Category Archives: Reflections

Publish Student Work – Online

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The first tip I sent out to schools was one that was quick to put in practice, but big on return: impose a NO TEXT rule for student presentations. This week’s tip is like it:

Publish student work online.

If your students are creating something – anything – for your class, a growing body of research is demonstrating that students learn more deeply when they are working for someone other than their teacher or the peers in the classroom. If someone were to ask your students, “Who are you doing this project for?” and their answer would be, “Our teacher”, a few simple changes to your assignment could dramatically affect your students’ motivation and engagement.

Some Background:

Students create all the time, in school and outside it. They create for their peers, for their family, and for themselves. In the last ten years, they’ve been creating more and more and more content, filling up terrabytes of space on the internet with everything from profound reflections on identity to absolute drivel. Why the increase? Because it’s easy. Technology, especially mobile technology, has lowered the threshold of effort required to share with the world.

But the threshold hasn’t just lowered for personal publishing – it’s lowered for educational uses, too. There are compelling reasons to leverage these publishing media in our approach to teaching, and the number of those reasons is growing. Recently, Derek Bruff, the director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, wrote,

“Social pedagogies [approaches to teaching that leverage social reasons to learn] can provide sufficiently strong motivations since representing knowledge for authentic audiences can satisfy students’ desires for connection and sharing.” 1

Publishing work online connects students to real people who aren’t in your classroom, imbuing student work with a sense that the product ought to be worth viewing.

Publishing in this way raises student anxiety about work, a condition that can actually promote learning, and brings a new context to the role of a teacher. Bruff illustrates this with the picture below.

Publishing for an authentic audience produces the stress of performance, a somewhat negative emotion, but couples it with the positive experiences of making connections and sharing. When students are placed within this dynamic, the “teacher” is cast in a different light. Instead of the sole evaluator of a student’s product, she is now the keeper of skills that will help that student perform well in the eyes of an authentic audience.

Will this work for all students? Of course not. Each of us views the task of performing for others a bit differently, but teachers at West High and West Middle have found that adding “audience” to their teaching toolkit has changed the way students are approaching their work.

A few ‘homegrown’ examples

The slides below outline 3 different levels of authentic audience.

  • Low-stress: A teacher groups students in one of her classes with the students in another of her classes. No teaching partner is needed.
  • Collegial: Two or more teachers in the same school building or school district combine efforts and direct students to view and/or collaborate on required work.
  • Distance: Two or more teachers, located across the States or world, connect their students, opening up opportunities for discussion not only about content, but about culture and perspective as well.

Authentic audience isn’t just something good for students.  As adults, we understand how creating for others drives us to work harder, think deeper, and make connections so that our creations are something we can take pride in.  Oddly enough, we often call this “teaching.”
What audiences might you open up to your students this year?
  1. Social Pedagogies as Framework for Online Learning ↩

Moodle vs. … the web?

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One of the joys of my job is to facilitate professional development tied to instruction of Moodle, our district’s choice for a learning management system.  This winter is the second time I’ve run the course on my own, an opportunity I thoroughly enjoy, and yet, this year, something has changed.

That change is the advent of teachers who are proficient in multiple online tools.  After all, if a person is proficient with wikis, blogs, edmodo, glogs, etc., what could Moodle profitably offer?  That is, if I can productively navigate public and private spaces on the web, and teach my students to do the same, am I not doing a greater service to students by teaching them through the whole of the web rather than plunking them down in a walled garden?  Wouldn’t it be better to simply manage a website as my home base and operate my “classroom” from there?

If I were to duplicate the functionality of Moodle in our current installation, I could generally accomplish …

  • persistent resource sharing through a website creator.  I’d probably use Weebly so that I could build static pages with resources while also hosting a blog for updated announcements.
  • discussions with Edmodo.  I’d need to capture the link if it’s a question I want students to think about over time, but I could do that without too much trouble and connect it to my website.
  • assessments with Edmodo.  A knowledge of the iframe tag would allow me most of the ability to insert images from around the web, but not upload my own images into assessments.  I could embed Vocaroo audio prompts.  Truly, most teachers might not use these features, but math and foreign languages are growth areas for Moodle in our district and visual/audio elements are key to them.
  • voice assignments through a combination of Edmodo assignment prompt and Vocaroo audio recording.  Students could send me the link or embed it into the assignment field.
  • chat through Today’sMeet links pushed through my blog.
  • gallery walks of digital content through discussions on Edmodo
  • student turn-in through either Edmodo or a combination of DropBox and DropItToMe
  • glossary-type activities through a wiki builder.  Wikispaces sites might be good for small group work, while Google Sites allows page-level permissions, which would be great for paired groups or individuals.

