Edublogs

In my placement school, we are all about sharing. The Spanish teachers are incredibly creative, and they're eager to share their activities, from questionnaires to TPR (Total Physical Response) stories and powerpoints. In fact, I often have to turn my colleagues down so I can get more practice in creating my own activities. In any case, I have already taken advantage of many of the wonderful resources they create and share with me, and I look forward to sharing my own activities and powerpoints with them in the coming months.

I believe that this is how teachers should be. If an activity successfully teaches our students important language skills, we want to share it far and wide so other students (and teachers) can benefit. This is one of the great things about the current internet culture. Not only do I have access to the minds of four amazing Spanish teachers, as well as a plethora of amazing teachers of other disciplines, at my placement school. Teachers around the world are sharing what has worked for them and offering it to the teaching community, often for free! I looked at two edublogs in particular for inspiration.

The first blog I looked at was Zambombazo, an amazing resource website for Spanish teachers. I first saw it when my classmate wrote about it, and enjoyed a few hours exploring the site. When I went to my placement the next day to rave about it to my mentor teacher, I found that she already knew about Zambombazo, and in fact was planning to use an adapted version of one of their activities that very week! The activity was a musical cloze (fill-in-the-blank) focusing on the preterit tense, with some comprehension and interpretation questions on the side. I thought this was a great activity because it practiced multiple things at once - reviewing the preterit tense, listening on a phonetic level, and interpreting the written and spoken (actually, sung) Spanish. The questions also focused on different levels of understanding - literal understanding, inferences, and bridging to world knowledge. Zachary Jones has a TON of these cloze activities, and many of them focus on specific grammar or thematic points, so the class can do a fun activity without having to take time away from core content. In fact, the fun and multi-sensory nature of the activity reinforces the grammar and vocabulary because it's so much more emotionally engaging than flash-cards and rote memorization, so it sticks in students' minds.

One of my favorite sections of the site was Doblado Doblado (doubled dubbing). Dialect and accent are always issues in teaching a second language, especially in areas with very limited contact with the target language. I learned a dialect similar to the one my mentor teacher speaks, so our students get a lot more exposure to that dialect than to other ones. We balance this out by using resources from a variety of countries, and dialectal differences is even a theme in one of the upper level classes.

Doblado Doblado looks at movie scenes and trailers dubbed in Latin American and European Spanish. There are cloze activities for the two versions, and often there are questions comparing the two. This is a great way to introduce the concept of language variation even at beginning levels of Spanish instruction. Not to mention the fact that students get to watch part of a favorite movie in class, but rather than turning their brains off for movie-time, they focus extra hard on the dialogue so they can hear the differences between the two versions. It's a win-win!

Another blog I looked at was Work-Life Imbalance, written by an amazing teacher I met at the Michigan World Languages Conference last month. Her blog is much more personal, and rather than providing specific resources, it serves as a source of emotional and philosophical inspiration. One post in particular really struck me: Making my Students Uncomfortable. Teaching languages is about so much more than teaching grammar and vocab - it's about teaching culture, and intercultural interactions. This post addresses the importances of pushing students outside their comfort zones in order to get them to really think - but not pushing them so far that they disengage. As a high school teacher, I can really relate, and I hope to hear back from her with some stories about what has and has not worked out in her classrooms in the past.

What other blogs have you all read that inspired you, either in terms of content and activities, or in terms of revisiting your philosophy of teaching and learning?

Tech Tools in Use... or Not

This semester, in groups of five, we presented about different tech tools we could use in the classroom. The tools were Padlet, Audacity, Socrative, VoiceThread and Prezi, the last of which my group presented on. The theme of these presentations was "Tech Tools in Use." That is to say, we weren't just talking about what the tools can be used for. We also talked about how they're actually used, by real teachers and students. We also got a chance to use the tools, to see how they actually work when a large number of students uses the tool all at once.

