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.

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.