More Spanish

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

 

Pinterest for Spanish class

One of my favorite tools this school year has been Pinterest.  I’d like to share  how I have been using it in Spanish class on this Five for Friday post.

1. To gather authentic resources to use in class.  Several sites pin their content and I can quickly re-pin items that I plan on using in class into my Spanish Class Resource folder.  One of my favorite humor sites in the target language is Risas sin mas.  Another great authentic resource is Infografía en castellano.

2. To gather authentic images for class.  Pinterest is filled with beautiful photography.  Recently I wanted to show my class photographs of tropical fruits that they may not be able to get in the Midwest.   I found all the fruits I was looking for with a quick search on Pinterest.  Of course you could do this with Google images as well, but Pinterest was a lot quicker.   One of my favorite Pinterest curators is SraHache. She has 92 boards organized across a variety of topics (countries, levels, holidays, cultural information).

3.  To share and learn about lesson plans & teaching ideas.  Although I still use Twitter, I find that I can narrow my Pinterest feed to very specific boards.  For instance, I may only want to follow Sra. Smith’s boards that relate to Spanish class.  I don’t have to follow her recipe & wedding boards.  With Twitter, I don’t have the ability to choose what comes through my feed, so sometimes I need to scroll through a lot of material that is not important to me.   Of course Pinterest doesn’t provide the opportunity for conversation like Twitter.

4. As a homework option for my class.  My students have over 20 options to practice vocabulary and I added Pinterest this year.  They can find images that represent the vocabulary we are studying and type in the word when they re-pin the image to their Spanish homework board.  You can see a sample board here.

5. As a collaboration of resources.  Pinterest is also be a good way to compile resources for a class project.  I want my students to use technology for educational (not just recreational) purposes. Since many of my students already have Pinterest accounts “for fun”, this would be a good tool for them to use for educational purposes.  One student would create a board and ask their group to join it & compile the resources they want to use for any kind of research based project—sort of like a visual Diigo.

I’d love to know how you use Pinterest in class. Thanks for reading!

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!

Five for Friday: 5 Web 2.0 tools to record oral communication

I am working on a series of blog posts for the summer called Five for Friday.  

Today I want to share my favorite five Web 2.0 tools to record oral communication in the classroom.The biggest shift in oral assessment for my class occurred because of the variety of web 2.0 tools that can be used to record students.  I still believe the best way to practice the language is in person, with a partner or in small groups, but the best way to formally assess a large group of students (at the same time) or gauge their progress is by using the following tools.  Each one will fulfill a different need. 

Google Voice My students use this tool weekly.  They record their homework on it.  I will ask them to record textbook prompted conversations with it occasionally, and I used it on my semester exam this year.  GV is free for me and the students, but does require you to have cell phone connectivity in your classroom.  Most of my students have a cell phone, and GV will also work with a landline, so if a student left their phone at home, they can use our department office phone or borrow a classmate’s.  The voicemail will record up to @90 seconds, and is very clear to listen to, even when all my students are recording at the same time.  You can read about how I set up the oral portion to my final exam here.  

Voicethread My class gets a lot of mileage from Voicethread as well.  There is a little bit of a learning curve so I phase it in over the course of 3-4 weeks.  I expose them to VT by having them do a listening activity with it first.  Then they create accounts & record a comment on another VT.  Finally they will create their own VT for a formal assessment when they describe things they used to do when they were in pre-school.  Several students will use this as a homework option, and more will use it for our “How- to…” presentations.  This tool works for oral work that has been scripted, planned and is more formal in nature. It is also free up to 3 VTs per account, and will require microphones.  One of my students found the Voicethead App on her iPhone easier to navigate & I know there is also an iPad App.

Lingt Language I did not use this website this year, but as I was preparing for an end of school inservice that described it, I regretted not using it.  It is very user friendly for the kids to use.  I ran into a couple of glitches setting up one of my assignments, and found the support to be very helpful.   You provide a prompt for your students like a photo, short movie clip or even questions you want them to hear & respond to.  The student can then record their response and submit using an email address.  They do not need an account.    You will need to have computers & microphones.  The kids can listen to what they said and record again if they need to.  When I used it previously, I figured out I needed to give them a time frame to complete their task, otherwise students will write out & then read their response, and I want to use this more for “off the top of their head” kind of communication.  The really cool feature of Lingt is that you can record or type in feedback for each individual student & send it to their email.  Lingt has a free account you can try out or you can purchase an upgrade.  

Cell phone Record App  If I am not mistaken most smart phones have the capability of being used as a portable recorder.  I know iPhones and iPods have free apps that can be downloaded and used to capture short conversations.  My students have used thses in the past when they have interviewed native Spanish speakers outside of the classroom or interviewed upper level students for a homework assignment.  The student would then send the recording to me via email or depending on the assignment, would play it for me in class. 

Audio Dropbox from CLEAR This is another tool that I have used in the past because it is so easy to use with my students, but I have replaced it with Google Voice.  This could be an option for those classrooms that can’t use cell phones.  The teacher creates a dropbox with a prompt and can embed it on a web site.  Students would then record their responses and type their names to identify themselves.  When I used it a couple years ago, it was not as media rich as Lingt, but it worked well, and it is free.

