Wednesday, January 9, 2019

TELL Assignment #1: SMORE Newsletter On Advocating for ELL

Provide a reflective write up using Smore (https://www.smore.com/) based on the module. How can you use the essential strategies and ideas to allow you to make changes, implement news ideas, be supportive and be an advocate for ELLs, parents, staff and administrators? How have you grown from this module as an educator? Where and what you do plan to do now? What is meaningful to you from this module?

As an advocate for ELL students, I am trying my best everyday to make sure that I have made the materials as accessible to students as possible, if a student doesn't understand, it is because I didn't give them the time I needed to. My students will always understand. Although the understanding of quality is sometimes "lost in translation" (apparently), the idea is still getting across and the is quite authentic for what I am looking for.

For parents, I would like to be an advocate by using things like Edmodo or "guardian signatures" in which students need to collect the signatures of their parents/guardians based on when they finish the work. In using Edmodo, parents are able to join to see what their students are doing as well as contact the teacher directly. Our school  has students, parents and teachers on Pearson's "Power School/Power Teacher" APP, however there is no direct communication between the parties.

If I could do something to bring the parents closer to the school community, I would be asking (as an administrator) that departments are running events once a month (one month for each department roughly) in which the departments are showcasing their students based on merits that are being acknowledged that month and then have parents invited. It is quite doable because our Drama department has about two months of the year taken care of. The Science fair would be a month. The food and nutrition classes could easily take a month. We have an "English Ambassador" student committee that could also use a month of time easily. This is not even yet mentioning the copious amounts of sports played throughout the year.

This module was actually difficult, these topics are not really things I ever stop considering-these are my daily concerns and some of which are issues I don't ever think I will be able to resolve in the my daily work, let alone the world. But if I were to chose a place to start, this module has made me believe that a Documentary project I have constructed and been tweaking since, would be an excellent place to start. Offering the school community to come together and enjoy student created documentaries, I think this might also be a note worthy time to have parents come visit the school and see their Grade 12 children (students) excel in one or all aspects of the English language.

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