More Spanish

Scavenger hunt

I have never seen my students so excited! Today was the Spanish 3 Scavenger Hunt. Yesterday students worked with a partner to write out directions from my classroom to anther school appropriate location.  At this location the students on the hunt would find a prize placed by the first set of students. My principals are fabulous to support this activity, and most of our staff is willing to join in the fun by allowing the kids to come in their classrooms to "search" for a clue.  My students are  practicing using  plural commands with this activity, and many realized the value of giving clear directions. Another take-way for them was the need to retain vocabulary from previous lessons.  They didn't have dictionaries or vocabulary sheets with them as they hunted for their prize, and had to rely on what they remembered to be successful.You can find the handout I gave my students here. Let me know if you try this with your students.

Student blogging in Spanish class

I started planning my student blog project last fall.  I mentioned that I had tried a variation of student blogging with previous classes, but didn’t care for the results.  Although it is still very early in the project, I really like the changes I made and the results so far are encouraging.  Let me start off by describing how I organized this project.

Purpose:  I want my students to produce written communication for an authentic audience.  I also want my students to self-select and internalize vocabulary that is of interest to them, and that in turn, they might be able to use in other forms of communication.  Another goal for this project is to allow students to gain confidence using web 2.0 tools, and develop an academic presence online.  It’s my hope that students will continue to write in their blogs as long as they are enrolled in a Spanish class at my high school, giving them a digital portfolio that reflects their growing fluency over the next two and a half years.

I wanted a component of this project to be student driven, so I allowed them to select any topic that was school appropriate to write about.  I gave them a week to think of what they might want to write about.  This has been the biggest difference between previous blogging projects.  Last time I attempted a blogging project, I gave my students a prompt or assignment, and had them write to that.

Audience:  Although I would like for my students to have an audience of native Spanish speakers, I have not been able to successfully find that audience for them.  I teach a total of 120 intermediate language learners, and I believe that they can be their own audience.  I have assigned a specific “blog buddy” to each student.  This student is in their physical class, and will be the primary peer editor during this project.  In addition, I had my students self-select 3 other blog buddies from any of my Spanish classes.  They signed up for their partners on a spreadsheet that identified the blog topic and blog url.  When a student’s slots were filled, the student would need to select a student that still had available slots.  Some students selected blog buddies based on the topic, but most selected blog buddies based on friendship. Each student has at least 4 blog readers, but I have noticed that some students are visiting and reading other blogs beyond the 4 that they have selected.

Organization tools: I am using Google Docs and our class Ning to help manage the organization.  I loaded my class roster on a Google Spreadsheet, and had each student type in their blog url and topic.  I have each of these documents posted online on the sidebar on our class Ning.  Students can always go to the Google Doc to get the url if they need to.  After they added the urls, I change the permission on the Google Docs so that students wouldn’t accidently delete information.  I printed a spreadsheet with the student names and had the students use this one to sign up for their blog buddies.  I kept the hard copy in case I have to refer to it or if the students forget who their blog buddies are.

I did a little research on blogging formats and decided to use Blogger.  Our district is using Google Apps, so the same account that they use for Google Docs, and Gmail should also work for their blog.  Our high school is in the process of rolling out these web tools. Most of my students are just starting to use some of these tools this year, so that meant that my students were using their Google account for the first time when they signed up for their blog.  

I found out the hard way that having more than 25 blog requests coming from the same IP address raises a flag at Blogger, and after my first class created their blogs, my third bell students were denied the requested blog.  I believe Blogger thought it was being spammed. I switched platforms with my fifth bell class to Wordpress.  The same thing happened there after 20 or so blogs were created.  This means that I have students working off of two blogging platforms.  The good news is I get to compare the two, and see which is easier to use for future projects.  The students who were not able to create their blog in class did it for homework.  Both platforms are easy enough to figure out, and with one or two exceptions, the students successfully had a blog to start writing on the following day.  

If you are doing this with a single class, I don’t think you will have any problems.  If you have more than 30 students, you will want to have the students create their blog at home or stagger the classes that are creating the blogs over the course of a few days.