Things I could not accomplish easily without Moodle …

  • differentiation through grouping.  Moodle allows teachers to deliver additional materials and experiences to subsets of their student population without the rest of their students knowing such materials exist.
  • archiving, sharing, and reusing experiences.  Modules like the Sharing Cart (or the import feature alone) promote activity sharing across professional learning communities.  While the Library feature in Edmodo closely compares to this, it  seems focused more on resources than learning experiences.
  • arranging both resources and activities according to units.  The relative permanence and topic-based arrangement of activities available through Moodle means that students have one place to go to find both resources, activities, and other working spaces (i.e. blog spaces or wikis that I’ve set up to make up for the deficiencies in Moodle 1.9)
  • full assessment layouts, with multimedia automatically displayed.  There are certain circumstances when teachers need students to answer a set of questions about a certain text or artifact.   Moodle allows for the arrangement of questions onto “pages” and includes additional assessment format settings that allow teachers to create quizzes that go beyond the question-by-question format.
  • inline feedback on text assignments.   The “inline comments” setting on the online text assignment allows teachers to give feedback to students directly into their text products.

This post is an exercise for me to help me think this through – I’m interested to hear other thoughts.  Abandoning Moodle almost seems a catch phrase on the blogosphere in the past six months, but Moodle has brought so many functions under one roof for us that I hesitate to recommend another solution.

That said, I don’t see Moodle as a panacea.  We’re still using 1.9 because Nanogong is just that good, but I know that means we’re outside the benefits of updates that came with 2.0.  I know it doesn’t have a ‘Web 2.0′ look and that it lacks the type of collaborative features available elsewhere.  I know that my blogging, wiki, and collaborative writing solutions must be “outsourced” to other tools.  I know that Moodle doesn’t “do” mobile.  I know these things, and yet having all the above interactions available in one place with one student login persuades me that it’s worth it.

What do you think?

Research and Inspiration from One Year of @actfl #flteach

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One year ago I became a member of ACTFL and began receiving the Foreign Language Annals as part of my membership. I meet monthly with the coordinator of modern and classical languages and ESOL here, and we use a bit of that time to discuss research that might direct the ways teachers and students use technology in presenting and learning a second language. I use the FL Annals as a starting point for my part of that conversation, and I suppose the highest praise I could give here would be this: I can’t imagine canceling my membership.

The FL Annals have inspired technology integration ideas, connected some dots in my understanding of second-language acquisition, and given me greater confidence that the work I do with teachers is helping students. Below is a summary of a few articles that have inspired me this year. Though there were many, I’ve selected only two per issue.

Authentic Tasks and Choosing NOT to Grade

In Horst and Pierce’s article, Foreign Languages and Sustainability 1, two things stuck out at me – the important role an authentic task plays in motivating language production and the conscious decision of the professors to AVOID correcting student errors in discussion board forums where students were communicating in an informal register, albeit still in the target language. When integrating technology , the principals of authentic task and a conscious approach to content created in the informal register are important aspects that I’ve seen work in the classroom. This article provides some support.

Building Better Self-Assessors

In Weyer’s article, Speaking Strategies 2 , I found a wonderful strategy to offer teachers who wish to help their students better self-assess: the process of transcription. Though Weyers focuses on how the intentional transcription process pushes higher education students into upper levels of proficiency, the approach can be tailored to secondary education students as well. I’m most excited to promote this technique using the Nanogong module we recently embedded in Moodle, a product that allows students to record their own voice easily and then transcribe the contents in the same web interface.

Attitude Matters

Though it may only have a tangential connection to the use of engaging activities with technology, Conchran, et al., contributed a thoughtful article 3 on what internal elements of our students contribute to their proficiency in a language – their attributions, attitudes, or aptitude? Their conclusion (from the abstract):

“The best predictive model was attitudes leading to aptitude leading to exam grades.” (566)

It seems to me that one reason to include some of the dynamic technology now at our disposal is that, when combined with meaningful, engaging tasks, it has the ability to influence the attitudes our students bring each day to class. While it’s at times easy to dismiss the idea of having “fun” in class, this article seems to support the idea that the relational environment we create in our classes has a great deal of impact on the production of language we see there.

