MACUL: My First Educational Conference

Though the morning started off a bit rocky after being kicked out of a "full" parking garage (who knew all those empty floors were for monthly members only?), we eventually discovered parking in a concrete labyrinth and made our way to COBO Center.  A bit harried, we jumped into once of the first sessions we saw, one on Blended Learning.  While the presentation consisted of more online resources I can quickly count, the method itself was not quite suited to my tastes; slides were flipped through so rapidly I could barely note the names of what interested me/what I felt could be meaningfully converted for use in the language acquisition classroom.  A bit more depth rather than such breadth would have been appreciated, yet I came away with multitudes of resources and ideas at the end of the hour.  We had been discussing blended learning in my placement; thus, I am excited to share some of my ideas with my MT.  Some particularly exciting resources are as follows:

• Digital storytelling through story jumper and zoo burst
• Voki 
  
• Product creation through thinklink or comic creators
• Ujam for creating hip hop/rap
• Kahoot and Zondle for online trivia
• How to create lessons on the internet through power my learning or blendspace
• Edynco for using mindmaps in teaching
• Moovly for the creation of video presentations
• Learnzillion, Flocabulary, and so much more! at tinyurl.com/tomlin2015

After this session and our half hour to collect ourselves, excitement and anticipation mounted upon the realization that a foreign language presenter was actually about to begin on the third floor!  One of only two presentations focusing on language acquisition, this was perhaps the most valuable for direct application in my own classroom.  Admittedly, I was surprised that there were not more presentations relating technology to language learning, as this is one of the few ways that students in schools in the U.S. have access to a large variety of native speakers and authentic texts.  Anyway, back to the most exciting resource gained from the day: ways to assess speaking proficiency outside of class!  Thus far, oral exams have been part of the end-of-unit assessment and take days to complete for all students, squandering, in a way, valuable class time that could be used for additional learning. While Vocaroo, Audacity and the Audio Dropbox can all be used to assess speaking, it is extremely easy for students to prepare answers on a piece of paper and then read from said paper during the assessment, as a teacher cannot see them and they have the time to do so.  In order to prevent this, both Lingt language and MSU Clear could be used, both resources I had never heard about beforehand.  Both operate around a similar concept: the teacher audio-records his or her questions, and then the student advances through the assessment one at a time.  The teacher has the option to time the response, for example allowing no more than thirty seconds for the student to speak directly after hearing the question.  Then, when grading the assessment, the teacher can play through all audio-recorded answers.  It seems much more time effective, and I would love to play around with this idea!  However, I will miss being able to spontaneously follow-up student responses...

Finally, last but not least: the most rewarding part of the day.  Lightening talks!! Personally, a five minute talk with slides automatically advancing every 15 seconds would stress me out, but many of these presenters did a fantastic job.  The two that resounded most with me was basically a poetry slam piece and a woman using the web above Wilbur in Charlotte's web as an analogy for the labels we give our students.  As we left, I felt all of my passion for being a teacher, something I sometimes forget when almost drowning in University work, planning and grading for my high schools classes, student teaching, and whatever may be happening in my personal life.  It was refreshing, this remembering why teaching is so important to me and how much I care about my students as their individual selves, rather than a singular mass under the title of "learner."  

Stormy Brain: Technology Teach-In

What to do for the technology teach-in assignment...there are so many options!  Luckily, we have a Promethean Board (Who knew not every interactive board was called a SMARTboard?)  we utilize every day, as do all teachers in my placement, making this task perhaps a bit easier than it otherwise would have been.  However, the task remains: how on earth do I make the pen that comes with the screen work?  My MT and I have been struggling with this, and have yet to find someone who can figure this little pen guy out...but, I am tenacious and armed with the Internet.  One morning, before the technology teach-in, I will make it work (meaning in the next week).  It would be so handy to be able to annotate documents/homework corrections, for example, with the pen, rather than remaining chained to the old wooden podium.  Furthermore, I have mindmap/brain storming ideas for which I need the use not only of the whiteboard, but also the space the Promethean Board occupies, hence the need for a functioning pen.