Previously, my student’s blogs were housed on our class Ning.  Although this is very convenient and easy to use, the blogs would not follow them when they moved to Spanish 4.  They can also customize what their blogs look like with both Blogger and Wordpress, and I think it helps give them a sense of ownership over them.   Another advantage is other readers can comment on these blogs outside of our school.  The class Ning has a limited membership, and non-members cannot leave comments.  

I will do my best to write a follow up post on how I have been grading this project, and share a few sample student posts within the next few days.  If you have any experience with student blogging, I would love to hear from you.

Oral Assessments

We are finishing up midterm exams, and this is the first year I feel the test has been meaningful for my students.  This year I set the test up to have three parts: an oral assessment, a written assessment and a traditional vocabulary/grammar section.  

The students recorded the oral assessment on Google Voice the last two days of the term, giving me a weekend to start grading them.  They have been practicing story telling all quarter, and I was very pleased by the recordings.    Students have been telling each other stories based on cartoons their peers drew for homework. The day of the test I took 5 different cartoons and shuffled them all in one big pile. Each student received a different cartoon, but it was a cartoon they had previously seen in class.  The students were asked to flip the paper over at the same time, and I gave them two minutes to think about what they were going to say.  All my students called Google Voice at the same time and talked. The story needed to be narrated in the past tense (preterit & imperfect) and was thematically specific to a lesson from this semester.  I told my students they needed to talk for at least 90 seconds.  Most talked for 2-2:30 minutes.  

My rubric is very generous for this assessment, but I strongly believe it needs to work in favor of the language learner, and reward the steps they are taking toward becoming fluent speakers.  I told them that I did not expect perfect grammar.  Out of 140 students I only had 6-8 who had problems using the past tense consistently, and even those students could tell me a story, they just narrated primarily in present tense.  

Although my students are asked to produce & use Spanish in their Spanish 1 & 2 classes, my class is the first time they are assessed orally. Although they have practiced this activity for over 12 weeks, they were still nervous. Although the assessment is far from a natural conversation, I feel it accurately reflected how each student can communicate orally. 

I would like to do more of these types of assessments, but they are very time intensive to grade.  At 2 minutes per student (assuming I don't have to listen twice), that is 280 minutes or 4 hours and 40 minutes.  I will continue to assess my students with Google Voice, but rather than grade all, I will randomly grade the recordings, keeping track of who I have listened to until I get to all of my students... and then start the process over again.

I would strongly encourage language teachers to include some form of oral assessment for their students.  I really believe it brings together everything they have been working on and reinforces the importance of speaking. 

 

 

Future student blog project

I like the blog feature that comes with our class Ning. However, I don’t feel that I use the student blogs in a meaningful way. Yet.  Previously my students have used their blogs to post written assignments, and I would pair them up & ask them to read & comment on each other’s work.  I found that it would take me longer to read and give students meaningful feedback on their blogs than if they turned it in on paper or dropped the document into a network folder in school. 

I wanted my students’ blogs to be a place where they could write, read and comment on things that were meaningful to them, but that didn’t really happen.  They didn’t have an interest in writing about the topics that I suggested, and really didn’t care about commenting on each other’s work unless it was “for a grade”.  I thought that I could use their blogs to connect with Spanish speaking students, but that virtual exchange has had its own set of issues. Sooo...

I’m thinking of how to make the writing and blogging meaningful.  I’m in the brainstorming stage of a project I want to roll out second semester.  I would like for each of my students to pick a topic of interest to them, and then I would like them to write short blog entries (8-10 sentences) about this topic on a weekly basis.  I’ll probably try it out for 4-6 weeks, and evaluate the project at that time. 

At this time I’m thinking I will assign “blog buddies” so that every blog has at least an audience of one or two students, but my hope is the kids that share a similar interest will visit each other’s blog.  They will need to gloss new vocabulary words for their readers. I also will have them tag each entry by topic so that the posts can be easily found within the class Ning. I will give them class time to work on the draft, re-write and post to the blog.  If they need to gather images or take photos, they will need to do that at home.  

