"Students Tap Into Technology"

           I managed to find a decent amount of ESL articles this week, but only a few that related to technology in the field.  The one for this week, written by Emma Gosalvez (2017), was about how Penn State Harrisburg students were working on researching and presenting their findings about how best to use technology in the classroom.  I was especially interested in this because I actually live just ten minutes away from the campus and any information on how to best use technology the better. 

            These college students focused on how pre-service teachers face diversity in the classroom and how to reach their students through technology.  Though the article was mostly summarizing the presentation the students gave on this topic, there were some good tips and findings shared as well.  Touching back on the concept of Digital Stories from this past week’s readings, some college students focused on making short informational videos that were presented to teachers, students or their family members, which they found resulted in higher engagement in their classes (Gosalvez, 2017).  They also discovered that when students in a classroom were assigned roles to create these informational videos for others, students were able to express their creativity and learn different skills as they took those roles on (Gosalvez, 2017).  They hope to take these videos further in the future and include interviews of people in their communities and make them more documentary in style. 

            The most interesting point in this article for me was a link (provided below) of a video created to engage ELLs with hip-hop.  It’s a very clever and effective video meant to educate educators in how ELLs learn, statistics on ELLs, and how to effectively reach them through relevant topics such as hip-hop stars.  As students are more likely to know major hip-hop artists over historical figures from hundreds of years ago, they felt incorporating it into lessons would be effective and culturally relevant. 

            I really enjoyed this article as I felt it connected well with the Digital Stories we read about this week.  Though these were college students creating short informational videos aimed at addressing diversity issues educators may deal with, I felt the collaboration and assigned roles could be utilized in any classroom focusing on Digital Stories.  The ELL Hip-Hop video was a good example too of what can be achieved through images, video, and collaboration.  The main thing I took out of this can be best summarized with a quote that, “it’s a matter of how do you take what you have and then maximize it” (Gosalvez, 2017). 

Teaching ELLs through Hip-Hip Link: https://psu.app.box.com/s/snx07ddpal2qcm0ww4tzy2xelwnxdbmr

References

Gosalvez, E. (2017, June 12). Students tap into technology to share research work. Retrieved from http://harrisburg.psu.edu/story/8613/2017/06/12/students-tap-technology-share-research-work