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!

Today is the last day of an 8 week professional development course I’m teaching on the importance of understanding and expanding our professional/personal learning networks.  It’s been a good time for me — a time to reflect on my own practice, a challenge to think about these things more intentionally, a time to evaluate how successfully I’ve been engaging in networks myself.

For me, I’ve come to a few conclusions:

1. I need to partition my life a little better.  I’m getting overwhelmed with all the information heading my way lately.  And I’m feeling the burden of a “need to connect.”  Planning how and when I access these networks, and letting it go when I don’t, is something I’d like to see in my own professional practice.
2. Reflection is good.  I knew this already, but the face-to-face collaboration that I’ve enjoyed during this class has reinforced this understanding again for me.
3. These tools are worth the investment.  I think they’re worth my time primarily because, as David Warlick so eloquently says, “it’s not about the technology.”  I’m grateful that people are so willingly sharing their interests, questions, and expertise online.  It has helped me grow as a professional and as a person.

I’m looking forward to contributing to more of these conversations, outside the typical bounds of face-to-face connections, in a more intentional and consistent way, in the next few months.   I hope the teachers in my class have taken as much away from this experience as I have.

For those in my blogging salary credit, let’s reflect using this collaborative tool.

For those who may be interested in our conclusions, feel free to check out the same!  Add your own thoughts by adding a row.