Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Creating TedED Lessons


A valuable way to test student's knowledge of a video that you are showing in class can now go beyond a fill-in-the-blank handout. If you're ready to step out of the monotony, I've got a solution for you. TedED gives you a way to create a lesson alongside a video of your choice. Aside from being a useful website for creating these lessons, there are also TedTalks which have endless amounts of topics and are educational. You may also do lessons on these! It's a creative new way to test students on what they are watching. Among multiple choice answers, you can also direct students to outside links to further research the topic as well as having open-ended and discussion questions. The possibilities are endless!
I created a possible lesson for ESOL students about metaphors. Not only does the video explain about the meaning of a metaphor and its uses, during the entire video the language used is almost all symbolic with a constant use of metaphors. ESOL students may not understand what she is saying in all of her metaphors but from watching this video, I guarantee that they will at least learn a few. It's important to show students real life uses of the language skills that they are learning. My lesson, A Lesson on Metaphors, hits various New York State Standards. One standard that stood out to me while creating this lesson was Standard 2, Language for Literary Response and Expression.  Metaphors, as shown in the video and outside links I provided, are a huge part of communication in English. We connect with people and symbolize our world using metaphors. For students to better express themselves both in writing and orally, it's important that they can use or at least recognize metaphors when they see them and that's why this video and TedED lesson is so important. To test if students are understanding metaphors presented to them in the video, I have an open-ended discussion question that I will ask students to answer. It asks students to pick a metaphor that they hear in the video and try to describe what it is saying/what it means. By looking at student's answers I will be able to check for comprehension of what a metaphor is and see if they can break it down and explain it further. Thanks for listening everyone, I hope I could provide a great resource for you!

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