Developing students’ respectful and ethical minds: E-Pals (u06a1)

(The things we don’t understand or know cause fear in most people. Once we do understand and know the objects of our fear, they are no longer a problem.)

I think it is very important for us as teachers to take our students out of the classroom and into the global environment they will soon work in. To do this, there are plenty of Web 2.0 tools to choose from.

I teach Spanish, as I’ve mentioned more than once, and I am always looking for ways to give my students authentic Spanish material to work with, and opportunities to practice what they have already learned. I think that E-Pals is one way to offer them both. I joined E-Pals and put up a post saying that I am interested in working with a teacher in a Spanish-speaking country who teaches first and second year English. I already have two teachers who I’ll be working with in September. I wanted beginner-English learners because my students are mostly beginners, too. This is our plan so far:

We are going to pair our students and give them class time to write to each other once a week. At the beginning, my students will write in Spanish and theirs will write in English. That way, they all can feel comfortable using their target languages because, obviously, they will all be making mistakes. We will encourage them to help each other with their mistakes. As our students become more proficient, we hope to provide them with two opportunities a week. On one day both students will communicate in Spanish and on the other day, they will use English. In this way, they will also receive authentic material from each other. As the school year progresses, we also plan on sharing classroom videos and other activities to learn about each other’s culture. We hope that our students will become friends and enjoy this communication.

I am hoping that along with the positive linguistic results that I hope my students obtain, the project will also help them to expand their respectful and ethical minds.

Using Glogster in the Spanish Classroom

How can you get students more interested and involved in the lesson? How can you give them a fun learning experience? How can you foster their creative side? How can you incorporate technology in your lesson? Well, Glogster is the answer to all these questions.

Having created my own glog, I can tell you that it is fun and there are lots of possibilities for incorporating its use into the classroom. What makes Glogster really great is that you create a secure virtual classroom for your students where you can monitor all their work. There are so many different choices for creating a glog that students can definitely express their creativity any way they choose. Students can make audio recordings using Audacity or Podcasts and then integrate them into their glog. In the same way, they can download video clips or generate their own.

Adding Glogster to a lesson plan also helps to cover the following learning standards:
Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange opinions
Standard 1.2: Students understand and interpret written and spoken language on a variety of topics
Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics.
Standard 3.1: Students reinforce and further their knowledge of other disciplines through the foreign language
Standard 5.1: Students use the language both within and beyond the school setting
Standard 5.2: Students show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using language for personal enjoyment and enrichment.

My glog, El resaurante de la profesora, is a teaching tool for a well-liked theme covered in Spanish 2: el restaurante. I gathered images of popular Spanish foods, included sites that cover Spanish food and restaurant vocabulary (with audio), added a Spanish joke, and finished with a video and writing prompt as an assessment tool. The glog is in Spanish, so if you don't speal Spanish, it tells you to click on the text boxes. I hope my students, and my proferos!, will en
joy it. :)

Here is the link to "El restaurante de la profesora:" http://laprofesoradepensilvania.glogster.com/El-restaurante-de-la-profesora/

An Online Resource for the Classroom

The amount of Web 2.0 tools that can be used in a classroom is mindboggling. One of the ideas that I have seen and plan on using in the upcoming school year is a wiki. I love the idea that an entire class, or even more than one class, can collaborate in the creation of the wiki. One student can add to a page, another can edit what the first one wrote, and yet another can insert music or a video. You can do about anything on a wiki.

The best part is that there is a wiki site especially designed for education: http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/

On this site, there are links to tutorial on "getting started" and on "ideas for classroom use." You have everything you need right there, at one site. I can’t wait to get my students started on their wiki!

Nurturing the Creative Mind Using Digital Media

Ever since I began this course – Digital Media in the Classroom – offered by Wilkes University and Discovery Education – I have been surfing the Internet, following links provided by my professor and going off on a link that is linked to a link that is linked to a link… Wow, sometimes it can make you dizzy. What I have discovered is that there are an uncountable number of sites and applications that can be used to foster the creative minds of our students.

