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.

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.

¡En español, por favor!

I’m at the point of my career that every day is Professional Development. I spend two days a week at a high school, observing, teaching, and getting plenty of feedback and advice. I spend three days and an evening at my university, taking classes specifically designed for pre-service teachers, and observing how my professors teach us. I spend one morning a week helping out at a Saturday school. I chat with my mom, a retired ESL teacher, and her friends from the profession. I never go a day without getting some sort of input that helps me develop as a teacher. But what about the next 40 years? How do I continue to grow as a teacher over the course of my career? I plan to constantly question my own practice and to continue speaking with fellow teachers. In addition, I’d like to learn from other teachers from different districts at conferences, such as my state’s World Language Association’s conference, which I just attended this week.

As my mentor teacher pointed out to me, attending this conference is invaluable not only because I get to see how other teachers teach languages, but because I would be seeing the very latest in world language teaching. And the theme of the conference indeed seemed to be innovation. In general, when one thinks about “innovation,” the first thing to come to mind is often “technology.” And technology was certainly a theme in every presentation I attended. However, it wasn’t the only innovation discussed.

One of the big innovations discussed at the conference was the 90% rule. For those of you who aren’t language teachers, the 90% rule is the idea that language teachers should be talking in the target language for at least 90% of class time, no matter what level the class is. This contrasts greatly with my own experience as a K12 language learner. Both my elementary school and my high school taught world languages in English, and as a result, my exposure to the target languages was quite limited. With the 90% rule, students are exposed to the target language for roughly 5 hours a week – which isn’t much, but it’s a lot better than nothing.

There seems to be a lot of pushback to the 90% rule. In conversation with other teachers attending the conference, I often heard the opinion that there was no point to teaching in the target language because the students wouldn’t understand. In one presentation I attended, “El 90%: Métodos y Actividades,” the presenters began with a straw poll of whether we thought that it was possible to teach 1st and 2nd year classes while speaking Spanish 90% of the time. The answer was a resounding “Impossible!” Keep in mind that this was not a straw poll of a general population of language teachers – this was an audience specifically composed of language teachers who had taken the time to come to this conference, to stay until the very end, and to attend a presentation specifically addressing not whether but how to teach mostly in the target language.

I was surprised by all of the pushback. In my school, we teach in the target language. In the school I worked at in Spain, we taught English in English. And of course, no ESL teacher is expected to speak the native language of all of her or his students, who may come from many different countries, and therefore the ESL teacher has no choice but to teach in English. Why so much disbelief about something that language teachers everywhere already do?

There seemed to be two main reasons for the pushback. The first was a lack of comfortableness with the target language on the part of the teacher. This wasn’t specifically addressed in any of the presentations I attended, but I suppose that the only way to fix that is to practice speaking the language until they’re comfortable with it. After all, you can’t expect your students to do something that you’re not doing.

The second reason for pushback was the belief that students won’t understand them if they speak the target language. I say “belief” because it is a belief, and not a given fact. There are many ways teachers make ourselves easier to understand. We speak slowly. We simplify our sentences. We use cognates whenever possible. We repeat. We gesticulate. We model. We draw on the board. We activate background knowledge. We stick with words our students are familiar with, and introduce new words or forms slowly. At the conference, I learned other methods, such as making powerpoints with pictures of the teacher doing an activity and a sentence describing it, or using realia found online and having a structured conversation around it. The list goes on. In fact, you’re probably already bored by the length of this paragraph.

It’s my belief that a teacher can make herself understandable to any student, even an absolute beginner. If a teacher can’t make herself understandable to their students while speaking the target language, in many cases either the teacher or the student hasn’t tried hard enough. And if it’s the latter, it’s the teacher’s job to engage the student until she or he starts trying harder.

I’m not trying to say that it’s easy to teach a class in the target language. There is a steep learning curve to learning in the target language, and teachers must be careful that their students don’t despair when they don’t understand something repeated for the third time. Sometimes minutes are wasted trying to explain something that’s not all that important for the students to know how to say in the target language. There are days when a student just can’t focus on understanding speech in the target language. However, I think both the teachers and the students will find that the pay-off is worth the extra effort.

