Visual Aid

Visual Aids should be present in every classroom. Many teachers ignore their importance and forget about them. Some don't know how valuable and helpful they could be. Others don't have enough time to prepare them. In all cases, they are missing out on something that can save them a lot of effort for the long run.
Visuals enhance understanding and help students memorize and focus on important information. They also add life to the classroom. Students love them! Teachers can refer back to them for revision instead of writing the information all over again on the board. Therefore, they save teachers time that they can use for something else. Also, they are extremely helpful for visual students who learn by seeing and reading things.


In my class, I make sure to include variety of visuals. I have a big A0 genre chart that has all genres we covered during the year with the features for each and the titles of the selections that belong to each genre. In addition, I use comprehension charts for each selection, others for vocabulary strategies and other vocab cards. Some of them are hand-written. Others are designed and printed.
Take a look at some samples of my work.

A chart to record the genres, features, and titles of selections

A summary of skills and vocab words included in a selection - Designed on Photoshop

Expository Text Features

Historical Fiction Features

Webinar: "Rigor: A Key Principle for High Impact Learning Experiences"

Today, at 12:00 till 1:00 AM, I attended a webinar entitled: "Rigor: A Key Principle for High Impact Learning Experiences". The Webinar was presented by Linda Dove, the Director of learning experiences at MeTEOR Education. She presented a clear and concrete understanding of Rigor and gave a strategy to determine alignment of  complexity to the student task within a supportive learning environment.

She started off her webinar by showing a landscape picture magnified to purple flowers. Then she showed the whole scene that these flowers are part of.

Then she explained that when we talk about Rigor it is important to see the big picture and how everything is connected. So with that in mind we need to connect the pieces to its entirety.

Rigor is  one component in designing quality learning experiences just as the purple flowers were part of the overall picture of a landscape. As educators we need to be very deliberate in that design and in corporation of instructional practices that are going to promote to collaboration, critical thinking, student engagement, curiosity and problem solving skills.


She later mentioned that it is important to modernize our learning environment and have our instructional practices address 21st century skills. We should look at the high impact learning experiences that we design for our students and check if all the components are there.

She then shared the following saying about  student engagement.


How do we help students to find their spark to make their own fire? We do that by creating experiences that include an emotional component, physical component and cognitive component.



So, what is Rigor?
Rigor is about giving students worth their time and investment.  It is defined as the level of complexity plus difficulty. It takes place in an energetic learning environment which is motivating, encouraging and inspiring.
 

Teachers can't change the standards set to achieve by the ministry of education or the complexity level of the standards. If the standard states that students should practice thinking, we can't just settle for recall.
Linda displayed different DOK (complexity) levels and later gave several examples:

 

One of the examples she gave on DOK levels

Afterwards, she explained how rigorous learning experiences affect on the development of the brain.

Finally, she wrapped it up by reading the following saying and answered some questions.


These are only main and brief points of what was covered. I enjoyed attending a webinar for the first time of my life. It is truly interactive and beneficial. I engaged with other participants and asked a question that Linda answered in the Q&A session at the end of the webinar.