Write More, Grade Less

In Armstrong’s article on graded and ungraded writing 4, she makes this summary statement:

“ Findings suggest that grades had little affect on student writing, and therefore more frequent and more varied ungraded writing assignments may be a productive pedagogical tool for improving the form and content of student writing” (690)

Earlier in the year I had been able to work with a teacher using TodaysMeet to do just that — provide students structured but ungraded opportunities to write about a topic that interested them. As more language teachers attempt the use of Moodle discussion boards, I’ll continue to promote this approach as one way to strengthen student writing.

Your Answer Doesn’t End the Conversation

In Miao and Heining-Boynton’s discussion of IRF and RTI 5, they include a nice table of response strategies teachers can use regardless of a student’s answers to an initial question, the goal being to mandate participation and promote engagement whether an answer is correct or incorrect. Whether used in face-to-face learning or online, awareness of these strategies can aide teachers as they create a culture of participation among their students.

With Assessment, Context Matters

The role of assessment – both for quantity of writing as well as quality – is investigated in an article by Brown, et al. 6 where the authors point out a tension in motivating students to take risks as well as strive for accuracy.

The findings of this article, paired with those of Armstrong above, seem to indicate that each student learning activity must be contextualized in order for students to succeed. If the goal of the activity is rapid, experimental construction of language, these activities are best ungraded. The results of the same activity, though, may be examined later as students find errors and attempt to fix them. Incorporating both tasks while learning language is an important step to ensuring that students attempt more complex language tasks as well as evaluate how effectively they have succeeded at the same.

And, a selection of quotes I found valuable:

“Current psycholinguistic research suggests that, as students begin to use more complex syntactic forms, their accuracy decreases until they have fully acquired the new forms” Horst and Pierce (Fall 2010, 373)

“Seeking broader and more diverse paths to mastery of a foreign language, students find the current two-tiered configuration [“language instruction” in early levels and “literature instruction in advanced courses] to be both stifling and largely irrelevant to major tracks emphasizing the sciences and business” Neville (Winter 2010, 446)
“Teaching is a matter of providing the learner with the right data at the right time and teaching him how to learn, that is, developing in him appropriate learning strategies and means of testing his hypotheses” Corder, 1988, cited by Mojica-Diaz and Sanchez-Lopez (Winter 2010, 473)

“Clearly, a need for striking a pedagogical balance between activizing new content and focusing on accuracy exists and, perhaps, has an analogy in the anecdotal two steps forward, one step back.” Brown, et al. (Spring 2011, 116)

  1. Foreign Languages and Sustainability: Addressing the Connections, Communities, and Comparisons Standards in Higher Education (pages 365-383) Eleanor E. ter Horst and Joshua M. Pearce ↩
  2. Speaking Strategies: Meeting NCATE Oral Proficiency Standards (pages 384–394) Joseph R. Weyers ↩
  3. Three A’s: How Do Attributions, Attitudes, and Aptitude Contribute to Foreign Language Learning? (pages 566–582) Jeff L. Cochran, R. Steve McCallum and Sherry Mee Bell ↩
  4. Fluency, Accuracy, and Complexity in Graded and Ungraded Writing (pages 690–702) Kimberly M. Armstrong ↩
  5.  Initiation/Response/Follow-Up, and Response to Intervention: Combining Two Models to Improve Teacher and Student Performance (pages 65–79) Pei Miao and Audrey L. Heining-Boynton ↩
  6. Qualitative and Quantitative Measures of Second Language Writing: Potential Outcomes of Informal Target Language Learning Abroad (pages 105–121) N. Anthony Brown, Raissa V. Solovieva and Dennis L. Eggett ↩

Why use technology? Because it’s part of life.

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I recently listened to a fascinating talk by Nick Perkins, entitled “ ;-) , LOL, [_]>, :P and 1337: New literacies and bilingualism“.  I’m currently thinking through a presentation I’ve been invited to help with for a local university conference and Nick’s presentation helped a couple bits to “click” together in my mind.  I’ll embed the video from iatefl below (which is worth a watch, or a listen, in its entirety).

