Don't worry

Matthew 6:34
So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Educational links for children by belinda

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Educational links for children by belinda

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Evolution of Instructional Materials Design

Responsiveness by Publishers
The general idea is that publishers develop their materials to meet the standards of the formal statewide adoption. Continually publishers refine and reshape through the information with teachers and school activities.
Effective materials include generally a teacher's manual, test items or resources, a study guide, and acitivity guide.

Visual Presentation
In the 90s, many publishers began investing in multimedia systems. Such systems include program related add-ons, such as pre-built tests and exercises, CDs, audiocassettes and videodiscs. 

Controversies
Controversies concerning teaching methods include whether to teach basic or higher-order skills; meaningful applications or discovery learning; facts, laws, and theories or the process of disciple; emphasis on relevant knowledge or personal development and social values and conflicts.

Innacurate Content
Research shows that materials often do not give topics the treatment they deserve, contain factual errors, or persist in presenting disproved concepts.

Priority Area: Presentation
Presentation review includes teacher and student resources, and alignment of instructional components, organization, readability, pacing, and ease of use.
The teacher's manual should align with students' activities in the content, sequence, pacing, and procedures for teachers, and should be of high quality.
Visuals play an important role. Too many visuals can distract learners from learning process. But relevant visuals support readability when integrated with text in a form different, but explanative, of the content.
Other important aspects to remember are: materials should be easy to use, support lesson planning, teaching and learning, as to be align with the curriculum.

Logical Organization
Students need organized knowledge structures to learn new information. Poor organization is detrimental to learning, an explicit and teachable conten structure can double the amount remembered. Some examples: outlines of main ideas, advance organizers with major questions, steps, or parts, cognitive maps for problem solving.
Simplicity avoids extraneous and redundant information and focuses attention. Examples include:
* avoidance of "unneeded colors and details"
* symmetry, simple lines; and
* plain shading such as gray, solid pastel, or black.
Remember that you as an outstanding teacher knows the best suitable materials for your students.

Songs of Love/ Stand by me by Masterkey

Five Great Teaching Techniques

Teaching Kindergarten Kids English

Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Materials: Research Update

By Licda Belinda Davis Maithand                          

                                                                                
This information is based on The Florida Department of Education, Bureau of Curriculum and Instruction.

Research based information shown two special cases for learning strategies:

1. The expertise reversal effect. Students who possess high levels of expertise in a subject do not benefit from the same strategies that work for average students. they require direct information to integrate for themselves with what they already know.

2. The powerful resistance to learning. It refers to students misconceptions in a subject area. Traditional strategies also fail to work, they require intense constructivism.

Motivational Strategies  

Instructional materials must include features to maintain learner motivation. Features that maintain students motivation include:

* positive expectations

* feedback, and

* appearance.

The degree of challenge and relevancy of activities also influences positive expectations:

- challenge works-not too easy, not too hard.

-"Relevant" helps; "irrelevant" hurts

-personal connections improve learning

Students are motivated by informative feedback about correctness, incorrectness, and how to improve what they are learning.

Appearance refers to materials with features that look appealing.

Teaching a few "Big Ideas"

Instructional materials should thoroughly teach important ideas, concepts or themes. they provide:

- focus for students and

- completeness

 Explicit Instruction

Instructional materials must contain clear statements of information and outcomes. It depends on:

- clarity of directions and explanations, and

- exclusion of ambiguity.

Guidance and Support

Instructional materials must include guidance and support to help students safely and successfully become more independent learners and thinkers.

Effectiveness of guidance and support depends on:

- level and

- adaptability.

An example of an organized routine would be to give the structure for a task followed by practice before moving on to production, and then to provide guided practice before independent practice.

Lectures help "advanced" students; "average" students need scaffolding. Research shows that students with less expertise require more structure, active learning , and guidance such as examples, hints, explanations, practice in working, and feedback on how they are doing.

Materials should accommodate differences in learning styles with a variety of activities and modalities.

In general the types of guidance and support that have been effective in supporting student learning include the following features:

* goals at the beginning of an assignment;

* organized activities and routines;

* explicit organizational schemes and explanations;

* examples of finished products, sample problems, and models.

                                                                                                       

Students Responses

Students learn more when they do the following kinds of activities:

- generate their own charts or worksheets for study;

- summarize and take notes;

- discuss controversial issues;

- participate in peer tutoring;

- generate their own questions about topics after receiving guidance;

- construct their own knowledge.

Targeted Instructional and Assessment Strategies

Instructional materials should include the instructional and assessment strategies known to be successful for teaching the learning outcomes targeted in the curriculum requirements. This depends upon

* alignment of strategies and

* completeness of strategies.

Is important to evaluate student progress as a result of learning activities. This serves a dual purpose: 1 to assess individual student's performance based on learning outcomes, and 2 to provide information about the kinds of revisions needed to improve instruction.

   

Love

And now abideth
faith, hope and love;
but the greatest
of these is love.
            1 Cor. 13:13

Principles of effective materials development

By Licda. Belinda Davis M.

According to Brian Tomlinson language learning materials should be driven by learning and teaching principles rather than be developed ad hoc or in imitation of best-selling coursebooks.
Many experienced authors rely on their intuitions about what works amd make frequent of activities in their repertoire that seem to fit with their objectives.
Materials should be coherent and principled applications of:
- Theories of language acquisition and development
- Principles of teaching.
- Our current knowledge of how the target language is actually used.

- The results of systematic observation and evaluation of materials in use.   

Proposals for principled approaches to the development of ELT materials
Materials writers need is an inventory of flexible frameworks to help them develop eefective materials for target learners in principled and coherent ways. we must determine what the principles are that shoul drive the procedures.
Principle of language acquisition 1

A prerequisite for language acquisition is that the learners are exposed to a rich, meaningful, and comprehensible input of language in use.
Principles of materials development
1. make sure that the materials contain plentiful spoken and written texts.
2. the language the learners are exposed to is authentic in the sense that it represents how the language is typically used.
3. Make sure the language input is contextualized.
4. Learners should be exposed to sufficient samples of language in authentic use to provide natural recycling of language items and features.

Principle of language acquisition 2
Learners nned to be engaged both efefctively and cognitively in the language experience.
Principles of materials development
1. Prioritize the potential for engagement by basing on affective and cognitive engagement.
2. Make use of activities that make the learners think about what they are reading or listening to and respond to ir personally.
3. Use activities that make the learners think and feel before, during and after using the target language for communication.

Principled of language acquisition 3
Learners who achieve positive affect are much more likely to achieve communicative competence than those who do not.
Principles of materials development
1. make sure the texts and tasks are interesting, relevant and enjoyable.
2. Set achievable challenges, which help raise self-esteem.
3. Stimulate emotive responses through music, song, art and so on.