As my students do not have many in-class Hörverstehen activities, and I have just been researching how key listening skills are acquiring a second language, I would love to include a listening activity for this day.  One website I have found with slowly, yet understandably/not mind-numbingly boring, spoken German with the text as well (major pro): Slowgerman.com.  Deutsche Welle also has slowly spoken news with text, which, although also awesome, is often beyond the level of even most of my Honors students...Anyone have any other ideas/ways to listen to language they may have encountered in their own studies?  I love Skype, but the computer lab and that sort of access in Northville is difficult to come by.   Die Sendung mit der Maus is a fun YouTube resource as well, but the topics are not always applicable to what we are studying...

Anyhow, my plan thus far is to incorporate the Promethean Board for the Daily Notes, examples to be done as a whole class/going over the homework, a brainstorm as to what the Hörverstehen will be about based on the title and the current unit (maybe utilizing Padlet here?  I don't want to overload the students with too much tech...), followed by several listens to the text with different focuses.  Included also in the lesson will be the students' Tagebuch (journal) entry, which they write daily and then finish at home/type into GoogleDocs for fast and easy feedback, as well as the ability to reflect upon how they are growing as writers of German.  We have 90-minute blocks...lots of time for activities!

If anyone has any other ideas for the listening activity/useful links were Podcasts, Radio, or short clips can be found (in German, with German subtitles if it is a video), please share!  We are currently wading through home/household vocabulary, as well as the dative in some classes and the Preterite/Simple Past in others.   Hope everyone enjoyed the recent snow days!  Crazy Michigan weather.

  

For If You Care to Know About the Use of Tech in my Placement...

My placement: Northville High School.  The community at whole: the most conservative in Wayne County (by far), majority upper-middle class.  Yet, it seems that, in the attempt to remain frugal and save as much money as possible for a rainy day (or another recession), that the school as a whole does not have the technology one would expect upon arrival (or more current textbooks/other materials/smaller class sizes...but that's another story).  However, this is not necessarily something  horrible, or causing the students a disadvantage--almost every student, at least in my classes, has at least an iPhone/SmartPhone, if not also a laptop, iPad, Kindle, Chromebook, etc.  When taking into account the larger picture, Northville does have a decent amount of technology available, at the very least, for teacher use.  For example, I have yet to see a room without a SmartBoard.  There is even a SmartBoard in the library available for student use...whether these, even, are completely necessary is still up for debate in my book.  But then again, I have a feeling I'm missing some of what they can do.  Yes, they are quite nice for taking typed, easy-to-read notes in class that can later be posted on a Website for student review; however, I have yet to see them accomplish anything that cannot be done with a bit of creativity, a whiteboard or chalkboard, and a good old projector.  Thus far, I believe my favorite aspect of a classroom is the whiteboard--I'm a mover and a writer, enjoying the greater movement offered by a normal board, unbound by a keyboard.  More modern projectors can also be hooked up to computers in order to display online content on-screen, which works well for world language classrooms when trying to show aspects of the culture, clips of videos, newspaper articles, etc.  But for other SmartBoard skeptics out there, there is this little guy:

 

Yes, they can be useful, but do they really transform education?  The greatest take-away from examining technology in my placement relates to the SAMR model...is it transforming education?  Is it augmenting learning (which SmartBoards can definitely do)?  Or are some of the sources of technology just a substitution for teaching?  Like the video, once thought to be revolutionary for teacher practice, some technologies are best only for the teachers, allowing them to take a break, especially if they do nothing with the new material they are giving students to work with.  Can videos and YouTube clips be beneficial to learning, and take it in new directions not necessarily possible before?  Definitely!  But not if teachers passively show a video and expect students to passively take in the information...more of an active process is necessary.