A few highlights for me:

  • Languages are best internalized when the learner is constantly answering the question, ”How can I learn to be myself in another language?”  This is a deep reason to communicate – the idea that language is vital to helping others understand you – not just to understand someone else.
  • Informal communication often isn’t grammatically correct, but it’s the register we use most when communicating “the real me” to other people.  When opening up opportunities for our students’ self-expression, maybe grammar shouldn’t be the first thing we examine.
  • Why use technology?  Perkins doesn’t spend much time in well-worn paths here.  He makes a simple point that I appreciate – we use technology because they use technology.  If students are using technology as they do the work of self-discovery, shouldn’t that be something we use as well?

Thanks for the great talk, Nick.

 

Thinking about sharing

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Below is an e-mail conversation between myself and another tech integration specialist colleague, Eric Wonsidler (@ewonsid on Twitter — definitely worth a follow).  Eric is great at sharing, and at bringing up thought-provoking questions.  In his e-mail he asked the following, regarding a link I shared with him to a VoiceThread site I recommend to teachers (which I sent in response to another great VT link he shared with me):

By the way, how do you share these kinds of resources typically?  Do you tend to tag in delicious, tweet them out, post on a website, or what?  How do you decide what goes where?

It prompted some interesting thoughts.  Here’s my response:

Well, that’s not an easy question to answer.  It takes all forms.  For the most part, I share where it makes sense in the context.  So, things I’m reading I tend to tweet and/or bookmark in delicious.  If I need to do a formal presentation on a topic, I’ll build a wiki (e.g. the Voicethread page I put together ) and add to it over time.  If I create something, I might send it out via e-mail and put it out on my blog (just did this yesterday).

Each method has its own advantages and constraints.  Twitter has a higher potential for the sharing to help the greatest number of people, but has an equally high potential for the shared item to get lost in the stream.  A web site allows information to persist, but take more effort on the front end to set up and has little inherent social connections.   My blog has the same advantage as a website, but since it works off of RSS, it has the ability to touch more people through subscriptions.  One constraint is that blogging involves periodic organizational refreshes (tags, categories, etc.) because I learn about how to blog better with each post I write.

The real power comes when the tools are used together, in a fluid fashion of knowledge archiving and sharing.  I haven’t come near to doing this well, but I can recognize the skill in others.  Even the ideal, though, is influenced by our own personal context.  It is, after all, nice to have a life.  :)

Thanks, again, for the great question.  Might just move this conversation to my blog.

So, I have moved it here.  What are your thoughts?

How do you share?

Failing better

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“We should be daily aware that we are failing.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”

With these words, quoting Samuel Beckett, Dylan Williams closed his keynote at a recent Assessment Summit.   Williams is not promoting a laissez-faire approach to teaching and learning here, nor is he saying that failure is now an acceptable outcome for schools and individual students.  These words sum up a passionate call to use formative assessment in the way it was originally intended – to present students with clear evidence of their performance on content standards and to build the self-efficacy needed for students to launch themselves though the proving ground of failure into enduring success.  Resiliency and persistence in individuals is the goal.  Deliberate and competent use of assessment, collaborative analysis of data, and high expectations for the learning process can move us toward reaching that goal.

It is difficult to put into words the amount of information and, indeed, professional shift I have experienced after processing the work of those I heard over the course of the past few days. If you are interested, I have taken copious notes over the sessions led by Dylan Williams, Thomas Gusky, Anne Davies, Wayne Hulley, Douglas Reeves, Ken O’Connor, Richard DuFour, Rick Stiggins, and a Panel Discussion including DuFour, Robert Marzano, and Stiggins.  From these notes I have put together 3 resources for myself for future reference.  This post is a reference point for these resources until I have time to write about each more fully.

First, the topics of the conference included many elements of assessment I had encountered as a graduate student in education, but had incompletely applied once I entered service as a teacher.  Notably, the idea of standards-based grading was one that I had never received training on, though some of the underpinnings of such an approach (creating an atmosphere where mistakes are to be seen as integral to learning, co-constructing criteria with students, rubric-based assessment practices) were ingrained in me by master teachers under whom I trained.  The idea of a standards-based evaluation of progress brings important context to those strategies, and with it I feel like I have a better view of the work of a classroom.

