign language, I have many years of personal experience in using context to fill in the blanks of words I don't know.

My focus is to teach foreign languages in high school, so I went to the CPalms Educator Toolkit and selected World Languages for grades 9-12. The standard I chose to look into WL.K12.NM.3.1, where students are able to introduce themselves in a simple way that would sound natural to native speakers. This is a good way to create an immediate connection for new speakers, whose language barrier could otherwise make it much more difficult to connect to others in the early stages. A simple point of communication to start a more complex conversation is extremely important to someone in the novice to low fluency levels.

The ability to efficiently search the internet is very important for a teacher in this era. I can remember many times where teachers have had an issue with embedded links or videos, and then struggled to find the page online, wasting a lot of class time. I think that the most useful trick we covered in class was the use of the "-" key to exclude terms from the search results. This can be useful particularly in my minor of Art History, where many terms have a completely different meaning to what they mean in other fields like science or history.