Carmella Fair and LaVerne Weldon

The short version… Find resources.  Use a rubric to evaluate them.  If the resource meets certain criteria, tag the resource with its metadata.  Wait to see if collaborators agree with you evaluation, then eventually the resource will be made available to teachers in Home Base.  Be an ambassador for Home Base.  Train others on the rubric.

Seems simple enough, right?  Unfortunately, my batting average is somewhere down around the Mendoza Line.  The first criteria on Open Education Resource Rubric is the Degree of Alignment to Standards.  The curve ball is that as an ESL teacher my standards don’t look like any other content areas.  NC uses the WIDA standards which “encompass social and instructional language, the language of language arts, the language of mathematics, the language of science, and the language of social studies” (www.wida.us).

So I need to find resources that develop a student’s academic language, but the resources shouldn’t be divorced from the content standards.  Therefore, I’m not looking for resources that teach the content, but resources that teach the language of the content.  Yeah… let that one simmer for a while.

The good news is that CUACS and DPI let me choose how to narrow my focus.  Because I teach a social studies elective for ELLs at the high school and I’ve seen the middle grades social studies teachers scramble for resources this year, my fellowship will focus on finding resources that support language development in the social studies classroom.

A home run for me is resource that supports

• Speaking, listening, reading, or writing
• Comprehensible input for a language learner
• Linguistic complexity for the targeted proficiency
• Vocabulary in context
• Opportunities to demonstrate language control

While I never expect to bat a thousand, I do hope that with some batting practice, I can swing myself out this slump.  Feel free to pitch me any resources, websites, etc. in the comments section that you think I should check out.  Caution: No resources with ads or logins can be used.