I also found it encouraging that the efforts of my school district around the topic of professional learning communities (PLCs) were validated by these educational leaders.  When I began teaching, one aspect of the workplace environment I cared deeply about was whether the community “talked teaching.”  What I gleaned from this conference was that a PLC takes that collegial atmosphere and focuses it, moving from a “steam engine” to a “combustion engine” in the terms of a metaphor given by Robert Marzano.  PLCs whose work revolves around consistent use of formative assessment, adapting instruction to meet the needs of students as those needs arise, make a significant difference in the learning of all students.  In the words of Douglas Reeves, “The important work is the invisible work, the hard work, the work attached to reflection and continual growth.”

The second resource I’ve put together is an aggregation of many practical assessment strategies given during the course of the conference.  I have attempted to arrange these according the the assessment process, as best I presently understand it.  Included are topics on …

  • designing units to include quality assessment,
  • extending the “feedback loop” so students have the most opportunities to learn,
  • fostering self-assessment among students (increasing self-efficacy),
  • planning for when a student doesn’t perform on a summative assessment, and
  • evaluating practice when a PLC isn’t readily available.

Most notable of these strategies is simple to describe but may be difficult to employ: a ‘no opt out’ attitude toward classroom participation.  Of all the strategies I heard, holding students to a standard of participation that says, in action rather than word, “I will not allow you to drop out of the important work in this classroom” is as intimidating as it is inspiring.  Questioning techniques are key to pulling this off, and many wonderful ones were shared, especially by Williams and Davies.  See the link above for more information.

The third resource I have prepared is one on personal shift.  To some degree I’ve mentioned items of interest to me earlier in this post, but there are particulars that I need to process a bit more.  Feel free to read more in the link.  Essentially, attending the summit has corrected a number of misconceptions I didn’t even know I had.  In his presentation, Stiggins referred to this as the number one “essential condition” for action at the district and building level:

“Ensure Assessment Literacy”

I know a number of things about entering assignments into a grade book.  I conscientiously weighted scores, held consultations with kids when I noticed difficulty, offered additional opportunities to succeed when summative assessment scores were low, and the list goes on.  But what I didn’t know was how the very philosophy of numbers, implicit in our grading patterns, impacts kids on a personal and emotional level.  It promotes an environment where students must perform, and perform correctly from the beginning, if their work is to be valued and accepted.

Hanging in a classroom somewhere is a quote that Williams shared.  If I were back in the classroom today, I might just hang it up even before the I’d put up the map of Pompeii.  Here it is:

Stuck?
Good.  That’s a great reason to come in today.

That’s the type of classroom, the type of teacher, the type of expectations that I would like my students to anticipate the moment they step through the door.

What Might My Classroom Look Like?

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Lately I’m recognizing a need of my own to summarize in some way all that I’ve been learning about tech integration over the past number of months.  I’m attempting to do it through the mindmap below, connecting instructional practices, tools, and my own experiences using tech in the classroom and now helping others.  It’s certainly a work in progress, but I’m excited to see it take shape over the next few weeks.  If it’s helpful to you, or you have thoughts to add, please let me know!

Thinking through Web 2.0 and Creative Commons

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Recently I gave a presentation on Web 2.0 tools to a few teachers as a part of a technology sampler class I led.  I’ve embedded the Prezi presentation below.

What interested me about this presentation wasn’t necessarily the content, though.  It was what I did with that content after I created it, namely this:

License for my presentation using CC

I gave it a Creative Commons license of Attribution Only.  For a number of months now I’ve been talking about how to respect the ownership rights of content creators when I chat with teachers and students, but I haven’t taken the step to license my own work.  The act of licensing was an interesting process for me – I had to think about

  • where I got the content that made up the presentation,
  • the method I chose to deliver that content,
  • the amount of time I invested to create the work, and
  • how I wanted others to use what I created.

In this case I made a quick decision to license right after I finished the presentation, but after some reflection on each of the points above, I decided to remove it and release it from any license at all.  The people I learned from were all over the web, and the information I was presenting wasn’t unique or (that) uniquely displayed.  For all intents and purposes, my presentation is public domain, and I’m okay with that.  In fact, I like that designation for this work.  I simply aggregated something that lots of people were talking about anyway and delivered it in a way that fit my specific purposes.  If someone wishes to remix that content and present it again, I’m happy to have obliged.

So, what’s the possible implication for kids?  If I were in the classroom again, I think that for each project my  students created, I would ask them to license it in some way, explaining their reasoning using the same or a similar process I went through myself.  If an individual’s personal process was different than mine, I don’t think I’d mind – so long as she outlined it for me so I could see that she was thinking.

Kudos again to Creative Commons for giving us control over our own creative work.  I’m happy to spread the good news and participate.

