MACUL Conference - part 3

Call me Peter Jackson, but I have managed to turn a single day at a conference into a trilogy of blog posts. In the other two posts, I wrote at length about the different sessions I attended. Because 99.5% of my blog's audience consists of colleagues who have access to a google doc with my notes on these sessions, I will not speak at length about the other two sessions I attended. But I cannot in good conscience neglect to speak about one more session I attended.

The last session I attended at the MACUL conference was a "lightning round" of eight five-minute presentations. Despite the technological focus of the MACUL conference, the common thread was not technology but rather humanity, specifically the humanity of our students. They urged us to nurture our students' curiosity, to encourage them follow their passions, and to explore what drives them, not just what's in their textbooks.

One speaker in particular stuck out to me. Amber Fante spoke about building support networks for "Children from the Gap". These are the children who slip through the cracks, who walk through life invisible or wishing to be invisible. They could be the ones who work to help support the family and then fall asleep over their homework. They could be the ones who hope their parent will be in a better mood today because things don't go so well when they're in a bad mood. They could be the kids that teachers take one look at and think "remedial."

These kids know what you're labeling them. You might think you are hiding it, but you're not. So any time you look at a kid, who may be driving you crazy, who may have neglected to do their homework for the 20th time in a row, who may be begging you for negative attention, label them something positive, because these are the kids who need it the most. Ms. Fante drew upon the image of Charlotte the spider from Charlotte's Web spinning words like "terrific" over Wilber the pig. She said that when she felt frustrated with a student, she would imagine the word "radiant" above them.

I am not perfect. I sometimes feel frustrated with my students. I also know that they are all radiant, even if they don't all know that themselves. I also know that they can see the labels we give them as clear as Charlotte's web. And each of them should see the glittering word Brillante.

MACUL Conference - part 2

My first exposure to teaching with technology came when I was a sophomore in college.

I suppose that's not entirely true. My professors used PowerPoint during my freshman year. My high school teachers used overhead projectors. I even watched the occasional video in elementary school. But this was the first time I was aware of experiencing teaching with Technology, capital T.

I was visiting a friend at her house, and saw her 5 year old son, in the next room, learning about religious traditions at a laptop. An older, Yiddish-accented voice came from the computer, telling him to press one if he understood the "very special thing about Shabbos," and to press two if he didn't. Intrigued, I asked my friend what this was. She explained to me the basic concept of distance learning. I was amazed. I never thought it was something I would be involved in.

Fast forward about ten years. My class has been asked to create a webinar about a technological tool of our choice. Upon assembling a team of brilliant classmates, I suggest Skype as our tool of choice. Between the three of us, we discover that there is much more to teleconferencing in the classroom than I had realized. There are entire webpages dedicated to using Skype for educational purposes. Of course, one of these sites was created by Skype itself, and it's logical that they would talk themselves up, but upon scrutiny, many of these activities seem like ones I would legitimately use in my classroom. The one that most intrigues me: virtual field trips.

Fast forward a few months. I'm at the MACUL conference in Detroit. A couple of hours after the presentation I talked about in Part I (I'll talk about the one in between, and the final presentation I attended, in Part III). The theme: Virtual Field Trips. Obviously, this is the session for me. Readers, I was not disappointed.

I have already typed up my notes about this session in the "Reflections" shared Doc that Tahani suggested (and also created? I'm not sure if she or Rory created it. In either case, thanks!), so I'm not going to post everything again here. However, I'll mention the highlights:

1. Virtual Field Trips are much cheaper than real live field trips, and may be the best option for some schools.

2. Virtual Field Trips don't have to be far away. In fact, if they're nearby, you can spark students' interest and awareness of their own community.

3. The best formula the presenters found was creating a video with an expert before the VFT, then give students time to generate questions, and then hold a video-conferenced Q&A session.

4. Most of the equipment needed for the above is precisely the equipment we use in this grad program.

5. Editing shots together in a non-choppy way is not as difficult as I thought it would be.

If anyone wants the more detailed notes and can't access the Reflections Doc, leave me a comment and I can send them along!

To be continued...

MACUL Conference - part 1

This Friday, I got the chance to go to my second educational conference this academic year, the MACUL conference in Detroit. It was very different than the MiWLA conference I attended in the fall, and I'm very happy I got the chance to attend both of them. While the MiWLA conference focused exclusively on teaching world languages, the MACUL conference focused on teaching with technology, in any academic discipline. I learned a great deal from the presenters I saw, and even got to contribute an idea of my own! I met amazing teachers currently working in the field, and got a glimpse inside of what goes on in their classrooms.

