More Spanish

Netbook Journal: California Dreaming Pt 1

Earlier this year our school district offered high school teachers an opportunity to submit a proposal to “Re-imagine the 21st Century Classroom” . I, along with two English teachers - Tricia Buck and David Lunn - were awarded 30 netbooks and an opportunity to introduce technology driven activities to our curriculum. We are being supported by our district’s Instructional Technology Specialist, Cary Harrod.  I am thrilled to discover what my Spanish students can achieve when they augment their studies with technology on a daily basis.

My Twitter friend and colleague, Leigh Murrell (who lives & teaches in sunny California) and I are very excited about our first student collaborative project. Two of our Spanish III classes are working together to learn about different music genres heard in Spanish speaking countries. We started planning our hispanic music collaboration in January. We talked about mutual goals we had for our classes, and came up with a three part assignment.

This week marks the end of the first part.  Our students self-selected a music genre that interested them and researched the genre’s history and artists that represent it.  They summarized their findings and linked two sample songs to our Ning. Although I am a huge music fan, my students taught me a lot about online music sources.  They started sampling music from Internet radio sites like Pandora, Jango, and Blip.fm. They found specific songs to link or embed to the Ning on sites like Last.fm, Rhapsody, Lala and Actualidades.  Unlike California, Cincinnati does not have a radio station that plays hispanic music, so my students have been exposed to a significant amount of hispanic music just doing research for this project. 

I am very impressed with the depth and quality of writing coming from Leigh’s students, and seeing such good work from other Spanish students has been great for my kids.  I have some very strong writers, but many students wrote their summary directly on the Ning without any peer editing or revising. My students were very impressed with their California peers, when they read what they had posted on the discussion threads.  I took the opportunity to talk about the importance of editing and taking pride in what was published.  I hope this will encourage them to proofread their work before posting it next time. (Here is the rubric for part one.)

I love how some of my more reluctant Spanish students are so engaged in this project because of the music content, and I think it is safe to say that after this project Ricky Martin will not be the only singer that pops into my students’ head when Hispanic singers are brought up. 

Monday, we Skype!  The kids are very excited to meet their partners, as we embark on the second leg of this project.  I bet that my students will ask them about their sunny California weather, as they complain about our snowy winter days.  Several have already requested a field trip. Please read what Leigh has to say about our collaboration.

Working toward 10,000 hours

My student are not retaining vocabulary this year.  If they hope to become competent Spanish speakers, they will need to spend time outside of class working on it. Our 55 minute class will not be enough for them to internalize the material, and allow them to develop fluency.  If each student would spend 12 minutes a night reviewing and studying vocabulary, I would see a huge improvement.  The problem is that most don’t.  What most of my students do is spend 15-20 minutes the day before the quiz cramming 30-40 vocabulary words into their short term memory. This is enough for them to do OK on that quiz, but a few weeks later, they have forgotten many of the words they crammed.  

The text I use in class does a nice job of recycling material, and this is how I know they don’t retain what they worked on three weeks or three months ago. Kids will look up a word on WordReference.com that we used in the previous lesson.  Our text uses the vocabulary in context, and the material that they learn is useful for daily communication. I also ask my students to use Spanish to express themselves in a personal and meaningful way on a regular basis through project based assessments. However, it is still not enough for them to retain the material. 

I keep thinking of Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule.  In his book Outliers, Gladwell tells us that one indicator of success is practice, and 10,000 hours of practice leads to mastery of just about any skill.  This is very applicable in a foreign language class.  Anyone can become proficient in a language if enough time is spent immersed in it. If my students would spend 12 minutes a day, five days a week that would be another whole hour towards fluency. 

I want to brainstorm ways that will promote this extra hour a week outside of class with vocabulary practice.  I want my students to be able to select the manner in which they  study the vocabulary, and I also want to see tangible evidence of the studying.  If you have some activities or ideas that have worked for you, I would love to hear about them. 

Netbook Journal: Tic-Tac-Toe Choice

Earlier this year our school district offered high school teachers an opportunity to submit a proposal to “Re-imagine the 21st Century Classroom” . I, along with two English teachers - Tricia Buck and David Lunn - were awarded 30 netbooks and an opportunity to introduce technology driven activities to our curriculum. We are being supported by our district’s Instructional Technology Specialist, Cary Harrod.  I am thrilled to discover what my Spanish students can achieve when they augment their studies with technology on a daily basis.

I have been trying to figure out a way to give those students who finish their work quickly and well some challenges that will also meet our curricular goals, and I think I figured out how the netbooks will allow me to give my high achieving students enrichment opportunities. 

I modified an alternative assessment tool, based on a Tic-Tac-Toe gird, to fit my class.  My students will be challenged to complete three out of nine web based activities in a row.  Since I want to make sure that my students practice listening, speaking and writing skills, I made sure that with the exception of one row, all rows will include a listening/speaking/written activity.  I want the specific topic within each activity to be open ended, so that the individual student can self- select the theme and apply the language skills/practice in that manner. 

I still haven’t rolled this out with my classes, but I hope to do so soon. I am curious to see how it is received by my students, and I’m interested to see the quality of work that is produced.  I have rubrics in mind for the activities, but I would like to have the student co-write the rubric if possible. We’ll see how this all comes together. 

Snow day with paella & Valencia

I told my students if the rumors of the winter storm proved to be correct they would have a little enrichment activity on our class blog.  I'm very curious to see how many student will do the work.  

In December, Zachary Jones published several of my student's work on his blog.  I was saving this one for our food unit. One of my students wrote a fabulous post about a paellada she had in her home. Not only is her writing strong, but the article works very well with our current lesson. Zachary also sent me another link to a song by Josh Rouse about Valencia & eating paella.  Perfect compliment to Rachel's article!  

On our snow day, I am asking my students to read & answer comprehension questions about the posts, and listen to the song. They will be responding to both posts on their personal blog. I can't make the students do this work on a snow day. However, I am pleased that I can offer them a way to continue to practice the language even when we aren't in school, and the fact that one of the articles they are reading was written by a peer, is just the icing on the cake!

Lingt Review

I wanted to write a quick review of a wonderful new web 2.0 tool I just started using: Lingt.  This free site allows teachers to create activities that require oral responses.  You can embed a written, oral or graphic prompt and the students will respond to it via a "talk bubble".  Students do not need to create an account. They can record their response and then type in their name and email address and send for assessment. My favorite feature is that after you listen to your student's response, you can send feedback directly to the student orally or with a quick note.   The instructor can also set up several classes, and this makes managing and grading the recordings very easy to do. I found the site intuitive to use for both me and my students, and so far it seems reliable.  The only problem the students had was letting the site access the computer mic.  If they didn't read the screen and denied access, the talk bubble wouldn't work.

I gave my students questions using interrogatives and the present perfect and told them to answer three out of the four prompts. A few students still want to write out their answers before recording, but I'm ok with that right now.  Several students asked me what question #__ was asking, and I had to explain to them that understanding the oral prompt was part of the assessment.  Most of the class did beautifully. I suspect the few students who had problems did not take the activity seriously or did not think I would listen to all the questions.  

I will be incorporating a lot more oral assessments with this site into my lesson plans as the semester unfolds. For teachers who are preparing for AP exams, this seems like a fantastic resource.