Web 2.0 tools for the Language classroom

 I'm at the pre-conference workshop for the Minnesota Council on the Teaching of Languages and Cultures. I plan on posting a short description of all of the sessions I will be taking tomorrow afternoon.

MCTLC Pre-conference Workshop: Web 2.0 tools for the language classroom
Presenters: Elizabeth Valencia-Borgert and Dr. Phyllis E. VanBuren

Web 1.0 = downloading / Web 2.0 = uploading

Wordle.net: One of the presenters puts her texts into Wordle before giving it to her class because the more times a word appears in the text, the larger it is; this gives the students an at a glance understanding of which words are the most important in the text.

Wiki: A bulletin board. The professor who presented has her students submit their work to her Wiki so that each student has access to all of the other student work. This is good for collaborative learning. The other presenter uses two Wikis, one that the students can collaborate on, the other that is controlled by her, her students can access the Wiki read-only. She uses an Avatar (a Voki account) that is embedded in her Wiki to communicate with her students. She also has Skype and TokBox embedded into her Wiki.


 www.360cities.com You can travel around the world looking at Panoramic pictures. Here is one of where I lived in Montpellier:


Saint-Anne, Montpellier in Languedoc-Roussillon

http://www.360cities.net/image/saint-anne-montpellier#-50.39,-25.30,70.0



Here's the Voki I'm embedding into my Wiki site in order to communicate with my students:

Get a Voki now!

a quick glance at another teacher's resources

I just e-mailed the French teacher of Stillwater's other junior high to set up an obvservation and I was just browsing through her website and I found a couple of things that I really liked. The first is a blog she kept for her students to read while she was chaperoning the high school French trip. I think it's really neat that she made this blog for her students - I think it makes France seem less distant for her students. http://stillwaterfrench.blogspot.com/

The other thing I liked was on the Oak-Land Junior High World Languages Page and it is a guide for parents who want to help their children but who don't know how beause they don't know the subject matter.

I don’t speak French, German, or Spanish (or I’ve forgotten it all since high school).

How can I help my student?


Encouraging students who excel or helping students who struggle can be difficult when you have limited knowledge in a subject area. Consider these suggestions to enrich your child’s World Language experience.

Show interest in what your children are learning in French, German or Spanish. Ask what new words they’ve learned recently. Find out what they like most about the class.

Make note of and discuss current events related to the countries they are studying.

Watch foreign films in the target language with your children.

Listen to cassettes/CDs in the target language. This could include language learning tapes or CDs of popular music.

Encourage your children to participate in language activities.

Eat at restaurants that specialize in cuisine of the language your student is learning.

Attend cultural events in St. Paul and other areas. Check local papers for times and events.

Send your children to summer language camps.

Take trips to foreign language-speaking countries or areas of the U.S., if possible, to immerse your children in the language.

Host an exchange student from a French, German, or Spanish-speaking country.

Encourage your children to continue their study of foreign language into college.


For students who are struggling:


Encourage your child to talk to their teacher. Sometimes ten minutes looking over a difficult concept with a teacher is all it takes. The teacher will have specific times of availability. See her for those times.

Set aside study time every night, even if there isn’t a specific homework assignment.

Advise your child to study with a friend who also studies the same language your child studies. Two heads are better than one.

What makes good teaching? MPR series last week

Here's an MPR series I'm just starting to get through from last week. It's about what makes good teaching (an appropriate topic). So far, I've only heard the third, which was an interesting conversation about listener contributed topics. The conversation hit on some of the issues that have been swirling around in my head lately - issues such as suburban/urban need and teacher evaluation.

Here is the series:

1. 10/6/2010: "Testing Teachers" by American RadioWorks, here is the homepage for the show/ - You can find a link to listen to the program or read the transcript there as well as a lot of information about the show content.


2. 10/7/2010: "What Does Good Teaching Look Like?" on Midday. It is a group discussion with teachers, administrators, parents, and students.

