Day 6: Podcasting in the Classroom

After reading the article by Maya Payne Smart and listening to a few podcasts from Mr.Cooley's Literature Circles, I am convinced that podcasting is an effective way for motivating students by allowing them to share their learning experiences. Making their work public motivates students to produce their most creative, meaningful work.  In addition, students can use a wide range of skills to plan, prepare, and record a podcast.  They can work collaboratively to brainstorm ideas, write a script, practice their lines, and edit their work before sharing it with other students and listeners on the web.  The application of all these skills potentially enhances their learning and gives them a sense of pride and ownership.  It can also enhance student engagement and it may be useful for a variety of learning styles.   

In the language classroom, podcasting would be a great opportunity for students to practice their listening skills, their pronunciation, their reading and their writing.  There are lots of possibilities for leading the students into meaningful learning experiences, as Smart points out, and I can see myself using podcasting in my classroom. 

Las estaciones with Bookr

This is such a great idea for creating interesting and fun displays for teaching students vocabulary or for incorporating authentic materials in lessons. I did, however, give up after a while, because it was so slow. Not sure if it was the program itself or if there is a problem with Firefox today!!! Very frustrating!!! If it actually is time consuming, I can not justify using it on a regular basis. In any case, I can see its usefuleness for any language classroom.

Spanish Vocabulary Building Activities

Unit 3: Days, months, seasons and weather

Day 5: Online Translators

Online translators can be a blessing and a curse.  Since different languages have different rules governing grammar and syntax, it is quite difficult to translate from one language to another by using an online translation program.  Although I can see that translation tools can be useful for my students, for instance when translating individual words, problems can arise when translating words and sentences that include idioms, thoughts, sentiments, etc.  Every language is rich and unique in nuances and patterns that cannot be duplicated or reflected by a computer program.  If you're fluent in at least two languages, I'm sure you can think of a phrase in one language that doesn't translate well into another, or if it does, doesn't carry the same feeling, depth or meaning.  Online translators can't make that distinction.  And language students need to understand that, especially when using them in order to lessen their workload.  The article offers teachers some interesting ideas for conveying to students that online translators can distort meaning which results in bad communication. 

Or you could try Bad Translator!  It is a humorous way for showing to students how the end result of online translation can be completely distorted. Here is the link:  

badtranslator

I don't mean to imply, however, that online translators are not a good source of information.  Rather, I am saying that we need to be aware that they  cannot always capture the true meanings of natural language and, thus, we should teach our students to avoid them when looking to translate large chunks of text for projects, essays, etc.  Using the old-fashioned dictionary is a good alternative and more conducive to learning.    

Short Stories for Oral Spanish

This is such a great book for younger or older students, since the stories are fairly easy to read, and applicable not only for oral work but also for a variety of in-class or homework activities.  It's great for practicing pronunciation, introducing vocabulary, introducing or practicing grammatical concepts, etc.  I can use it for my classes as an alternative to the textbook and, if posted on my blog, students can access it for homework purposes or for doing their own reading.  

Day 4: Reading Matters

One of the ideas that this article emphasizes is the reading of texts with a focus on deciphering context.  This is one of the strategies that I used in reading first in my L2 and then in my L3 in order to understand information from the texts that I read.  As an L2 reader I always looked for contextual clues that could help me predict the meanings of words that I was not familiar with.  This at times became frustrating, as the article also points out, but as I became a more proficient reader, I developed better skills in predicting meaning from contextual clues.  In my L3, deciphering meaning became easier, as I had wider background knowledge from my L1 and L2 to pull from in order to make links with my L3.  The article offers some good ideas for choosing texts and setting the stage for student learning, such as designing reading tasks that allow the students to infer meaning by making predictions from relevant information and text construction.  However, I would have found it useful if it addressed step by step the issue of how a reading lesson should be structured, what elements it should include (e.g, pre-reading, post-reading, and extension tasks), which tasks are best to help students assimilate textual information, and how to increase student motivation or interest.   

Links to Ideas for Teaching with Music and Music Videos in Spanish

Here are some links for teaching with music in Spanish that I have used in the past:

miscositas authentic materials 

canciones para la clase 

spanish music videos  

spanish immersion tv 

A couple of these links also offer listening games and dictionaries, as well as lesson plans for teaching with music, cultural videos and authentic materials for the classroom.  The others are strictly suggestions on videos and artists for teaching specific grammatical concepts with music.  I hope you find them useful!!!