DANIEL THORNHILL
TTLO Unit 1 - Accessibility
This unit was all about making language learning accessible to everyone. Scroll down for descriptions of and links to my artifacts from this unit.
For this post, we assessed our readiness for online language teaching. Our colleague Diana Serrano offered me some tips for varying activity type. Then, our colleague Sara Gardner and I exchanged ideas for assessing comprehension ("Is that clear?" and "Any questions?" are not enough!)
I took these thoughts on readiness for online teaching from Canvas discussion forum and turned them into my first blog post.
For this post, I wanted to share with everyone my thoughts on H5P, a powerful HTML content creator, so I turned them into my second blog post.
If you'd like to see everyone's contributions, you can view this Google Doc.
For this activity, our colleagues Angela De La Cruz, Diana Serrano, and I performed an activity analysis process on 3 activities we were using to see how accessible they would be to people with disablities. We learned how many of the formatting (and even some pedagogical) choices we make can become obstacles to our learners.
Feedback was positive. Our colleague Jacob Dixon was unsure about how the information presented in the text would be used, so I added some clarification. Our colleague Kelly Atwood indicated that the idea of distrbuting hint cards would be effective.
For this exercise, I took an old memorandum with tips for teachers and some testing statistics and performed an accessibility analysis on it using the Universal Design for Learning guidelines. Again, it became clear that much of the formatting in the orginal document was not accessible to people with visual impairments. I also had some trouble using patterned fill in pie charts, but our colleague Sara Gardner gave me some helpful tips for that. Now, making accessible documents is a cinch.
In this unit, we reflected on our readiness to be online teachers and our first impressions of taking this course online. I began to see the advantages (accessibility, flexibility) and challenges (large time investment) of teaching online.
I decided to frame each reflection as an interview. The question-and-answer format seemed to fit these artifacts perfectly. Check out the reflection interviews for this unit and the others on my blog.
See my for-credit artifacts on Chapters, 1, 5, and 6 here, detailing my interpretation of the theoretical background of TTLO and best practices for kicking off an online language course.