Month: February 2022

Key word highlighting

By s1820797

On 14th February 2022

My second lesson contains a variety of keywords that I want students to be able to understand, and use effectively. Whilst planning my second lesson, I started to research how key words can be used in teaching, to successfully embed definitions in students’ memories. Here, I reflect on the techniques that I found, and discuss how I will apply these techniques in my lessons.

Research

In a blog post by Joanne Miles Consulting, I read how it is important to teach key words early on in the learning process, to prevent future misunderstandings. This seemed logical to me, and I had already included keywords at the start of all of my lessons, so I am pleased that I have addressed this already. However, I also read about how important it is to label key words, to remind students of their meaning. I have not done any labelling or highlighting of my keywords, and found this concept especially intriguing. I decided to research it further, to see if it was something that would be worthwhile to do in my lessons.

I found a paper by Rello et al. (2014), who researched the impact of highlighting key words on how easy and understandable a piece of text was to read. Interestingly, the researchers found that highlighting keywords in bold can make text easier to understand for people with dyslexia. I will be using many keywords in my second lesson, including ‘habitat’, ‘community’, ‘abundance’, and ‘diversity’ – all of which have very different, but similar sounding definitions:

Habitat: The place where an organism lives

Community: All the different organisms living in a habitat

Ecosystem: All the different organisms living in a habitat, and the habitat itself

Biodiversity: The variation of living things in a particular area

Abundance: The number of organisms in a particular area

Distribution: Where organisms are located

The approach of highlighting keywords could therefore be very effective in distinguishing these key words, and improving students’ understanding of them.

Action

As a result of my investigations, I have decided to use a different colour font for each keyword, running through all of my PowerPoint slides. For example, every time I use the keyword habitat, I will put it in bold, in blue font. I hope that this will make the keywords clear to students, and help refresh their memories about what the words mean. It may also prompt them to look at their key terms glossary that I intend to give them, if they have forgotten what the word meant.

An example of how I will use key word highlighting in my PowerPoint presentations

However, if I colour highlight all my keywords, I realise that I will need to use a colour-blind friendly palette, to ensure that these words are also visible to colour-blind students. I researched some colour-blind friendly palettes, and found a palette which had been made to optimise colours for colour-blind individuals (Wong, 2011). By using the colours from this palette for my keywords, I hope that they will be clear to all students as well as accessible. I feel that it has been useful to research some teaching methods and theories as they have helped me to plan what I hope will be effective lessons.

Next steps

Researching the impact of key words and key word highlighting really got me thinking about the accessibility of my PowerPoint presentations. By making the changes outlined in this blogpost, I hope to make my presentations more accessible and understandable to all students.

References

Miles, J., 2014. Embedding English: 13 Strategies for Teaching Key Words. [Blog] joannemilesconsulting, Available at: https://joannemilesconsulting.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/embedding-english-13-strategies-for-teaching-key-words/ [Accessed 14 February 2022].

Rello, L., Saggion, H., Baeza-Yates, R. (2014). Keyword Highlighting Improves Comprehension for People with Dyslexia. Proceedings of the 3^rd workshop on PITR, 30-37. 10.3115/v1/W14-1204

Wong, B. (2011). Points of view: color blindness. Nature methods, 8(6), 441. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1618

Feb 14, 2022

Planning my first lesson

By s1820797

On 9th February 2022

In Project Progress

Over the past week I have been planning the first of my five lessons. In this blog post, I will discuss some of the challenges I faced, successes I had, and the things I learnt that will help me plan my other four lessons.

Challenges

The biggest challenge I faced in planning this lesson was making sure that the wording I used was appropriate to my target audience, of S1 and S2 students. I found myself having to go back and re-word sections of text, to make them more accessible. I also decided to include a list of keywords, to refresh students’ memories of key ecological terms such as ‘habitat’, and ‘ecosystem’. This should make it easier for them to complete the activities in the lesson and will hopefully support students who have difficulties such as processing or dyslexia. In addition to wording, I also found it hard to limit the amount of text I had on my PowerPoint slides. I wanted to keep a large font size, of at least 28, so that the text could be easily read from the back of the classroom. To do so, I had to cut some of the information. This was particularly hard in the part of the lesson where I wanted to explain what an insect is. I had originally planned to have some text on the board to discuss with the students. However, I realised that a large block of text, and me talking at the same time as they would be reading, would not be very engaging and I want to avoid students ‘switching off’ because they are overloaded with information. Instead, I decided to make a video with diagrams and a voiceover, which I think will be more visual and more effective in maintaining the students’ interest.

Successes

Something I found that would work to break up sections of text, was using animation to reveal short chunks of text at a time on the PowerPoint slides, this way I can gradually reveal the information when it is appropriate to do so. I also found it useful to look at examples of presentations teachers have openly shared on websites such as the TES, and look back at my notes from the lesson I observed at Liberton High School. I noticed that many lessons start with a brief overview of what is planned for the lesson, then the learning objectives are discussed, and students were told how they will know that they had achieved these objectives. Then, the main body of the lesson is taught, and a plenary activity conducted at the end. I used this structure for my first lesson plan, and will replicate it in my other four lessons. I think this structure will work well, as it will help the students to have a clearer understanding of whether they have met the learning objectives that I would like them to achieve.

Lessons learnt

By planning this lesson early on, I realised just how much time needs to be dedicated to organising the resources that will be used, making the resources, and creating clear and concise PowerPoint slides. I now have a much better idea of the amount of time I need to dedicate to planning the other four lessons in my project. Now have a basic template of a lesson plan, with learning objectives, keywords and a plenary section, I can use this for the subsequent lessons. This will enable me to be more efficient in my lesson planning. Additionally, by looking at examples of lessons made by teachers on resource sharing sites, I have a better understanding of the level of language that I should be using during my lessons.

Feb 9, 2022

Bethany Hickling: Geoscience Outreach and Engagement (2021-2022)