Craig's List meet Señora's List!

Tool: Google Sites - For teaching about the subjunctive with adjective clauses, I had my students create want adds for a varitey of things: automobiles, furniture, cell phones, video games, etc. I set up a template Google Site and added all the categories that I could think of that would appear in the want ads or on Craig's List. The site was called "Señora's Site", named after the famous "Craig's List" of which most students are pretty familiar with. In today's day and age a large number of people utilize sites like Ebay or Craig's List to look for or sell items. Wanting students to practice a real life skill/task and due to the fact we were studying subjunctive with adjective clauses, I had my students write an add for an item or service that they were looking/searching for.

Results/Reflection: The activity worked pretty well, but there are some changes I will make for the future. The main problem that we encountered was that unlike Google Docs only one student can be typing on a specific Google Sites web page at one time. Everyone can be on the same Google Site and on different pages, but 2 people on the same page and one person's work will get deleted. So for next time, I will need to make sure that I have a seperate page within the Google site for each student in the class. On a bright note, this school year our district is pilotoing Google apps and all of my students already had accounts set up before we started, which was a real time saver and made it much more user friendly for the students. If your school does not have Google Apps, you can always create a free account for the class and have everyone log in with the same username and password. You can't track everyone's work, but it saves a lot of time and has worked well for me in the past.

Ideas from the Minneapolis, MN TIES 2010 Conference

Had so many notes and great ideas at the TIES 2010 conference.  Love networking and learning from other educators and how they implement technology in their classrooms and schools!  Please visit my Wallwisher site to see the ideas and links to information from some of the presentations that I attended if you want to learn more!  If you also attended the conference feel free to add your personal notes and ideas!

Notes & Ideas from TIES 2010

Teen Texting Continues to Grow!

The link to this article "Survey: Teen Texting Reaching Critical Mass" by Thomas Pardee includes some great information from a survey done on teen texting.  Also, it includes some information about what I do with cell phones in my classroom.

Strategies I use to integrate technology in the classroom...

Here is a link to Joe Dale's (author of the popular blog "Integrating ICT into the MFL Classroom") blog post about some of the things I do in my classes to integrate technology and engage my students.  He included some presentations I created, pictures of my students texting and a copy of the permission slip I designed for cell phone use in the classroom.   Just thought it might be useful to others. :)

Teaching by Texting Starts to Take Hold - AOL News

Teaching by Texting Starts to Take Hold - AOL News

Fodey.com is fabulous...

Tool: Fodey.com is a free online tool that one can use to generate newspaper clippings, talking tomatoes, wizard text and more. The cool thing about this site is that you do not need to create an account to start. You simply type in your text and it generates the product.

I used the newspaper clip tool with my Spanish III students to practice the Spanish Subjunctive with adjective clauses. The task that I gave them was to write a newspaper ad for an item that they were looking for. It could be a car, house, ipod, etc. The students simply typed their ad into the newspaper clip generator and clicked the generate button. Just like that they had created their very own realistic looking want ad! I then had students save their ad for me to grade at a later time. So easy!

Results/Reflection: I was really impressed by this tool and overjoyed at how easy and userfriendy it was. It was nice not to have to create an account to use the features. The only drawback was that students couldn't save their work while they were working on it. I definitely recommend this tool to other educators! It would be a great starting tool for someone just starting to use web 2.0 tools in the classroom.

Google Sites Grrrrrrreat!

Tool:  Google Sites is a tool that I implemented as an assessment tool in my Spanish 3 classes.  Each class of students developed a class website with information on various professions, but in Spanish of course!  Each group of students collaboratively worked on a page for the site and was in charge of specific profession.   They had to include on their page what we were studying...characteristics of a person, professions, and the present subjunctive with verbs of influence along with some other fun features like links to resources, gadgets and images. 

 

Results/Reflection: The project itself went very well and the students were very engaged in what they were doing.  It was amazing to see what they put together and also know that the students had practiced a skill (web page creation) that would be beneficial in their future!  In addition, they successfully integrated what we were learning in a contextual and real life way.

Tips:

• Set up a blank web site template for each class prior to introducing the project to students.    That way they can go and start working on their pages immediately. 
• For giving students access to the group site, the easiest way is to create one class account and give all the students the same username and password.  The nice thing about Google Sites is you can always revert back to an earlier edited version. 
• If you want to have each student login with their own username/password, they will each need to set up a google account.  This can take some time...So, I would suggest having them do this prior to going into the lab (maybe as a homework assignment?).  They will also all need to have an e-mail address.    You cannot send out invites to the Google Site Template you set up until the students have created and activated their Google Accounts.  
• Have students manually save regularly.  Many students are used to using programs that automatically save and forgot to save some of their stuff.  I brought a little bell into the lab and would ring it every 10-15 minutes to remind them to do this. :)