Last week, I was working on creating an Innovative Learning Plan in my CEP 811 course that enhance students’ learning experience. I shared my plan with other peers and gave and received feedback through the lens of UDL and Intersectionality. Today, I wanted to reflect on this experience.
Technology plays an essential role in teaching. Students need to explore and learn in multiple formats; therefore, implementing new strategies is crucial for educators. Working with ESL students this year changed my perspective on how we acquire knowledge and the need to use other ways to support their learning process. For this reason, I decided to find an app for English learners that facilitates this experience.
I chose ELSA, an artificial Intelligence Coach that helps students learn at their own pace, specifically in the areas of speaking and pronunciation. ELSA includes a personalized plan, tracks students’ progress, and provides immediate feedback so learners can identify their strengths and focus on the areas of improvement. The idea of using ELSA is that students can demonstrate an understanding of the English language through real-life situations, which is the main goal of my Innovative Learning Plan, which focuses on practicing role-play scenarios to produce language more naturally.
The following steps show how ELSA works:
“Testing ELSA” by Camila Mendez is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
Giving and receiving feedback
After reflecting on UDL and Intersectionality in the past few weeks, I was able to understand these important concepts deeply and analyzed my peers’ work from a specific perspective. For example, I identified UDL principles in some parts of the lesson and other aspects that could enrich the learning experience by implementing UDL strategies. From the perspective of Intersectionality, I used information related to gender bias and tried to connect some aspects that could enrich the students’ experience. Giving feedback to my peers helped me learn about other perspectives and ideas on creating effective lesson plans in different environments and grade levels. After receiving feedback from my peers and instructor, I wanted to improve my lesson, and I made the following changes:
Role-play scenarios: I include more details on how students will create their performance and practice this activity using ELSA and during tutoring sessions.
ELSA: a specific description of how the AI coach will help develop language skills.
Rubric: Adding a Rubric in order to help students understand the learning goals and summative assessment.
Timed lesson: include specific times for each activity to maintain clear learning objectives during the lesson or tutoring session.
I have also been considering other options for presenting the content that might be customized with ELSA. However, the priority will be to focus on using the features provided by the app and eventually explore other alternatives on how to display the information. Using ELSA, will help one of the aspects I would like students to focus on, which is developing their speaking skills and speech articulation. “Technological tools like the internet, podcasts, video conferencing, videos, and speech recognition software are considered the best tools for teaching speaking skills and using such tools have been regarded as ways of helping students improve language skills” (Bahadorfar and Omidvar, 2014, p 959).
In addition, I researched the benefits of implementing technology in the classroom, and I found a study by Wei Wang that helped me reflect on the efficiency of using app-assisted technology to boost students’ motivation and diversify the teaching and learning experience. The study demonstrates that app-assisted technology improves many aspects of acquiring knowledge and develops learners’ ability to retain information. “Compared with the traditional teaching mode, education app-assisted learners teaching technology can promote knowledge memory and migration better and help students master the learning method effectively and use learning strategies flexibly”. (Wang, 2022, p 13).
Sources
Wang, W. (2022). Influences of Education App-Assisted Teaching Technology on Learning Efficacy of Learners. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning. Vol. 17 Issue 21, p4-16, 13p; DOI: 10.3991/ijet.v17i21.35369
Sosas, R.V. (2021). Technology in teaching speaking and its effects to students learning English. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 17(2), 958-970. Doi: 10.52462/jlls.66
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Commentaires