Spanish Blog Activity

Photo courtesy of Pics4Learning

I recently had to do a writing assignment for my Teaching of Foreign Languages class. I decided to design a blog for the Level IV students.  Although this activity is specifically geared towards Level IV learners, I plan to implement varieties of this activity in my classroom to target all learning levels.

I will write a blog post at the beginning of the week about information that is being covered in class, a recent holiday or news event, various questions about the students' interests and activities, family life, cultural elements, etc. The post will include questions that will start a discussion between the students and teacher. They will be required to write at least one comment on the post at some point before the end of the week. They will also have the opportunity to begin a dialogue with myself and the other students by voicing their thoughts and opinions. The students will be evaluated on their use of the language and the relevance of their comments to the topic.

I believe that this activity would be an instrumental way to introduce technology into the classroom and reinforce the students' writing skills. It would be an opportunity for the students to write about things that interest them and to compare and contrast their thoughts and opinions.  It will be an interactive activity that involves a medium that they are familiar with, the internet, and a skill they are learning, the Spanish language.  It is a great opportunity for the students to use Spanish outside of the classroom setting.  It also covers many of the ACTFL Standards for the teaching of Spanish. The following standards (and corresponding objectives) will be fulfilled with the use of the blog as an extension of classroom learning:

• Standard 1.1 Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange opinions.
• 1.1 Objective:  Level IV students will write a comment (an opinion or additional information) on a blog post or another student’s comment that is 100% relevant to the information given.

• Standard 1.2 Students understand and interpret written and spoken Spanish on a variety of topics. 
• 1.2 Objective:  Level IV students will read the blog posts or listen to accompanying videos and understand the various topics presented with 90% accuracy to content.

• Standard 1.3 Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics in Spanish.
• 1.3 Level IV students will post written information, ideas, opinions, etc. on the blog to share with other students in the class with 100% accuracy to relevance.  

• Standard 3.1 Students reinforce and further their knowledge of other disciples through Spanish.
• 3.1 Objective:  Level IV students will read blog posts that are relevant to other disciplines such as history, geography, and literature and write posts that contribute to the topic given with 100% relevance.

• Standard 3.2 Students acquire information and recognize the distinctive viewpoints that are available only through the Spanish language and its many cultures.
• 3.2 Objective:  Level IV students will read blog posts about Dia de los Muertos and write comments about the importance of the holiday to Hispanic people with 85% accuracy to content.

• Standard 4.2 Students demonstrate understanding of the concept of culture through comparisons between the cultures studied and their own. 
• 4.2 Objective:  Level IV students will write blog comments that compare the Popul Vuh to creation stories in other cultures after watching the Popul Vuh video on the blog with 85% accuracy to content. 

• Standard 5.1 Students use the language both within and beyond the school setting. 
• 5.1 Objective:  Level IV students will write blog comments outside of the classroom and exchange opinions and information with other classmates with 85% accuracy to relevance to original blog post.   

CLICK HERE to view the example blog I designed for this activity! 

The Way Things Used to Be

Photo courtesy of brandon king on Flickr.com

My husband and I had an interesting conversation the other day.  We had just bought a new net book and were talking about how we "needed" it so that everyone in the house had a laptop (in addition to our desktop computer and 2 smartphones).  The conversation then shifted to our children and how their technological lives are different than our own were.  We realized that some of the skills that we held to importance had been compromised in our children because of technology.  The dialogue continued as we thought of things that may become extinct in our lifetimes because of technology:

1. Phone books.  Everyone has a smartphone.  It's much easier to look up a phone number on your phone than it is to thumb through a phone book.  My younger children would have no idea how to use a phone book.
2. Land lines.  Everyone has a cell phone.  6-year-old children have cell phones.  Who pays extra money to have a land line if they don't need one?  And cell phone numbers aren't published, leading to an even faster demise of the phone book (see #1). 
3. Encyclopedias.  Do they even print those anymore?  Encyclopedia Britannica has recently stopped printing their encyclopedias after publishing them for over 200 years.  I think that the internet has pretty much destroyed the need for printing these cumbersome volumes of information. 
4. Paper dictionaries.  With dictionary apps and Google, who would need to own a dictionary?  One certainly doesn't need a dictionary to find the proper way to spell a word.  With spell check and T9 it's useless.  And without the need for a dictionary why even learn alphabetization?  Other than learning to read, learning the ABC's does little more than help someone find words in a dictionary (or names in a phone book).  Alphabetization is of little use to someone who is just typing a word into a search engine.
5. Books.  The Kindle, Nook, etc. will make paper books seem antiquated.  Why have hundreds of books cluttering shelves and lug around a heavy book when a slim tablet will suffice?
6. Libraries.  Libraries as we know them will be replaced with technology.  The rows of shelved volumes will become rows of computers and other technological aids. 
7. Newspapers.  They are already on the way out.  Readership across the board for newspapers is way down.  It's hard to find a newspaper in America that is actually making money distributing paper copies of the news.  Here is an interesting article about how Online News Readership Overtakes Newspapers from Technolog on msnbc.com.
8. The United States Postal Service.  Email has already tightened the belt on the USPS.  But why wait for something to be sent to you when you can have it RIGHT NOW?  Along with this will be the loss of legible penmanship.  When it is faster and more convenient to type something, why would you ever sit down with a pen and paper to communicate with someone?

There are so many more things that I could list that will meet their demise, but I think you get the point.  With that said, I would like to inform you that I love technology.  I get very excited about the opportunities that it opens for all of humanity.  I also am very nostalgic about things, so I meet this with bittersweet feelings.  I learned to type on an old clackety-clack typewriter, played music on a record player, watched movies on VHS, and called my friends on a rotary phone.  My bubbling excitement for all these new technological advancements is weighted with my sadness for "the ways things used to be."

How will these advancements and opportunities through technology affect my children and the students in my classroom?  I have to stay versed on new technology in order to keep up with them.  I also have open my mind to these things so that I can further understand how the younger generations learn.  I have to remember that they were raised amidst instantaneous information, the knowledge of the world at their fingertips.  They are tuned into a "community in the cloud".  They need to multitask and be entertained.  If I can't keep up with that I surely will not be the most effective teacher that I can be.

This YouTube video is a short discussion about some of the skills that kids are losing and gaining because of technology.  I touched on some of them, and added additional ones in this post. I think that both sides have some interesting points about how children are changing.  I initially thought that it is terrible that kids are losing some of these skills.  The more I thought about it, though, I realized that children these days may not have the skills that older generations held to importance, but they have so many other skills that we never had the opportunity to develop.  With technology children are allowed to do things so much more efficiently than we ever did.  The possibilities for these younger generations are endless because of the tools they have available to them.

 

Video courtesy of YouTube