On Friday I created my first e-book. I thoroughly enjoyed creating that e-book, as simple as it was. The exercise showed me how life could be added to some of those sometimes boring phonics lessons. Try as I might, somehow those lessons always seem drab. Now that we have learnt how to create our own e-books the future seems brighter for phonetic instruction.
Because I teach secondary school, my clients are all teenagers, most of whom function at the remedial level. One of the major challenges we face as English teachers in this scenario is trying to teach adolescents phonics. They see this as "baby work" even when some of them are unable to decode basic three-letter words and set up barriers to learning.
The problem, I believe, is two-fold: most of them have younger brothers, sisters and cousins who are doing this at work at the primary level, Infants. The second problem is they remember doing the work when they, themselves were in Infants and so now as teenagers think of it as demeaning, it seems. The problem may never be eradicated totally but as teachers and Reading Specialists we have to find ways to make this critical element more interesting and less “babyish”.
While creating my e-book I thought: cartoons. Children at every age love cartoons. If we can make phonic cartoons would we be able to breakdown some of those barriers? We can take the same information from those phonics texts, add some pictures, add our voices, or use another voice depending on the effect you want, get those letters to shine in different colours for emphasis and we're teaching phonics in today's world! I'm almost certain my students would appreciate the instruction more than what pertains now.
Visit BBC Words and Pictures to get ideas on how to use technology to teach phonetic instruction and more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/wordsandpictures/phonics/sandcastle/index.shtml
Hi Angela,
ReplyDeleteI know you thoroughly enjoyed creating your eBook.. I was there for some of it. Apart from ease at which it can be done, another great feature cane to mind whiel you were creating our book. I had so much fun and I was anxious to create one too!! I think we have just add the motivation element to our lesson. So now we have fun, educational and motivation!! We dont even need internet access. Again, I am really eager to try this with my students.
Many times students are asked to do power point presentations and most of them can't really navigate the programme. They have great difficulty producing a presentation. To most of them it is boring and time consuming. With ebooks power point can be made very interesting, with the addition of clip art, voice, transition of the slides, back ground music etc. Students can use this technology to produce a book on their own. They can define technical vocabulary terms while they integrate the technology without internet.
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