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!

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?

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? 

 

OFLA presentation

Thanks to all of you who came to see my session.  I hope you picked up some new information.  Here is the link to the Wiki used in the presentation. Please let me know if I can answer any questions.

 I also wanted to post my presentation.  I hope all the links work on it.  

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.

Netbook Journal

 Earlier this year our school district offered high school teachers an opportunity to submit a proposal to “Re-imagine the 21st Century Classroom” . I, along with two English teachers - Tricia Buck and David Lunn - were awarded 30 netbooks and an opportunity to introduce technology driven activities to our curriculum. We are being supported by our district’s Instructional Technology Specialist, Cary Harrod. I am thrilled to discover what my Spanish students can achieve when they augment their studies with technology on a daily basis. 

 Our first activities started at the end of this past week, after a bout with a stupid cold. On Thursday and Friday I combined traditional instruction and self-paced work online to help students learn how to use the present perfect and review verbs that use indirect object pronouns. I gave students a quick explanation of how the present perfect works in Spanish, and then assigned a couple of workbook activities for practice. No questions. The students then moved on to a self-paced game on www. quia.com over the same material. The interactive activity tells them immediately when they make a mistake. Most of the kids figured out their mistake, but a few needed my help figuring out how to use the reflexive pronouns with this tense. These same kids must have made the same mistakes on the workbook activity, but either didn’t notice their mistakes or didn’t ask for clarification. I really like how quia practice gives kids that direct feedback, and doesn’t let them complete the activity till they correct the mistake.

 After the grammar practice the students moved on to a listened activity. Thanks to Zachary Jones’ site, they were able to view and listen to an Argentinean pop song that used the verb gustar over and over. They filled out a clozed activity and answered some comprehension questions about the song. The kids were able to go at their own pace when they used the netbooks and headphones. Some students understood most of the lyrics the first time around, and others needed to pause and rewind the song a few times to understand what was being said. When we get back on Monday, my students will work with their partner in Spanish to talk about what they liked or disliked about this pop song, and that will transition into other verbs that follow the same pattern as gustar. I like how my students can work at their own pace, and all students were actively engaged when they were online. Some students finished very quickly, so I am brainstorming open-ended activities that these kids can work on while their peers complete the original lesson plans. Any suggestions are very welcomed.

New for second semester

Monday morning these were waiting for me in my classroom.  My students will have access to online resources and tools on a daily basis.  I'm still trying to figure out the logistics, and we are waiting for a cart that will charge the netbooks, but I AM EXCITED!  I'll be writing more about how I plan on using the netbooks in our Spanish classroom, and will share what our short term and long term goals are soon.

txting en espñol

Here is a short list of text shortcuts in Spanish from FL Teach, just for fun or combined with a phone mini-lesson.

stoy           Estoy
tmb             También
l               El/la
mñn             Mañana
hno/hma hermana
bss             besos
100pre  Siempre
ac              Hace
aki             Aquí
asdc            Al salir de clase
bbr             To drink
c               Sé, se
finde           Fin de semana
fsta            Fiesta
qt1bd           Que tengas un buen día
hl              Hasta luego
kntm            Cuéntame
kyat            Cállate
m1ml            Mándame un mensaje luego
q acs?  ¿Qué haces?
q risa  ¡ Qué risa!
salu2           Saludos
tqi             Tengo que irme
tas ok? ¿Estás bien?
xfa             Por favor
xq              Por qué, porque
ymam,         llámame

ymm

For a more comprehensive list check out this site.