To be honest, many of the tools seemed interesting, but left me feeling like "cool story, Bro." Sure, VoiceThread is awesome, but will I actually use it? Would I use it often enough that it would be worth the time it takes for my students to figure it out? If I'm going to use it once a unit, then yes, it's worth it to spend the better part of one class period teaching students how to use it and letting them figure out different features. But if I don't plan to have them use it that often, would it really be worth it? Besides, the idea of teaching them how to use a complicated technological tool in Spanish sounds like a frustrating experience. This is not to say that I would never use it, but I don't see it becoming part of my repertoire during my early years of teaching.

On the other hand, I could definitely see myself using Padlet. Earlier in the semester, the class had worked on a Google PowerPoint (pardon me, Google Presentation), and there was mass chaos when everyone tried to update at once. Faster computers wrote over slower computers, and the slowest computers were completely lost in the mix. Furthermore, every time someone added more text higher up in a document, the whole thing would shift down, and everyone looking at a part lower down on the document would lose their place. In contrast, Padlet wasn't overwhelmed by everyone working on a personal padlet at once. Each Padlet was it's own deal, and we just added links to our own personal Padlets on the main Padlet. In addition, there are different ways you can make things pop up when people work on a shared Padlet, including a way that the newest update is always in the same spot and everything else shifts down. That way you don't run into the problem (that we ran into in the Google Presentation) of many people trying to write on the same space, and overwriting each other.

One neat thing about Padlet is that you can put different kinds of items on it. You can post simple text boxes, embed videos, link to websites, etc. It's basically like a website that's incredibly easy to make. This is great because, if you have the technology, you can have your kids make a Padlet for a project, and the students with less technological knowledge won't be disadvantaged. Yet it's not so simplified that they are totally limited in what they can post. Plus, it doesn't have the same dizzying effects that Prezi does (if you are in my cohort, you heard me complain like the old curmudgeon I am about that a couple weeks ago.)

The presenters also showed a number of Padlets used by real live teachers. By looking at openly shared Padlets, you can get access to a whole lot of material for your own classroom, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to teach the imperfect tense. On the other hand, because you're not the one controlling the Padlet, if the teacher decides to delete her Padlet or change things around, you're kind of stuck. I would probably look at public Padlets to get ideas, but I wouldn't want to rely on one, just in case the creator of the Padlet happens to delete it the very morning I need it.

What do you all think? Would Padlet work in your classroom or lesson planning? Was there another tool we looked at this semester that fits better with your teaching?

Technology in Our Schools

In his book Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920, Larry Cuban explores, as you might guess from the title, the use of technology in school classrooms. The idea that technology will revolutionize the classroom is nothing new, and in fact, many contemporary trends have been around for a while. One of these trends, unfortunately, is the relative distribution to access in different schools. Throughout the last century, the majority of technology has been used by the minority of teachers. Some schools had the latest technology, and some schools had the left-overs, in questionable conditions. Sound familiar?

I currently work in a school with incredible access to technology. We have smartboards, overhead projectors that connect to laptops or project what you physically have on the desk, laptop carts, and wifi that has not once gone out while on my watch. Everything works. Really. Ok, sometimes the laptops are a bit slow, or a student has to switch one out for another one that works better. But there are enough laptops on a cart that this it's possible to get another one in the rare scenario that the first one doesn't work. There are enough carts that we've never not had one when we needed one, and there are usually at least two sitting around and charging in the teacher's lounge on my floor. It's possible that other teachers simply don't use the laptop carts very much, which makes sense because they would come in a lot more useful for some disciplines than for others. Still, it goes to show that we have more than enough to go around.