To Rubric or Not To Rubric, That is the Question

This past Thursday, David Theune came to my Teaching With Technology class to talk about student motivation for excellent work. In particular, he spoke about the rubric model and the audience model. Theoretically, rubrics offer students some sort of scaffolding for excellent work, but Theune argued that this is often not the case in real life. He argued that rubrics were often harmful because students at different points of mastery would look at the rubric and think one of two things: This is impossible, where do I even begin? or This is easy, I can crank it out in an hour. In either situation, the student doesn’t put in a lot of effort, and as a result, doesn’t not learn a great deal. Additionally, he argued that rubrics encouraged convergent thinking – everyone gets the same rubric, so everyone churns out the same essay.

Theune argued that we should stop thinking about rubrics and start thinking about audience. He argued that people do better work when they know that someone (other than the teacher, who, let’s face it, basically isn’t a real person) will see it. Theune mentioned different audiences students might have, such as parents, peers in a different district, younger students in the same district, and the world at large, and he discussed the benefits of each audience. For example, in inviting parents into the classroom, we would strengthen family-school connections. In having our students present to younger students, we would give them the opportunity to teach, which both helps them learn their material and gives them the chance to feel like rock stars. My particular subject matter lends itself more to some audiences than others. Many of my students will have parents who don’t speak any Spanish, and who would be less likely to attend a performance in my class than an English-language class. However, a pen-pal or skype-pal with a native Spanish speaker could really motivate my students to improve their speaking and/or writing skills. After all, nothing pushes you to get better at communication than having something to say and someone to say it to.

I agree with Theune that students are unlikely to turn in shoddy or perfunctory work if they know that someone who matters to them will see it. This takes care of the I can crank it out in an hour students. However, it doesn’t address the students who thing This is impossible, where do I even begin? Students are unlikely to turn in shoddy work, yes, but a perfectionist or a student who feels lost may simply turn nothing in at all. For evidence, see this very blog, which I have posted nothing on all summer and all of September. For many students, taking away the rubric and giving them an audience may be the equivalent of throwing them into the deep end and then posting the results on youtube. They might be so terrified of being laughed at by their pen-pal that they don’t write to them at all.

Another issue raised in class was the viability of inviting parents into the classroom during the workday to watch their kids perform poetry or read essays. Many parents work one or more jobs and would be unable to attend anything during the day. This could make students whose parents couldn’t come feel less motivated than their peers whose parents could make it to the performance. A possible solution to this problem could be to videotape the event and make it available to all of the parents, either online (those without home computers could watch it at a library) or on dvd’s. Another solution could be to alternate, and have one workday event each semester and one after-school or weekend event each semester, to give more parents a fighting chance of attending something.

I would make a special effort to try to get parents who speak Spanish into the classroom. Particularly in the upper-level Spanish courses, I would invite Spanish speaking parents to talk about a subject of their choice, which would not only strengthen family-school connections, but would also give my students a chance to get authentic Spanish input and to learn about an interesting topic to boot. Parent presentations in Spanish would potentially touch on 4 of the 5 C’s of language teaching: Communication (listening comprehension and question asking in the target language), Connections with other disciplines (using the target language to talk about the topic of the parent’s choice), and Communities (using the target language in the community, and not just for schoolwork), as well as potentially Culture, depending on whether the parent chooses to speak about a cultural topic.

In the end, I think Theune had some great ideas, but I don’t think that one has to see rubrics and audiences as either/or. Many students could be helped by rubrics, which serve as scaffolding for students who don’t know where to begin, while their audience would push most students to perform beyond a perfunctory checking off of each requirement. And yet, I wonder what to do for the student who is afraid to perform. Any suggestions?

La vuelta de la profe profi

It feels strange to write in this blog, over a year after my last post. And what a year it has been. I've written various drafts for this vuelta-de-la-profe-profi post, but in the end, none of them satisfied me, in part, I suppose, because my old audience won't read it and I don't yet know how to write for my new audience. Pues, nada. Adelante.

Schooooooool's out! for! summer!