I will have to come up with a quick weekly check list to keep the grading manageable, and a very focused rubric to be used at the end of the project.  I’m concerned that it may become overwhelming to grade, so the final grade will be an assessment of the overarching project rather than grading each individual blog post for each student on a weekly basis.  

So far these are the topics I will suggest to my students: fashion/clothing, sports, movie, music or TV reviews, video game tips, easy craft how-to, food, humor posts like Dear Blank, Please Blank... I hope that once I show them some examples, they will also suggest their own topics.  I think the key is to keep the posts short and encourage topics with vocabulary that is familiar to them or have high cognate usage. 

Sara Conttrell wrote about how her students blog for homework , and she has some great suggestions.  I know that her class size is different from mine, so not all that she does will be feasible for me, but the post is a good resource for anyone else who is interested in having their students blog.

I would love to hear from you if you have successfully done something like this in your class.  Any suggestions are welcomed.

 

Hello (again...)

It has been a looong time!  I have been busy (like all of you) with the start of the new school year.  I have a fabulous group of Spanish 3 students this year, and I just wish I had a few more hours to my day so I could share all the great stuff my students are up to...

I continue to use my homework system.  I really love it & I think my students benefit from it. This year it feels like MORE of my students are doing MORE meaningful things with the vocabulary assignments.  I had a student who follows politics do a political spoof on Goanimate using vocabulary from our lesson.  I had another student write a short story about the Mario video game, using the vocabulary in a very imaginative way. I have two (good) rappers that amaze me with their songs, usually performed live in the classroom (I'll try & tape one soon).  Today I want to feature one special student (Matt R) who is taking photos of the vocabulary and creating a story with them.  Here is the link to the photos he took, using vocabulary from 4A of Realidades 2 text.  I hope to use this photo-story to explain and practice imperfect & then compare preterit vs imperfect. 

How is your year going?  I would love to hear from you if you have tried this vocabulary homework in class.  

 

Ser vs Estar mnemonic poster

I am going to be spending a little more time reviewing and practicing Ser vs Estar at the start of the school year with my level 3 students. I created a poster with DOCTOR ELF as a mnemonic device. I did not know about this device until I saw it on Easiest Spanish blog post. Thanks!  I also want to thank all the people who contribute quality photos over at Morguefile.com for commercial free usage. My Elf photo came from their files :)

Download Ser vs Estar

Standards poster to use in Spanish class

One of my goals for this year is to have my students understand the curriculum standards, and see how the work we do in class relates to them.  I have created a handout/poster/slide to use at the start of the year in Spanish.  The language has been simplified and summarizes the standards.  Feel free to use & happy start to the new school year!

Download PDF StandardsPoster

Comparing food & eating habits across three cultures

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I am taking a couple of graduate classes in conjunction with the Educator tour to China.  Another assignment for my class was to create a curriculum unit that would benefit my students in my Spanish class.  I had many ideas, but I didn't want to stray too far from my curriculum, so I created a lesson that compared foods across three cultures: Spain, China and the United States. I wanted to create a unit that allowed for some choice, but that was focused enough so students would not be overwhelmed.  

The lesson's objectives are the following: 

Using the target language (TL) students will be able to investigate, compare, contrast and analyze food in three cultures: Spain, China and the United States. Students will use the TL to discuss the relationship of food to a country’s culture.

Here is a PDF of the lesson I will be submitting to EF. Download Food Comparison Lesson Plan

I will be collecting resources for the classroom wiki mentioned in the lesson plan, and I will be happy to post when I have a variety of links to share.  If you have any interesting links that would work well with this project, I would appreciate learning about them.  

Thanks for stopping by!

Voicethread: Education in China

Another great opportunity I had with EF on my China trip was to earn graduate level credit by taking some classes offered through University of the Pacific.  One of the assignments for this class was to create a Voicethread on a topic of interest that I was able to explore while I was on tour.  My Voicethread will give you my take on what I observed and learned about Chinese education.  Please feel free to leave feedback on the blog or on the Voicethread. 

