More Spanish

Costa Rica 2013

We are back from an amazing trip to Costa Rica with EF Tours. Although I thought the previous trip was good, this was, hands down, my best student trip to date. (You can read about my previous trip in 2009 here.) The students we took were respectful of the Tico culture, enthusiastic and well behaved.  A couple of women who worked in a hotel in La Fortuna told me they were the best behaved group they had ever seen & wished all groups were like them.  That is pretty high praise! Unfortunately, I know what they might be used to dealing with.  The week we were there, EF alone had 56 groups on tour!!! There were 3 other groups we kept running into, and most of the teens were well behaved, but a few were making a bad impression... yelling & running in hotels, going out after dark by themselves, walking out during dinner time...

New to me on this trip was the Don Juan's Organic farm. 

This former Costa Rican educator runs a farm with very little waste.  His presentation captured our students' attention and kept them engaged.  The farm was beautiful, and the ecological concepts are well worth adapting. 

The trip was action packed. 

Ziplining, kayaking, horesback riding, hiking, white water rafting...

Students practiced Spanish of course. They would barter when buying handicrafts. They also had an opportunity to visit with an elementary school in the Arenal region, and despite the rain, played and talked with the children.

We saw a LOT of wildlife! We started off by visiting a biodiversity park a few minutes away from San José. We saw plenty of animals on our hikes, and we also took a crocodile tour.

This was a life time learning opportunity for many of my students, and I know they enjoyed themselves and learned a lot.  I appreciate all the time and planning that went into this trip by our tour leader (and my department chair) and the EF guide. 

Have you traveled with students before?  Any tips or suggestions?

 

Summer learning

I am in the process of earning a few graduate credit hours, and I would like to share some very interesting online courses available.  This spring I took two classes through the Powerful Learning Practice Network .  The first course was Blogging 101  and the second was Creative 21^st Century Lesson Plans. Both classes were two weeks long, and each was worth one graduate credit hour.  I found the content to be relevant and the workload fair. What I like most about these classes is that I was able to design lessons that I could use immediately.  On a later post I hope to go into specific details about what I got out of each class.  Rest assured both classes are content rich, but because the class is archived, I didn’t feel pressure to explore all the information in the two weeks that the class was offered.  In fact, I plan on going back this summer and re-visiting some concepts.

I am currently working on Teaching Foreign Languages Workshop through the Annenberg Learner site . There are 8 lessons to this content rich series, and I will earn two graduate credit hours when I finish the work.  Although I have been teaching for over 20 years, I have learned a tremendous amount in the first two lessons.  The workload is significantly more extensive than the PLP classes, but they are also very relevant to what I do in class on a daily basis.  If you are not interested in earning continuing education hours or graduate credit, the material is 100% free, and the 8 half hour videos are well worth your time to view.

The third site I want to mention is Coursera.  The classes offered here are also 100% free, but you would need to check with your district about whether or not you could earn continuing hours for the certificate(s) you acquire after doing the work.   Recently Coursera started offering classes designed by universities in Mexico, so later on this summer I hope to practice my language skill by taking Ser más creativos . At the end of summer I hope to participate in Innovación educativa con recursos abiertos.

If you are looking for a new perspective for your teaching next year, need some new ideas, want to earn hours for certification purpose or simply hone your language skills, I recommend looking into these courses. I hope to post some of the lessons I design from my summer learning experience as I complete the work.

Thanks so much for stopping by, and enjoy your summer learning opportunities!

*Digital supplies by Julie Billingsley "imagine that" kit