On Monday, I had my last session of Teaching With Technology until September. The activity from that day that stuck with me most wasn’t actually technology-based, which isn’t unusual for this class. (More on that later in this post.) Four of us volunteered without knowing what we were doing, and we were sat down at tables facing away from each other. At first, I thought we were going to do something competitive, but I was happy to find that, in fact, we were working as a single unit. I much prefer working as a group than working in competition – competitive games are zero-sum, and I hate the added dimension of the impossibility of everyone coming out happy - if you try your best, you please your teammates, but it means the other teams are more likely to have an unhappy outcome. Furthermore, it means keeping discoveries from people on the other team, which in turn complicates even sharing these discoveries with people on your team since you don't want the "others" to hear. When everyone works together, there's none of that inner-conflict, so it's all about problem-solving, curiosity, teamwork and fun.

Each table was given an envelope with puzzle pieces and we had to piece together the puzzle. The thing is that we each only had half the puzzle, so we had to figure out how to put it together, without seeing the pieces the other pair had. First, we figured out more or less what we had, and put together a decent chunk, and then we started talking with the other pair. I systematically went through the pieces, from bottom left to bottom right, then the next row up, etc, until we had accounted for every piece. It was a fun and satisfying game. But what's it got to do with technology?

One thing I love about this class is that we never start with technology and try to find a lesson to fit it. We start with problems and then we try to figure out how to solve them in our class discipline, and then we see where technology fits into the picture. I like this method a lot, because I'm starting to see how tech really does fit in to a lot of lessons in a logical and useful way. Now that I see how tech can expand my students' options, if it's used correctly, I have a much more positive attitude about it.

 It’s been a really great class, and I’ve learned a lot in this short time. I wouldn’t say that my technological skills have increased drastically, yet I’ve learned to use a number of new programs. To be honest, I don’t think I even used a shared GoogleDoc until starting this program (and I’m trying to accept that having shared spreadsheets means sometimes giving up the idea of alphabetization, since most people just add themselves to the bottom of the document. In case anyone reading this is wondering, I am the one who’s been putting everyone in alphabetical order when we make contact-sheets, dinner plans, etc.) I think the biggest thing for me was just becoming more familiar with different computer programs, and realizing that using new ones isn’t so daunting.

Edited August 6th: Apropos of using "new" programs – I've just made my first PowerPoint Presentation! I am inordinately proud - I think I am now officially as technologically advanced as the average Victorian... maybe even the average Edwardian! Anyhow, glad I got that milestone over with before starting to teach on my own.

EduBloggers! (Because two-word portmanteaus are for the weak.)

This weekend, I looked at a couple of edublogs for my Teaching With Technology class. I skimmed a few weeks of Langwitches, reading 4 or 5 posts in-depth, and read a few posts of Teachers At Risk. It's been really cool reading my colleagues' amazing blogs, seeing their different takes on the same or similar readings and classes that I've experienced. It's also nice to read the blog of someone who hasn't been following more or less the same path as me this last month and a half. I think I'll start reading these, and a few more edublogs, on a semi-regular basis.

One of the first things that struck me while reading Langwitches was the importance Tolisano gives to authorship. The latest entry (at the time I'm writing this) is about creative commons copyright. To those unfamiliar with CC, the idea is that anyone can use the images, text, etc that you post/publish/leave lying around your living room labeled as CC - as long as they credit you, and as long as they don't make any attempt to profit off of your work. It's beautiful and idealist, like CouchSurfing before they sold out (a rambling post for another day), a testiment that people are basically good and that the internet is a great way to foster communication and collaboration. Tolisano makes an all-too-common lament that people, for various reasons, subvert the purpose of CC, particularly with leaving off authorship. She lists a number of reasons people seem to do it, ranging from malicious intent* (claiming her work as their own) to simple ignorance**. I'm glad she addressed the fact that many people break copyright law online simply because they don't know any better. We have to remember that many users of the internet are children, or adults with limited technological literacy/experience. All the more reason to educate people about important internet norms.