That being said, my MT does do a swell job in using the SmartBoard as both a notetaking tool and as a way to show students newspaper articles and YouTube clips...what really surprised me about Northville was the lack of things like Google Chromebooks, laptop carts, easily accessible computer labs, and the like.  If laptops are needed in class, it would most likely need to be a BYOD day, which, apart from bringing SmartPhones, I am reluctant to do, mainly because I do not know how many of my students have laptops...I could always ask, however.  EdMoto is used as a convenient, well-organized way for students to both turn work in and receive feedback for that work...look forward to a Webinar I and some of my colleagues will be creating around the educational benefits and uses of Edmoto next week!  In addition, grades and absences are reported using MyStar, a convenient way for students (and possibly their parents as well) can keep track of how they are doing in school.  As a whole, Northville is a healthy, safe learning environment with a fair amount of technology...often, the value in technology is how one uses it, after all, not in the device itself.

What about you?  I would love to hear about the technologies offered in your schools, and how you use them in order to teach in ways that may not have been possible without technology.

Sketchnoting...why have I never thought of something like this?

First off, what kind of world languages teacher doesn't automatically want to check out a blog with the name of "Langwitches?"  Complete with a little black pointed hat in the corner.  This is only the start of Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano's creativity, an EduBlogger to whom I responded.  Throughout her blog, she includes doodles, sometimes in combination with the types of images of something your would find on Google, like this walnut.  In this specific posting, "Sketchnoting FOR Learning," she writes the following about sketchnoting (using sketches as a form of note taking/visual summaries): "it helps me process and digest a talk, wrap my mind around a large amount of information and organize my thoughts better.  I am using sketchnoting as part of my learning process."  If sketchnoting is so helpful to her, then it could be helpful to my students as well...I set out to read more and skim through the PPT slides she had prepared for a Sketchnoting conference.

Admittedly, I love almost anything to do with art...drawing, watercolors, acrylics, pen and ink, you name it.  I was prepared to really like this sketchnoting idea, and I was definitely not disappointed.  With Sketchnote, one can do something as practical as make a shopping list, to posting a blog, organizing a lecture, making a birthday card, brainstorm, or even lecture.  Throughout the slides, she demonstrates many different uses for the Application.  In many ways, it can be used to extend and challenge students in a myriad of ways not typically utilized in the classroom.  Students often doodle when they are bored...but what about learning through doodling?

If you are interested in some sweet examples: http://langwitches.org/blog/2014/11/04/sketchnoting-for-learning/  and http://langwitches.org/blog/2014/09/24/sketchnoting-and-yet-another-dimension/
Oodles of resources are also offered under the prepared slide show.  She even has a Pinterest board with a variety of ways in which to use sketches and doodles in the class to enhance learning.



In case you couldn't tell, this particular posted excited me a little bit.  Especially as a language teacher, visuals can be crucial to facilitating deeper and more meaningful understanding.  I knew this had to be one of the EduBloggers I responded to...I have yet to receive a response, but I did only post today.  In my response, I wanted to thank Silvia for sharing this awesome idea without sounding too pumped...responses to someone else's blog can only contain so many exclamation points.  I thanked her for sharing her thoughts behind sketchnoting, shared a little bit about myself so as not to sound like a complete random person floating around on the Web, and basically said why I thought the concept was so interesting/thoughts as to how I could use doodles as a way to enhance learning in my classrooms.  In the end, I asked her if she would have any suggestions for me.  She seems very experienced, extremely on top of things, and I have no idea who she is, which makes posting to random people a little intimidating to me...but hey, the worst she can do is tell me I sound stupid or just not respond (which I wouldn't really mind...I'm shy when it comes to faceless Internet people)...and I highly doubt any EduBlogger would be actually rude.

Technologies on Technologies on Technologies

Almost every Teaching with Tech class this semester has consisted of presentations of new technological advancements that are either meant for or can be adapted for learning.  I have a feeling some of these are going to be fantastic for world language teachers, and am pretty pumped to try some of them out in the German classroom!