Some of the best advice I got before the conference was that it is ok to leave a session early if it doesn't seem to be the best fit for you - as long as you are subtle and courteous, people will understand. After all, one can only attend at most 5 sessions if you don't check out the Maker Space or vendor area, don't go out to eat, and don't spend time making connections with other educators from different schools.

The first session I arrived at was probably a great session for many attendees, but it just wasn't up my ally. So I snuck out and was able to catch the second half of another session which was completely different than what I'd been expecting. It was called "Crowdsourcing Content for Your Classroom and School," and was presented by Craig Steenstra. I had assumed that it would be about crowdsourcing with different teachers around the globe to get great realia for the classroom - a big deal in the World Languages department. Instead, the session focused on crowdsourcing content from your students! Mr. Steenstra showed us how you could create a blog on Blogger and set it so that anything emailed to an address you create would immediately become a post on the blog. Even better, you can set it so that everything emailed to that address becomes a draft for a post, so that you, as a teacher, can check for school-appropriate-ness before it goes live.

I would love to create a "Spanish in our community" blog with my students, and they could post every time they encounter Spanish in their community. This could really open students' eyes when they are in a very English-dominant setting, to realize that Spanish, and other languages as well, really are all around them! For an ESL class, rather than tracking how much English they encounter (which would be, of course, a lot), they could track when they encounter certain things we study in class, such as different tenses, vocabulary words, or my favorite, idioms. For more ideas from Mr. Steenstra, check out his website at craigsteenstra.com , or his presentation notes at j.mp/crowdit .

I attended three more very interesting sessions that day, which I will post about in part 2, and possibly part 3.

Fliparse = to flip out / freak out. In case you were wondering.

Today I spoke with a student of mine before first hour. Let’s call him Mark. Mark often arrives long before first hour starts and gets homework done in the quiet of our classroom. Sometimes I pick his brain about high school, especially with regards to the Spanish class. I think he’s able to be pretty honest with me because I am the student teacher and not the teacher. I figure it’s a win-win because I get to hear a student’s perspective, and he gets a Spanish warm-up before class starts. It’s always a pleasant surprise to see how willing students are to give honest feedback about their school experience. I feel very lucky to have gotten to know my students well enough to be able to ask them.

Today, when talking about which classes were the most difficult, Mark mentioned that his math class is flipped. What an opportunity! I thought. I have already asked a couple of students about online classes (something that didn’t exist when I was in high school), and now I had the chance to ask about flipped classrooms! I had plenty of questions to ask, and Mark was quite willing to talk, despite the early hour and his teenage inner-clock telling him that it was way too early for Spanish conversation.

It turns out that Mark is not a big fan of having a flipped class, not a huge surprise to me given how much hype it gets (I tend to figure that, when I hear teachers hyping something, and don’t hear anything from the students, there are still some bugs to get worked out). I had assumed that the issue would be the lecture-at-home part, but in fact, what Mark disliked was that he rarely was able to finish the “homework” in class, and therefore had both homework and lecture to do at home. He regularly spent at least an hour on this homework/lecture combination, which, in conjunction with other AP or IB classes, can be killer. No wonder he often looks so tired!

Mark’s comments made me check my earlier assumptions about where the issue would lie. However, just because Mark had mentioned something I hadn’t thought about doesn’t mean that I had not also been right. So I asked him if he understood the lessons at home, and if not, what happened. He said that he generally did understand them, and when not, that he could ask Mrs. S when he got to class the next day. Well then, I guess it’s not as big an issue as I thought – at least not for this particular student. I would still ask a larger variety of students before drawing any strong conclusions.

One thing that surprised me was that Mark’s comment that flipped classrooms were less work for the teacher. From my perspective – not at all! So much video-recording, uploading, etc. A tech-newbie’s nightmare! So I asked him to elaborate, and he said it was easier because the teacher didn’t have to make new notes for them; she could use the ones from the year before. Ah, I said, then it’s more work the first year, but less afterwards. Yes, said Mark, and it’s more work for the students. Hmm. More work for the students isn’t an automatic problem in my book, but it must be justified very strongly. As other students started to arrive, I left Mark to his devices. I knew I had some food for thought to keep me thinking for a while.