EF Language School Visit in China

I just got back from an incredible Educators’ Tour in China with EF.  Our group was very pleased with the experience, and although I am not usually fond of traveling with a tour group for leisure, I wouldn’t visit China any other way.   I’ve traveled with students various times with EF, but this expedition was specifically designed for teachers and professors.  We were not able to tour a Chinese school because students were on summer break when we visited, so EF graciously included a visit to EF’s Language Schools in Shanghai.  (I was not aware that EF has so many different businesses, including language schools and IB programs.) 

On a later post I’ll share some thoughts and insights I have on Chinese education in general, but for now I want to address English as a Foreign Language in China.  Chinese students start taking English classes around year 4 or 5 in their primary schools. EF Language Schools and other language schools like this supplement the learning students do in their regular school day.  According to our teacher tour guide, Natasha, tuition to a language school can be as much as 6-10% of a family’s annual income for bi-weekly sessions.  One of the reasons families are willing to spend this kind of money on a supplemental language learning is because the Chinese schools teach a grammar based curriculum that requires memorization and a “formulaic” approach to learning English, but provide very little authentic practice or language usage.  

Our tour started out in the EF headquarters. We had four speakers address the EFL program that EF markets & promotes. Currently EF has over 100,000 students in China alone!  The school’s philosophy can be summarized with the goals of their Life Club program.  EF wants to expose their students to authentic tasks, encourage autonomous learning, incorporate motivation, promote mixed ability learning and use language in a meaningful way.  

Currently they are launching Trailblazers, a multimedia textbook series, written and created by EF.  The manga inspired textbook follows the adventures of some teens as they battle aliens who are trying to cause havoc.  The target audience is 11-15 year olds, but I think it may appeal more to the 9-12 crowd.  I like the concept of having a plot based textbook (rather than a grammar-based), but I have to question how “authentic” scenarios with aliens will be.  I understand how the cartoon videos that come with the series may engage a young language learner, but I have reservations about how well they will work for listening comprehension exercises. It is important to keep in mind how drastically different this curriculum is compared to rote memorization that comes with the language classes in a traditional Chinese school.  EF is trying hard to create a product that will keep students motivated.  EF also has several iPad apps and computer games that supplement their program. 

After the presentation our group of 35 teachers & friends broke up into four groups and each group was assigned one specific Shanghai EF language school.  Our group had the best experience.  Our school was located in an affluent area with beautiful high-rise residential buildings all around it. We had personal student tour guides for our school visit: Sabrina & Jenny.  Sabrina, 12, was a fluent English speaker and ballerina, with more poise and personality than I ever will have.  Jenny, also 12, was a little shyer, and sometimes required a little help from Sabrina. Our students ranged in ages from 5-16.  We visited the youngest language learners’ classroom first just to say “Hi” and “What’s your name?”. Another classroom was testing.  The third classroom had presentations going on.  After presenting their dialogs, we sat in a big circle and had a Q & A.  The students had prepared questions for us, but they felt awkward & self-conscious trying to have a conversation with such a big group listening on, so instead, we turned to the kids sitting next to us and tried to engage them with one-on-one conversation... much more effective.  The next activity was a group game using a smartboard.  Although classes ended at 4 pm, most of our students stayed on to talk to us in the school’s lobby.  A few of the students had traveled to English speaking countries and were pretty close to being fluent English speakers.  Most students I talked to wanted to go to the US, England or Australia for university (one of the advertising billboards tag line was “From EF to Harvard”).  We found out the school’s director had had a two days to prepare for our visit. We appreciate their time, and I was very impressed with what I saw.

I understand that our experience was not shared by the other 3 groups.  One group only had a few minutes of contact time with the students, and another group’s visit was not as organized as our visit was.  

Most of our tour guides during the trip spoke English well, even if a couple had some problems with pronunciation at times.  I was surprised that most of the staff at the hotels did not speak English at all.  Several times during our trip we had young language learners come up to our group to practice English. Obviously the Chinese value speaking English quite a bit, and as tourism in China grows, I believe conversational English will be more prevalent. 

Sorry to say, I only picked up a little bit of Chinese during my visit.  How do Chinese programs in the US compare? Here is a 2010 article from the New York Times that summaries Chinese language learning.