More Spanish

App Review: Sock Puppets

I was catching up with my RSS feed, and ran across a Sock Puppet app for iPhones & iPads on The Creative Language Class.  I downloaded the free app immediately, and created the following skit.

 

How cute is that! I can see this as another alternative for prepared conversations with partners, or as a way for me to present grammatical topics in a conversation.  I had to mess around with the upload to YouTube for a bit, but part of that had to do with having two YouTube accounts open on my iPad.  You can select the puppets, the background and a few props.  Once the stage is set, you tap on the puppet that you want to talk, and record what it will say.  Once you are done, you save your show and can export it to Facebook or YouTube. You can go into the settings and modify the pitch of each individual puppet also. I'd love to hear about other ideas you have using this app!

App Review: Brian Pop Esp

One of the inservice sessions I attended yesterday had to do with iPads in the classroom.
I am curious to see how many of my students will be bringing iPads to class next year.  (Our district will allow each student to bring their own device, so I know I will have a variety of tablets
and laptops.)  I am still surprised by the lack of Apps that specifically target my classroom.  Don’t get me wrong there are many good Apps out there like Wordreference and Voicethread that can be used in the class, but few that take advantage of the visual and audio capabilities of the iPad AND
have specific content in intermediate Spanish for a high school student.   

One that has potential is Brain Pop.  This app presents a 4-5 minute movie on a specific topic like Frida Kahlo or water pollution in Spanish with lots of animation.  The script runs at the bottom
of the movie so the learner can hear and see the words.  The vocabulary is not watered down, but there are a lot of cognates.  It may be a challenge for many of my Spanish 3 kids, but I would love to test it out & see how much of the information they can get using previous knowledge, context
clues and the animation.  After seeing the video, the student can re-watch or take a 10 question quiz. 

What content-rich apps have you used with your students?