My mentor teacher, and the other teachers that I've observed teaching, all seem quite adept at using their technology. I observed a master math teacher teach a lesson on graphing equations by hand. To compare different types of equations, she used one color for the x-intercepts, a different color for the line of symmetry, and another for the high or low point of the parabola or absolute value function. Using different colors made the similarities between the two types of equations really clear. It would be easy enough to use different colors on a regular whiteboard, but in order to easily go from one picture to the next, she used a projector and wrote on the smartboard using the digital pen. I was impressed with how automatically she switched colors on the smartboard "pen", cleared her writing to get back to the original picture, and shifted back and forth between slides. It was clear that the technology made her lessons easier for the students to understand, but only because the teacher had practiced using it to the point of automaticity. This is something I observe in my mentor teacher as well, and in all the teachers I've seen. They don't just have access technology; they can use it "fluently", like speaking a second language without difficulty.

This is all good news for my placement school. However, this simply isn't the case in other schools. In the school I used to work in, a teacher was considered foolish if their lesson depended on the internet working. The tech guy was working on fixing the internet or other tech problems so often that I didn't even realize until months into the school year that he also taught classes. When I first got back to the States and started this Teaching With Technology class, I felt like a Negative Nancy but I couldn't help asking "And when the wifi goes out?" every time we were introduced to a convenient yet internet-reliant tool to use in our classrooms. As I can tell by reading my classmates' blogs, this is clearly not an issue of the States versus other countries. My current placement seems to be an exception when it comes to access to working and reliable technology. Even within a single school district, such as the one I went to school in, disparities arise.

It's clear that the technological divide, already evident many decades ago, is not abating. It's hard to say if it's becoming starker or not, but that seems to be the wrong question. The most imperative questions are: what is the current situation, what are the results, and what can we do about it? More and more it is becoming clear to me that teaching my students to the best of my ability, while absolutely essential, is not enough. As teachers, we must be advocates for our students, and for students in general. After all, students are not just our "clients" or our "products" as some models seem to posit. They're not our "future" as many a feel-good song tells us. They are the current generation of young people; they are Now.

Connections across Disciplines

While reading articles about disciplinary literacy, I was struck by the differences between how one reads for different disciplines. Because of this, my program separates the cohort into disciplinary groups for the literacy class. The language teachers are with the English Language Arts teachers, which makes a certain amount of sense in that we might use stories or poetry in our classes. However, one could just as easily argue that learning a language is more similar to learning math or science.

Learning a second language, especially in the primary stages, involves looking for patterns and applying them in different situations, much like mathematics and science. For all three disciplines, this spans all of what Anderson and Krathwohl would call "the cognitive dimensions" - from simply memorizing and repeating a pattern (remembering or recalling the pattern) to  discerning a pattern or algorithm from examples (inferring), to figuring out when to apply which pattern or algorithm (differentiating). Inspired by these similarities, I took a look at a group of math teacher's project on BYOD for my Connections Across Disciplines.

The group began with a summary on their opinions on the BYOD debate. They mentioned that, for their specific discipline, BYOD would simply complicate matters because most applications used in math classrooms wouldn't work for all devices. This made me realize how discipline-specific the BYOD debate can be, as well as the importance of knowing how accessible common applications are to students with different levels of access to technology. In my school placement, phones are often used to access online dictionaries; something that works on any smartphone. Yet a complex app for math or science might only work for smartphones with specific platforms. I see why it might be best for phones to stay in students' backpacks during their math class.

The lesson that the math group planned focused on ratios. They chose an interesting and somewhat controversial topic: the ratio of liquor stores per square mile, and of churches per square mile, in their students' area. One doesn't often think of math class as a place that such emotionally charged topics would come up, but I could see students having different reactions to the class. I think this could really bring home the idea that math is more than just numbers in a textbook. It could even lead to some real soul-searching in the class, and hopefully could help students feel empowered to change their community for the better. However, I could also see some students become distressed by the topic and disengage with the class, so I think it's important that the topic be handled thoughtfully. Given how thoughtful this group was about the BYOD debate, deciding against it in part to promote equity among the students, I am sure that these teachers in particular would introduce and explore the topic with thoughtfulness and with grace.