Update:

Recently, Kevin Gamble contacted me to correct a few things about my thinking above.  I thought that the least I could ask of Creative commons was the attribution-only license, and that the closest I could get to public domain was Prezi’s own “Allow for reuse” setting.  Via a conversation on Twitter and Buzz, however, I got to expand my understanding of Creative Commons by one more important license: CC0, a license that allows you to freely release your work entirely of its copyright.

So, voila:

added the CC0 license

Thanks, again, Kevin!

Oh, and here’s the presentation.  Feel free to remix.

Web 2.0 – an intro on Prezi

Reflecting on NADSFL, Day 1

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In my next few posts, I’ll be reflecting on a conference I attended in San Diego this week.  I was fortunate to spend two days with the National Association of District Supervisors of Foreign Language (NADSFL) and then an additional day at the American Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) conference.  Each day held its own unique experience (and, therefore, necessitates its own post).  If I can get around to it, I’ll detail my personal next steps in a final post sometime this week or next.

Day 1:

Wow.  What a day.  There are so many coordinators and supervisors here from across the nation, each sharing experiences and strategies for success.  It has been a true privilege to participate in these discussions.  They have expanded my lens quite a bit.

Some general themes that stuck out to me during the conversations I had:

  • Assessment: Assessment should be performance-based and rest on a foundation of formative evaluations from teachers, peers, self, and the general public.  I especially liked how Lynn Fulton Archer (@dlfulton) put it, “We are no longer the sole provider of content, so we can’t be the sole evaluator of that content.”  I think tech can naturally step in to broaden the audience of a student’s work.  It puts a student closer to the experience of “natural” acquisition of language because the impetus to learn comes from all directions, not just from the teacher.
  • Buy-in: Buy-in is a key factor in curricular success.  Both teachers and students should feel that their voices are heard and weighty in the selection, development, and delivery of curriculum.
  • Funding: Funding is an issue across the country, but there are bright spots in the form of FLAP and other federal grants.  There are also entire states who have begun a process of doing more with less, like Utah, but it requires a commitment to languages from the highest levels of government.
  • Modeling: We must participate, as supervisors, professional development leaders, and teachers, in the very tasks we are asking of our students.  Are we using 21st century tools and approaches in our own learning?  Are using the concepts of formative assessments, including performance assessments, to evaluate our own progress as professionals?  Are we asking ourselves to be self-directed, efficacious learners as we attempt to lead students down that road?

These are some provocative questions, ones that I’ll be pondering the next few days (years?).  Again, it’s been a privilege to listen to some very experienced supervisors share their common struggles and victories.

Above all, the biggest theme of the day was how to support the work of great teachers, who are daily in the trenches laboring to encourage kids to value and develop the skills necessary to succeed in our increasingly global economy.  I’m excited to get back among them.

Tech in the foreign language classroom (sharing session 1)

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conversation

Last Wednesday I was able to sit down with a few foreign language teachers who are incorporating a number of tech tools into their instruction. It was a productive time of sharing and I thought it would be a good one to archive.

The agenda for the afternoon was simple: share what you’ve done or what you’re thinking about doing, chat for a while with a guest speaker via Skype, and finish sharing. A summary of these teachers’ ideas is below, organized by tool. The ideas below aren’t mine, but I took away some great things to share with others and I hope someone else will benefit from these as I did!

Smart Notebook –

  • Highlighting — one high school teacher was pleased at how one simple act, highlighting, could direct her students’ attention. During the course of a lesson, this teacher would display the textbook through her document camera, or show a visual, etc., and annotate that by using a highlighter in Smart Notebook. When students had the floor, they duplicated the approach — highlighting during their own presentations to focus the attention of their peers.
  • Interactive Games — Notebook’s gallery sports a number of customizable interactive games, most of which reside in the “Lesson Activity Toolkit” area. These have been welcome additions to lessons for one teacher, who has enjoyed discovering and implementing some of these into her lessons.
  • “Hidden Answer” – a middle school teacher hides the answers to simple questions by setting the background of a Notebook page to the same color as one of her pens. After she inserts the question and answer into text boxes on the page (in a different color than the background), she ‘colors over’ the text with the pen color that matches the background. After students brainstorm answers to the question in the target language, one student gets to come up and “erase” till they find the answer.
  • Organization – another middle school teacher found that transitioning her lesson plans to Smart Notebook slides has helped her organize her own thoughts and collect related materials all in one place. For example, for a given lesson, this teacher uses the ‘Attachments’ tab (the paper clip icon) to keep the related quiz with the lesson itself. Then, if she happens to have too few copies, she can access resources she needs quickly.

