More Spanish

Netbook Journal: California Dreaming Pt 1

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.

My Twitter friend and colleague, Leigh Murrell (who lives & teaches in sunny California) and I are very excited about our first student collaborative project. Two of our Spanish III classes are working together to learn about different music genres heard in Spanish speaking countries. We started planning our hispanic music collaboration in January. We talked about mutual goals we had for our classes, and came up with a three part assignment.

This week marks the end of the first part.  Our students self-selected a music genre that interested them and researched the genre’s history and artists that represent it.  They summarized their findings and linked two sample songs to our Ning. Although I am a huge music fan, my students taught me a lot about online music sources.  They started sampling music from Internet radio sites like Pandora, Jango, and Blip.fm. They found specific songs to link or embed to the Ning on sites like Last.fm, Rhapsody, Lala and Actualidades.  Unlike California, Cincinnati does not have a radio station that plays hispanic music, so my students have been exposed to a significant amount of hispanic music just doing research for this project. 

I am very impressed with the depth and quality of writing coming from Leigh’s students, and seeing such good work from other Spanish students has been great for my kids.  I have some very strong writers, but many students wrote their summary directly on the Ning without any peer editing or revising. My students were very impressed with their California peers, when they read what they had posted on the discussion threads.  I took the opportunity to talk about the importance of editing and taking pride in what was published.  I hope this will encourage them to proofread their work before posting it next time. (Here is the rubric for part one.)

I love how some of my more reluctant Spanish students are so engaged in this project because of the music content, and I think it is safe to say that after this project Ricky Martin will not be the only singer that pops into my students’ head when Hispanic singers are brought up. 

Monday, we Skype!  The kids are very excited to meet their partners, as we embark on the second leg of this project.  I bet that my students will ask them about their sunny California weather, as they complain about our snowy winter days.  Several have already requested a field trip. Please read what Leigh has to say about our collaboration.

Netbook Journal: Tic-Tac-Toe Choice

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.

I have been trying to figure out a way to give those students who finish their work quickly and well some challenges that will also meet our curricular goals, and I think I figured out how the netbooks will allow me to give my high achieving students enrichment opportunities. 

I modified an alternative assessment tool, based on a Tic-Tac-Toe gird, to fit my class.  My students will be challenged to complete three out of nine web based activities in a row.  Since I want to make sure that my students practice listening, speaking and writing skills, I made sure that with the exception of one row, all rows will include a listening/speaking/written activity.  I want the specific topic within each activity to be open ended, so that the individual student can self- select the theme and apply the language skills/practice in that manner. 

I still haven’t rolled this out with my classes, but I hope to do so soon. I am curious to see how it is received by my students, and I’m interested to see the quality of work that is produced.  I have rubrics in mind for the activities, but I would like to have the student co-write the rubric if possible. We’ll see how this all comes together. 

Snow day with paella & Valencia

I told my students if the rumors of the winter storm proved to be correct they would have a little enrichment activity on our class blog.  I'm very curious to see how many student will do the work.  

In December, Zachary Jones published several of my student's work on his blog.  I was saving this one for our food unit. One of my students wrote a fabulous post about a paellada she had in her home. Not only is her writing strong, but the article works very well with our current lesson. Zachary also sent me another link to a song by Josh Rouse about Valencia & eating paella.  Perfect compliment to Rachel's article!  

On our snow day, I am asking my students to read & answer comprehension questions about the posts, and listen to the song. They will be responding to both posts on their personal blog. I can't make the students do this work on a snow day. However, I am pleased that I can offer them a way to continue to practice the language even when we aren't in school, and the fact that one of the articles they are reading was written by a peer, is just the icing on the cake!

One of my favorite blogs for Spanish class

Anyone who follows me on Twitter has already heard me gushing about Zachary Jones’ blog Actualidades.  So for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure to visit it, I urge you to do so. Soon!  You will find incredible resources to use in your intermediate - advanced level classes.  He has a section of cloze activities for popular songs, games to practice vocabulary, and many, many articles that pull from popular culture.  He very generously offered my students an opportunity to be a guest reporters on his blog, and I can’t even begin to tell you how excited each of them was when their article was published.  Although every student has posted a few blog posts through our class Ning, being published on a site outside of our class was much more exciting to them.  I hope to continue to find more opportunities for them to write to an audience that is outside of the classroom.  

Jack-Jack attacks the preterit vs imperfect

I continue working with co-operative groups in class.  Our latest activity practicing the preterit and imperfect paid off very well.   My students started the year with some background in the conjugation of the preterit tense, but it has only been in the last six weeks that they learned about the imperfect, and how to use both tenses together to tell a story or narrate events. 

I have been giving traditional notes using Powerpoint presentations, and my students have been practicing both tenses in context with partner activities, conversations and writing activities.  I was concerned that they really were not grasping the distinction between the two tenses, so last week my lesson plans involved  complete immersion of this grammar point.  

I started our the lesson with an individual pre-test.  Students read a short narration and had to choose between the two tenses and provide the conjugated verb in the corresponding blanks.  They were allowed to use their notes which contained verb conjugation charts and notes on tense usage.  As soon as the students took the pre-test, I asked them to get together in their co-operative groups and re-take the same test as a group.  A grade was given for the group test, but the individual test was a baseline score for me. 

The second day of our preterit vs imperfect immersion week, the class viewed the short animated film by Pixar called Jack-Jack Attack.  It was perfect for the thematic vocabulary covered in our text.  As they watch the film I would stop it during key points, and asked the students to consider the tense they would use to re-tell the story.  After seeing the film for the first time, I gave each student a storyboard organizer.  With their partners, they brain stormed vocabulary in Spanish that was used in the animated short.  We saw the film a second time, and this time they took notes on their storyboards in Spanish on the action of the film.  