One application that I found particularly attractive is “Quandary” by Half-Baked Software Inc. The site is: http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com/quandary.php It is explained as follows: Quandary is an application for creating Web-based Action Mazes. An Action Maze is a kind of interactive case-study; the user is presented with a situation, and a number of choices as to a course of action to deal with it. On choosing one of the options, the resulting situation is then presented, again with a set of options. Working through this branching tree is like negotiating a maze, hence the name "Action Maze". Action mazes can be used for many purposes, including problem-solving, diagnosis, procedural training, and surveys/questionnaires. There are several clickable examples offered on the site and from these examples you can see the wide variety of mazes that have already been created. Students could really have fun creating their own mazes for their peers.

A is for apple, B is for bailar

I created a power-point presentation incorporating several videos, audio and pictures so my students can learn the Spanish alphabet. I believe this method of delivery can help students to develop both the disciplined and synthesizing minds in several ways.
As I constructed the presentation, one of my goals was to encourage the students to make comparisons between the two alphabets, to see the similarities and the differences. Comparing and contrasting are two abilities associated with Analysis, the fourth step of the Bloom’s Taxonomy Pyramid. It is considered one of the “higher” levels of thinking and it is also the step directly before Synthesis. The mere introduction of a new alphabet to a student whose linguistic skills are limited to his “mother tongue” is a first step towards higher level thinking. Many students show surprise that the ABC’s are not always A, B, C, but can also be “ah, bay, say.” To further facilitate this line of thinking, in the presentation I included the question,”Is the Spanish alphabet the same as the English alphabet?”
By including a variety of video presentations my intention was to meet two goals: to fulfill the requirements established by my professor for the assignment that I was completing (which, I am sure, was included as a requirement so that I could reach my second goal) and to show my students that there are multiple ways of approaching any particular theme. This is precisely what we want them to be able to do: to understand that there is not only one way to look at the world around them. To get this point across, we could also have our students stand on their desks and get a new perspective, as John Keating, the character portrayed by Robin Williams, did in the film, “Dead Poets’ Society.”
By the end of the presentation, my aim is that my students will not only learn the Spanish alphabet and be able to compare and contrast it to the English version, but they will also be able to synthesize all the new rules and knowledge presented to them on the screen so that they can read and write Spanish words correctly, which in turn will lead to more synthesizing in their future endeavors.

Using PhotoStory 3 in an Interdisciplinary Project

This last school year I ran into a friend, a former teacher from my school who is now one of the technology coordinators for our school district. I asked him what was new as far as readily available digital media in our district and he told me that he was going to introduce Microsoft PhotoStory 3 to my students and me.

He told me to reserve three days in the library (our computer lab), which I did, and then I started my class on the project a few days ahead of time. We had just finished a lesson that covered the vocabulary for train travel and the formation of the past tense for Spanish verbs. I presented them with the project: they were going to work with a partner and they had to tell the story of a train trip that they had taken from Madrid to another city in Spain. (With this scenario, they would include the recently learned vocabulary and the past tense of verbs.) All groups were to choose a different city for their destination. We looked at the major cities in Spain and I talked to them about some of the sites that made each city famous and unique. Their PhotoStory would begin in Madrid and from there they would narrate their travel by train to their city of destination. They had to find out and include which train station they had left from, the train schedule, price of the ticket in different classes and for one-way or round trip. They had to talk about their train ride, the amenities offered on board, and the arrival station in their selected city. After their arrival, they had to describe their hotel and how they spent three days in the city, visiting several specific places of interest that are unique to their city, not just “the beach, the mountains and the soccer stadium.” They had to visit typical Spanish restaurants which offered regional cuisine, include a recipe, talk about the food they sampled, prices of hotels, travel and tourist attractions (in Euros and dollars), and they had to include the features of the PhotoStory program (importing pictures, recording dialogue and narration, adding background music and using the “Ken Burns effect” for picture movement. Very few of them had used the program before, so it was new to almost all of us.
In all, they were working in Spanish, and using elements of social studies, math and technology. Over all it was a successful project. I also learned a lot. One of my biggest mistakes was the lack of an extension for the project or secondary activity for groups that finished ahead of schedule.
I graded their projects using a well-designed (even if I do say so myself) rubric. The students were given the rubric on the first day of the project so they could see exactly what I expected, no surprises. The final projects were fantastic!