More Spanish

Compiling language teachers' blog urls

I read a reply to one of my blog posts, and was surprised to find out that I did not have the commentator's blog in my RSS feed.  I was very sorry to see how much good information I missed last school year.  I unfortunately can’t keep up with all the blogs relating to the teaching of foreign languages/world languages, so I would like to enlist your help. I have created a Google spreadsheet to share where language teachers can add their blog url and any other information about their blog.  (If this resource is already out there, please leave the link to the site/document in the comments & I will add my information to it.) As I find time, I will start adding blogs that are active in my RSS feed to the spreadsheet, but if you read this before I have added your blog, please help me out by adding your own information, or adding your favorite blog to the document.  I do want to keep this list specifically targeted to blogs that relate to the teaching of languages or blogs that provide content to FL teachers (ie Zachary Jones site Zambombazo).  Please don’t add blogs that are exclusively personal blogs or sites that require $ for content.  Make sense? Feel free to add the link to the Google spreadsheet to any online resource that might help us compile & share these urls. Thanks for your help!

 

El Mundo de Birch is back :)

One of my favorite profesional blogs to read is El mundo de Birch.  I was very happy to see her new post regarding a conversational activity she does with her kids.  I was soo excited, I created my own to use with my kids on Friday.  You can see the PDF at the bottom.  I wanted the students to be mindful of the tenses they have learned so far, so I set up the questions to include present, imperfect and subjunctive.  I know I will be doing this again when we practice conditional & future.  I can't wait to see how it goes.  Thanks Sharon!

Download Conversación con naipe

You can read about some of the modifications I made to this game here.

Twitter favorites

I have been so busy this school year that whenever I'm on Twitter all I seem to do is mark intriguing Tweets as favorites.  This weekend I went through some of those favorite Tweets, and found all kinds of interesting links and posts.  I'd like to share a few.  

Triptico is a web site that has interactive spinners. Students or a teacher can customize double spinners with pronouns and infinite verbs to practice verb conjugation.  Perfect for pair work or a class game.

RTVE has several cartoons and kid's shows in Spanish available online.  The material listed on the site is fabulous, but I think you need to register to view & my registration did not go through the few times that I tried.  I look forward to trying the site out another day, and hope the site was just down when I tried it.

Also from RTVE is a 4-5 minute news clip.  This was very user friendly and did not require registration.

I checked out Formespa and found this great music video by the group Tam Tam Go called Atrapados en la red, perfect for tech vocabulary in Spanish! The site has many other activities for Spanish students.

I loved this Flickr application called Five Card Flickr Five photos are randomly chosen from Flickr and you (or your students) can write a story or a narration about them.

I also added a couple more blogs to my RSS feed. Sarita, a Spanish teacher in Kentucky, had some great ideas about how to grade blogs for homework.

Voices en Español has a blog to go along with its podcast.  The latest post mentioned Lenguajero, a website that is pairing up Spanish and English students for some virtual language practice. 

The wonderful José Picardo has some fabulous guest bloggers on his site, including one of my favorite Twitter colleagues Alice Ayel who writes about using photography in the FL classroom.

I want to thank all the wonderful people who share this information with me on Twitter every day!  I'm just sorry I can't give specific credit to each of you for the sites you brought to my attention, but believe me I do appreciate it very much.