If you haven’t checked out James Wooldridge’s website yet, you need to right now. On his site, he publishes songs, videos and games that help reinforce Spanish and provide great opportunities for students to hear the language in context. His material is just odd enough to keep your students interested and possibly shaking their heads. Once you’re at is page,
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I’ve experimented with my teaching strategies a lot this year. In fact, I’ve experimented more this year than I’ve ever experimented before. This could be because I’m tired of teaching certain things the way I’ve always taught them, but I think it has more to do with my PLN. I’ve gotten a lot of really great ideas and learned so
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For some reason, I haven’t embraced online quizzes. Maybe it’s because I’m lazy. Maybe it’s because I have a harder time keeping track of digital things than paper things. Regardless, I’ve started experimenting with online quizzes using Google Forms. In the process, I accidentally realized that they can be used as a form of formative assessment. I’m pretty new to
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I wanted to share another website with you today: Spanish Language and Culture with Barbara Kuczun Nelson. This is a great site which can be used in many different ways. The site can be used for studying Hispanic cultures or for its grammatical practice exercises. The site provides ample opportunity for students to sharpen their higher order thinking skills and a
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If there is anything our students (and perhaps all of us) want, it’s immediate gratification. When they receive immediate and clear feedback, it keeps them hooked and interested in the task at hand. A couple of online tools that provide this kind of feedback are Spaleon and Digital Dialects. Spaleon is essentially a conjugation trainer for Spanish verbs. Learners can
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I hadn’t been back to Pinterest.com in a while, so the other night I decided to take another look at it. A month or so ago I wrote a blog entry about possible ways to use it in the classroom. However, I discovered something the other night that inspired me to take a closer look. I realized that after
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Since my post about backchanneling and peer editing, I’ve had to chance to try out backchanneling a little more. I still have a ton to learn, but here are some of my preliminary thoughts. The first class I tried backchanneling with, it went really well. The students were peer editing some comics they had made and I was in shock.
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Last week I did something I had never done before: volunteered to do some after school professional development. Nobody asked me to do it, but I did it. It didn’t go exactly as I planned, but it wasn’t bad either. Naturally the scenario where nobody came was going through my head. That didn’t happen. But the other scenario where my
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To be honest, I’ve always had a little bit of trouble with peer editing. Students always seemed to look at each others’ work, then say “looks pretty good to me” or something equally descriptive. My hunch is that I never really scaffolded it well enough. I’d forget that many students aren’t use to trying to differentiate quality work from mediocre
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I’ve finally realized that nobody is going to come to me with ideas on how to integrate technology into my classroom. Like many educators and other professionals, I’ve decided to take it upon myself to actively seek out resources and information to help me do just that. I’ve since learned that this is called creating a Personal Learning Network. Anyway,
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