Voicethread –

  • Directions – a high school teacher has set up a Voicethread project where she asks students to give directions from one place to another. Using the drawing tool within Voicethread, students can illustrate turns as they describe them, which she found to be a nice addition, especially when she was unsure of a student’s pronunciation.
  • Getting the year started — another high school teacher took video from a trip she and her husband had made over the summer and created a discussion to start off the year for her level 5 students. Over the short clips she embedded into Voicethread, the teacher talked a bit about her summer and then asked questions inviting students to talk about their summers, using the target language. Feedback from her classes was positive, with some students even commenting that the assignment didn’t really “feel like” homework.

Google Earth –

The same teacher who mentioned directions in Voicethread, talked about how she brought some context to those directions through Google Earth. Using the zoom function within Google Earth, this teacher was able to bring students to the city where sheonce lived and point out points of interest they could find there.

Digital Storytelling –

  • Tar Heel Reader — Another high school teacher spoke passionately about engaging students in the writing process as soon as possible, and providing a space for public display of those works. The site she shared, Tar Heel Reader, has some valuable examples of doing just this from in a variety of languages, all from a simple-to-use interface.
  • StoryBird – there are a number of other sites which can host examples of student stories in a similar format to the Tar Heel Reader. I brought up Storybird because it was the subject of a recent meeting I was able to attend with some UK modern language teachers. This site hosts the work of a number of different illustrators and invites students to pull work from these artists to create their own stories (a la The Mysteries of Harris Burdick).

Webcasting –

  • Skype — Two teachers from different high schools within the district are planning to give their students an authentic audience for some upcoming performance assessments. Students in these upper level classes will be writing and performing skits, but this time those skits won’t just be for the teacher and their peers. They will be performing for another class of kids they don’t know who are studying the same material.
  • Tokbox — Through a contact in New York, one teacher had a chance to pair her students with students from Mexico for a one-on-one conversation in the target language. Due to a few difficulties (weather shutting down the lab in Mexico, only 5 students able to talk at a time due to lab restrictions there) the teacher is looking to pair with another class. Some things learned from the process were that our students aren’t really comfortable talking with someone they don’t know and that they need directed help to prepare for holding a conversation.

Noah Geisel –

Our guest speaker for the afternoon, Noah graciously agreed to chat with us about a couple tools he’s been trying out in his classroom. An accomplished teacher, Noah is also an adept presenter, even working through the limitations of Skype.  He took us through two tools: todaysmeet.com and befunky.com.

  • TodaysMeet — This tool is essentially an online chatroom. In Noah’s terms, it helps teachers harness the “backchannel” of their classroom, encouraging participation from all students through text. One unique feature of this chat is that the teacher can designate how long she wants the chat to exist (from 1 hr to a year) and each student response is limited to 140 characters, the size of a typical text message. One way Noah incorporates this tool into his instruction is by using it as a way to spark comprehensible input from his students. Later in a unit, after students have acquired some target vocabulary and phrases, Noah grabs 6 or 7 random photos from the internet and introduces a storytelling activity in which all students participate. Opening up a TodaysMeet chat, Noah asks his students to “help him” tell the story by writing captions for each photo as he displays them one at a time. For a few minutes each photo, students type and retype captions using the target vocabulary. They vote on which will be that photo’s caption, and then move to the next. While diacritical marks aren’t yet supported by TodaysMeet, Noah chooses to use this tool for communication activities that work on skills where such marks aren’t essential.
  • BeFunky — This is a simple photo manipulation tool. With only a couple clicks, you can make a photo into a comic book. Noah uses this tool to create review activities after a skit project. Noah identifies that student who needs something to do during the skits and asks him to be the photographer for the period. Once the skits are over, Noah selects one skit to transfer in BeFunky to comic form. Each photo of the skit he then drops into a word document and adds areas where students describe the action (the ’handout’ form in PowerPoint similar to this). When students walk in the next day, they recieve a worksheet where they must “retell” the story using target vocabulary. The project has greatly motivated language production, as students are eager to put words ”into someone else’s mouth.”

I’m looking forward to another time of sharing next semester!