Scrolling down to June 11th, you can see some e-books her kids made about animals. I clicked through (totally worth it - they're adorable!) and was struck by two things. 1) There was some misinformation in the book about sharks, so fact-checking wasn't as emphasized as it could have been (humans are NOT a major food source for sharks!) and 2) the e-books ended with a bibliography. Yes, the bibliographies had only one book each. But Tolisano is teaching the kids, early on, that it's important to cite your sources. This message cannot be given early or often enough!

Langwitches is filled with useful tutorials and flow-charts, including a poster about how to use e-mail for school, and how to use different tools. I think I'll find this website pretty useful for getting more familiar with common technology. I was pretty turned off by one post she had, though, about how technophobes need to "just get over it!" While you don't want teachers who don't know basics, like how to check email, telling those of us with lower technological literacy to "get over it" is not particularly encouraging. In fact, in makes me less likely to want to read her blog, and thus less likely to learn to use what she's berating me for not already knowing. Maybe she was just trying to blow off steam after a particularly frustrating exchange with another teacher. But blogs are editable, and she should have changed the title of that entry by now.

The other edublog I read was Teachers At Risk. I really liked the entry titled Nine Questions I Ask My Students on the First Day of School. She wrote it for her special ed math class, but it's easily adaptable to any subject matter, and seems like a great way to set a positive tone on the first day, while also getting a good idea of what areas/skills your students will be able to leverage well, and what will need more scaffolding***.

Does anyone else have an edublog they would recommend? Comments welcome!

* Kate Beaton's reaction to the Grumpy Cat people stealing one of her jokes to make a profit.

** FAQ for Hyperbole and a Half. Scroll down to see Brosh address reposting without crediting the author.

***Did I really just write scaffolding in my blog? Alternately, p<0.005.



EDIT: Thanks, Anne, for catching the spelling error! I had interpreted it as a sandwich of languages, instead of a magician of languages. That would have made it difficult for people to find the blog, in case of link-failure!

EverNote and Primary Pad

I'm usually a pretty reluctant adopter of technology, but I've surprised myself this week by starting to use two new programs since my last blog post. One of them, I learned about in the class where I presented about XMarks, and the other we used in class on Monday.

Over the weekend, I started using EverNote, and I'm pretty happy about it. I'm just using it for class notes and for a to-do list, but it's really helpful. My to-do list is in different colors depending on what class it's for, or if it's a non-school-related obligation. With everything in one place, it's much easier to see what I need to do, and it's satisfying to click those “done” boxes. I know I could just make something similar in word, but having this on EverNote makes it easier to find, and if I don't have my computer, I can reach it from online.

In terms of notes, I'm still on the fence. I really like having all my notes all together. It will make things especially easy for cross-referencing between readings and between class lectures. However, I don't like the outline form. I am used to using an outline form in Open Office that alternates numbers and letters. Using EverNote, all of the numbers and letters are just numbers, so it's not as easy to keep track of where you are when you're writing or reading notes.

Right now, I'm still taking my notes in OpenOffice and then copy-and-pasting them to EverNote. But if I ever edit the notes, it messes up the outline form. So it's a process.

The second thing I started using was Primary Pad. You use it to make a text document with other people, and everyone can work on it simultaneously. It was really cool to use it while working with two others on our lesson plan. The text of each person who edits the document is highlighted a different color, so you can keep track of what you've written, and what other people have written. I really liked working on it simultaneously, because we could be editing different paragraphs at the same time, and didn't have to wait for each other to get to the keyboard. It's also cool to use when we're not together. It's nice that we'll all have access to it, like a GoogleDoc, and that everyone's different colors will cue us in to what parts the others have edited since the last time we looked at the doc.

One problem I have with Primary Pad is that it requires the internet. I'm reluctant to use anything in my classroom that requires a connection. While I always have a back-up plan, especially when technology is involved in the activity, it's frustrating for students to have to change gears abruptly when they're really getting into something, and the internet connection suddenly fails. At least with EverNote, you can edit things without an internet connection, you just can't synch it, but with Primary Pad, you can't really do anything while the internet's down. Still, it could be used in the media center, where computers often have wired access to the web.

The moral of the story is that even I can start to use technology, and it may even make me more organized, which is something I sorely need. Does anyone have any advice on the whole outline-form in EverNote thing? Any other advice for using tech in general?

See you all in class!