Or you can find it here: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/10/07/midday2/


3. 10/8/2010: "What's your idea to improve teaching?" Midday. This is the interesting discussion I listened to on my walk today.

Also found here: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/10/08/midday1/

Urban Youth Poets: Quest for the Voice

This program is a couple of years old, but every time I come across it on TPT MN, I always try to find more. I haven't found any updated Minnesota Spoken Word Association websites, but I sent an e-mail to ask for some.

This program is really interesting though:

Poverty in the suburbs

Hamline's program has an urban focus, which is great, it is incontestable that there is great need for great teachers in the urban environments, but some of what I've been hearing has seemed to me a little bit extremist.  Maybe it's because most of my experience in the classroom has been in a suburban environment and in that environment I met so many children with so many needs.  I think all children deserve a great education whether urban or suburban or rural, whether poor or rich.

This morning I've had TPT on while I've been milling about my flat cleaning up after a fun weekend.  In one of the programs - either Almanac, To The Contrary, or Religion and Ethics - I heard a statistic that has stuck.  The statistic was that now 30% of children in poverty live in the suburbs.  70% still live in urban or rural areas, but the growing number of impoverished children living in the suburbs reflects what I've witnessed in schools I've been in.

As a student learning to be a teacher, I'm learning about how harmful it is to stereotype students based on demographics in an urban environment, but I'm not hearing a lot about how harmful it is to stereotype students based on environments (urban, rural, suburban).  I'm learning a lot about classrooms made up of diverse ethnicity but equally poor students, I haven't yet heard a lot about how to manage a classroom with students from families in both the top and lowest income brackets. 

I think it's great that some of my classmates have such great passion for urban teaching - I'm not challenging the statistics, we need a lot of great teachers there - but I am challenging some of the animosity I've felt against suburban students and the idea that they are over-privileged.  To stereotype a student based on where he/she lives is still a stereotype and as teachers, we should know better.

Classroom observation: Junior High (eek!) French

Wow, junior high is . . . busy.  Today I sat through four French classes at Stillwater Junior High.  The system is set up like this: 7^th graders choose a language and take it every other day.  8^th graders continue in that language and they take it every day for one semester.  9^th graders take the language class every day for both semesters.  The system is set up to make the public school more competitive, because then it can claim that language starts in 7^th grade, but to me it seems like a system that makes it harder for the students to learn the language.  First of all, there is less exploratory time, second of all, because of the one eighth grade semester; some kids can go 9 months without having a French class, and then have to integrate into a class where some students only went 3 months.  It requires a lot of review time.  Also, because of the different timing for each grade, the classroom is not a multi-grade environment and a student cannot get into a language after 7^th grade.

The thought that hit me hardest was: wow, there’s hardly any time.  You get the kids, have them for about an hour, and they’re gone again.  It’s really important to maximize every moment you have with your students.  Also, with 7^th graders, you’re dealing with the transition into junior high.  The 7^th graders had their first test today and one girl cried the whole period because she didn’t know a couple of the answers.

It seemed like the junior high students were going through their second round of being a toddler.  They definitely like to explore boundaries and it becomes really evident in a language classroom because the most popular answers to every question were, “Non, je deteste!” or, “Non, pas de question!” (I hate! Non, out of the question!)  Not because they actually hated hockey, but because they loved being able to say that they hated it.  In each class there was at least one wanderer – a kid who didn’t feel bound to their desk or what was being studied, he or she would spend the class time exploring the room or getting supplies to make pictures for the wall.  What seemed to be the most important for these kids was to see how much physical contact they could have with the other sex during the classroom.

I asked the French teacher about how she felt about straying from the book a little bit.  She said that when she became a French teacher she initially had all of these aspirations to integrate culture and diverse learning activities into her classroom, but the reality of teaching for her seems to be getting by with the time she has with her students.  She doesn’t feel she has enough class time or outside of class time for the cultural activities – what’s most important is that her students are prepared with the vocabulary and grammar they need to succeed at the high school level.