Audacity Alright, so this is #6.  I can’t complete this post without mentioning Audacity.  Some teachers love this tool.  I have used this with small groups of students, but I’ll be honest, it has a learning curve, especially if you want the kids to save the file as an MP3.  Part of the issue might be that I don’t find mixing programs to be very intuitive, and I am not comfortable trouble-shooting some of the issues.  Without a doubt it is a very powerful program, and it is free.  I could see students producing very professional podcasts with Audacity.  Here are examples of a podcasts on self-selected topics my students put together a couple years ago.  

What are your favorite tools to record oral communication?

 

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?

Power Up inservice for FL teachers

Next year our high schools will be encouraging students to bring their own device (laptop, iPad, tablet) to school for educational purposes.  This is a very big step for any district, and can be very daunting for everyone involved. Tomorrow I will be sharing what I have been doing in my class with my colleagues.  I have been writing about my own journey with technology in my Spanish classroom since 2009, and I have picked up a thing or two along the way.  

• Technology should enhance and not distract from the lesson.
• Web 2.0 tools & devices allow students to collaborate from multiple locations & with different schedules.
• If the tool is not user friendly, it's not worth using. However, all technology has a learning curve, and the teacher needs to incorporate this into his/her expectations.
• Technology allows for differentiation in the classroom, but this doesn't mean we get rid of methods or lessons that work without computers or devices.
• Learning a language takes time and practice.  The Internet is filled with resources that will support a language learner to develop fluency.  It's our job as a language educator to expose our students to those resources, but the students need to actively engage in the language to actually learn it. 

Here is the Google Doc I created to share resources and student examples.  I am thankful for a great group of students over the past three years who contributed to this document by producing quality work. Please feel free to view, and add your thoughts about language learning and technology in the comment section.

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. 

 

 

Some thoughts on digital natives in my classroom

Thanks to Ant McNeill for photo via Flicker.com

Many believe Generation Z children seamlessly manage technology for a variety of purposes.  The kids who grew up with the Web, MP3 players and cell phones have been exposed at a much younger age to technological tools that have drastically changed the way we complete tasks.  These same technologies have also added a plethora of entertainment options.  Despite the exposure these children have had to these digital tools, they still compartmentalize entertainment, their social life and “formal learning”.  I believe that students will develop skills that will allow them to navigate more fluidly between each of these compartments, but I have to continually remind myself to be patient about the process. 

As some of you have read before I am fortunate to have a classroom set of netbooks. Many, many things have changed about the way I run my classroom since we have had access to them, but I am surprised every year by the time we spend in class learning or reviewing some very basic digital skills.  These are a few things I took for granted my students knew how to do:

-Email a document to themselves

-Trouble shoot a frozen screen

-Set up a user name and password that they could remember easily the rest of the school year

-Retrieve the password and/or user name if they forgot it

-Find and use a web site’s help center/support

-Embed a link

-Load an image online

-Use a web site’s navigation menu to find specific information if it is not the first thing that pops up on a site

You get the idea... To be fair, many of my students negotiate these tasks and are a huge help in class as they troubleshoot issues with their peers. However many students who successfully use Facebook, do not transfer over the skills they use on that site to similar tasks needed to do work for Spanish class.  This is one example of compartmentalizing.

Here is another example of compartmentalizing outside interests with educational goals. Toward the end of the school year my students had an option to self-select a topic of interest to them and work on it over the course of two weeks.  (I’ll describe the project in more detail in a later post.)  When given the opportunity to select any topic of interest to them and use it Spanish class, many kids really didn’t know what to pick.  Several wanted to do fall back on a traditional report & posterboard.  Not only did they have problems considering their hobbies and outside interests as a viable topic, but some still wanted to print out and paste images to card-stock despite having experience and exposure to several multimedia tools. 

This was not the highlight of my week.  Thankfully I talked to my colleague and Art teacher Rod Vesper (you can read his blog here). He had just visited some students in our district that were part of a 7th grade pilot program that allows students to bring their laptops to school. He was very impressed with the learning and the manner that these kids used digital tools to learn.  Seamlessly.  He also had experienced some of the same issues that I had been working through.  And he reminded me to be patient.  

Our students revert to what is comfortable to them.  They are well acquainted with reports and posterboard visuals.  They are accustomed to teacher-directed activities.  It will take some time to shift this mindset.  Student need to be exposed to digital tools that can be used for learning as well as personal enjoyment.   They need to have the opportunities to develop digital skills to perform tasks for learning.   They need to understand that digital skills and tools are not exclusive to entertainment and chatting with their friends.  These tools can also be used in the classroom effectively. I look forward to having those 7th graders in my classroom in the next couple of years. Until then I will remind myself that I am doing my part to shift that mindset in my classroom. 

If you use digital tools in your classroom, how do you work in the learning curve into your lesson plans? 

 

Flickr for vocabulary practice

I wanted a to write a quick post about Flickr.  I have talked about this Web 2.0 previously, but I wanted to add another usage for what is one of my favorite sites.  One of my homework options is for students to photograph current vocabulary and load it to our class Flickr group.  This year I have 8-10 students who consistently take photos and load them to our class group.  I ask that my students tag the photos with the lesson number, and I can easily create a slide show by selecting the photos with that specific tag.  You can see an example of what this slide show looks like here.  There will be some repetition in the vocabulary words photographed, but I am ok with that. The student photographers enjoy seeing their work as a slide show, and the other students like viewing these photos more than the clip art that comes with the textbook.  This is a great review activity and takes very little preparation on my part, but personalizes the lesson tremendously.