The next time we met, students worked with their co-operative groups and used Google Docs, their storyboard and their class notes to re-tell the story of Jack-Jack Attack in Spanish using the preterit and imperfect appropriately.  I then took 3 of the student created summaries, and turned them into an assessment in the same format of the pre-test.

The first part of class the next day was spent in student co-operative groups with one version of the assessment.  As a group they figured out what verb tense was needed in each blank.  If they had questions, they were directed to each other or their class notes.  After all groups finished, we went over the activity together as a class, giving any students who did not get their questions answered in their co-operative group a chance to ask me or the rest of the class for clarification.  I then gave the students an individual assessment in the same format of the practice activity. 

Although the test grades were very high, what I found to be better evidence of student learning was the discussion I over heard when they were working together as a group.  I heard students giving specific examples to support their opinion, students clarifying the grammar point to their classmates and students correcting each other’s work. I believe the group work and peer discussion did more to help my students understand the concepts than all the Powerpoint presentations I used previously.

Wiffiti in the class

I wanted to share a quick and easy activity.  I first heard of Wiffit from on this blog post from Allison Riccardi (@anlingua on Twitter).  My Spanish III are working on the subjunctive.  Yesterday we listened and interpreted Juanes' song A Dios le pido.  Today, my students wrote a few sentences using the subjunctive about some of their hopes & wishes.  Then I asked them to text the sentences to the Wiffit board I created & posted on our class wiki. My laptop projected the sentences to the screen as partners worked with each other reading & editing mistakes that were being streamed on the screen.  The only problem I had was that Cricket & Cincinnati Bell did not allow students to use Wiffit.  I am looking forward to using this application in other lessons.

Some thoughts on reading and writing online

My reading methods class best prepared me to teach. I learned some students needed to be coached on how to vary their reading style depending on the medium. Last weekend, I was talking to a friend who is a very thorough reader about all the wonderful resources for teachers in the form of blogs, and she was frustrated she couldn’t keep up with the reading.  Later on, I realized, although she is a good reader, she is applying  the same type of reading skills she used during graduate school to the blogs on her RSS feed. She hadn’t adapted her reading skills for the skimming and scanning  necessary on some internet pages. The opposite holds true for some of my students. Many are expert scanners, but don’t read information for detail. They are used to skimming, picking up key words and moving on to the next link. 

In an interview with Wired magazine, Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, talks about how the digital world is changing our brain.  Jackson says there are studies that show how the environment shapes brain development in kids. The kind of reading material my students have been exposed to largely determines the kind of reader they are.  As a teacher I need to be aware of two things.  First, I do not have the same kind of reader in my classroom I had ten years ago. Second, my methods class on reading is even more important now, because there is a wider variety of written media out there for kids to sort through, and they may not naturally know how to vary their reading style to fit the medium.

I see some of the same issues with their writing.  They write a lot. They text, and journal, and post to Face Book, but many of my students don’t naturally go back to edit or revise.  Because of the multitasking environment they live in, they chose not to go back and look over their work. In an informal medium like a social network site, that is quite appropriate, however, in a more formal medium like a blog or wiki, editing and proofreading is needed. 

In the last couple of days, my students made me realize I need to be more proactive in my approach to the quality of reading and writing my students do.  The class was working on two separate tasks. One group was reading what is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs for class, while the second group recorded a Voicethread presentation.  Many students approached the blog as a scan and skim activity, to the point they didn’t read the follow up questions, and neglected to respond fully to them.  Some of the students read the blog, and answered the follow up questions quite thoroughly, but they published their reply without editing.  Today I pointed out the different types of reading, giving them examples of when scanning is the best way to approach a web page, and when a closer reading would be a better tactic.   We also talked about quick writing and polished writing.  I’m going to encourage and provide my students the opportunity to read and respond to blogs and discussion threads, but for the next few weeks, I will ask them to be mindful of the kind of reading and writing they are doing.  My hope is this practice will help them discern the appropriate reading and writing skills they need to use.

Cooperative short story writing

One of my favorite activities this year with the wiki was a short story assignment my Spanish III students did on our class wiki. I was trying to figure out how to do a writing project that practiced editing skills, and my colleague suggested a cooperative story. The grammar focus was preterite vs imperfect, and the vocabulary was disaster related (floods, fires, earthquakes, paramedics, etc).  I assigned the groups randomly so that no two students were in the same class (that way we avoided problems loading the wiki page at the same time & it allowed the students to use the discussion thread feature).   The students wrote directly on the wiki in Spanish.  They had to write a minimun number of sentences the first day & the second day at the computer lab, they had to make corrections on each other's work.  They could delete sentences & add more to make the story more cohesive. They were given credit for each step of the process. They were also graded on how well they comunicated with each other on the thread (I allowed them to use English  there). 
Please check here and here for some examples of their work. If you go here you will see an example of a successful discussion thread.

 

You can find the rubric I used, and the self-evaluation the kids used for themselves and each other here.

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. 

Voicethread and sporting events

Here are a few examples of Voicethread that my students have been working on over the snow days.  It was posted on ProgressBook & emailed through the wiki, and even so, I know that the majority of kids haven't found out about the extra credit opportunity.  I'm in search for a program that will allow me to text my students (through a computer).  I really believe THAT is the best way to share information.  These examples were done at the student's home. Some kids don't have a microphone, so I'm allowing them to type in their narration.  The program is pretty easy to figure out & the only problem I've run into is that some kids are keeping their project "private" so the link to the wiki doesn't let me view their work.  Check out Katie's & Megan's project for a nice project with sound.