The Railroad method of teaching...

Sometimes, just sometimes, teaching is like being on a train where the brakes have gone. What you are about to cover with the class is a bad idea. You know it's a bad idea. You know that you're going to end up not so much monitoring as frogmarching the class through the work. And yet you can't stop yourself.

Today, it was Powerpoint. Fine for all but one of the Entry 2 class. Oddly enough, the one student who is utterly at sea with computers actually went to an IT college in their country, according to the Class Profile. I knew that asking her to try Powerpoint was probably asking for trouble. So what made me do it? Possibly the fact that it takes her long enough to type anything in Word, and that since Powerpoint demands a lot less from students in terms of sentences, it might be easier for her.

I need to work on differentiation, especially in this class. The normal E2 scheme of work is fine for most of the students, but there are 3 who are much faster than the others, and then at the other end there's At Sea.

Of course, one of the main issues with the IT classes, as I think I've said elsewhere in this PDJ, is the fact that the ESOL IT classes are not grouped separately from the basic ESOL classes. Which means that in one class you have a myriad of different levels of experience and ability. My personal feeling on the subject is that the students cannot possibly hope to truly benefit from the IT classes if they are not treated as a separate subject, and thus the students' needs and abilities diagnosed SEPARATELY from their ESOL needs. More than this, the benefits for those of us who teach IT for ESOL students would be enormous- we would be able to plan more effectively, and teach all the students things they need to learn. Perhaps we could include language studies as part of that, and these could be differentiated, but the actual IT part of the session would keep all our students challenged, and save the usual notes for cover teachers: "Nuala, Nigel and Norbert are doing this, Geoffrey, Gladys, Gomez and George are doing this, and Sophie and Simon are doing this..."

One of these days, when I'm better at the IT side of what I do, I shall write ESOL IT coursebooks. The elementary book will be entitled "Teacher! I click?". The intermediate one will be entitled "No, click there." And the advanced book will be called "Oh- you're a computer programmer."