My own group drew attention to Padlet, an application that has been described by some of my colleagues as "Pinterest for Teachers."  I suppose this is accurate, but it can be used for so much more!  As a class, everyone created their own Padlet relevant to their own content areas, and I must confess, I was surprised by some of the creativity involved in creating these online bulletin boards.  I hadn't even thought of using the space in order to create a sort of matching/scavenger hunt activity...In my own German class, I used Padlet in order to link vocabulary words with pictures to make the meanings more tangible for my students.


Another tool I could really see myself using, or one similar to it, is Socrative (www.socrative.com).  With this device, students could take surveys and quizzes at home, thus saving class time.  Yes, they could, theoretically, cheat on these quizzes; however, they are just cheating themselves out of valuable learning for the test in this manner.  Furthermore, like we did in our own class, students can take quizzes in class with partners as part of a "space race," bringing in some aspect of competition.  It's pretty cool from a student perspective to see your own progress as your spaceship zooms across the screen!  Recently, my MT has also brought Quia to my attention, which seems an even better option; however, while Socrative is free, Quia requires a 50$ fee.  Quia does have 2,316 premade online German activites, which seem like they would be an excellent research.  Through Quia, one can also create a class webpage, an online schedule/calendar, upload pretty much anything, and modify pre-existing activities/share creations.  My MT is doing a 30-day trial period--we'll see how this works.  It appears to be a great collaboration resource with over 3 million activities in a variety of content areas.




Audacity, a podcast creating tool presented by a group of fellow MACers, will probably not make an appearance in my classroom.  It does seem to take a fair amount of time to teach students how to use it; in addition, I can find very authentic podcasts in German online.  My students hear my German every class; it's better for them to hear different dialects from authentic sources.  In regards to hearing their own language production, my students can simply record themselves with their phones or computers.  One German teacher, who is amazing at what she does, still uses a tape recorder with her students.  It works well, students learn German at rapid speed still, and it functions perfectly in its role...not everything that is new and current is totally necessary.

Also, if anyone needs a pick me up, found these little guys when we were creating our voice threads today (which, in time, will be awesome for use in a German class...too buggy for now, however):
Not going to lie, I kind of just want to be them right now...fat, happy and on a beach!

 

Thinking Outside the Box with David Theune

Rethinking rubrics, audience switching, motivation, cloud-based video systems, livestreams, audience variety, book clubs...Resource overload!  Last week, a guest speaker visited us here at UM: David Theune, a high school English teacher from western Michigan.  What might an English teacher know about technology that you don't, you might ask?  How might technology fall under connections, when it so often pushes people farther apart?

Honestly, I was ready to take a nap before David Theune walked into the room.  Despite having just given a presentation on Padlet (it's a pretty sweet resource, check it out), nothing seemed better than Mac 'n Cheese and my bed.  Seriously, how great does this look when you're sleepy and hungry...

I wasn't prepared for his big personality and dynamicism (might have made that word up, but you know what I mean)--his energy and intriguing presentation woke me right up.  Guest speakers tend to have about a 50/50 chance of being awesome vs. being boring; David fell into the awesome category.  So many resources for connecting with our students and the community, not even all technology based, in a mere 45 minutes or so!

One of the main take-aways for me was the switching around of audiences for student work.  Thinking back on my own experiences as a high school student, it certainly grew dreary knowing the only person to read and evaluate my work would be my teacher.  I would write a paper, turn it in, have it tossed back to me a week later with a big red grade on the front.  For less motivated students, where is the incentive here, especially if the teacher is not especially well liked?  This is one of the reasons I really enjoyed David's talk about rubric flexibility and switching audiences for student work.  Imagine how much harder students would try if their work mattered in different ways...for example, students wrote research papers on non-profit organizations, during which they basically had to call/e-mail the organization in order to obtain better, accurate information.  Students also ended up raising money for various organizations, which is awesome.  Like David said, giving students the opportunities to exercise choice and discover their own agency is important.  Students could also teach content to other students...

For other assignments, parents would either come in and teach or listen to student essays.  At the high school level, this is especially important; did your parents' involvement die down or cease all together as you entered high school?  I know my mom stopped even going to my sporting events by that point, forget about school work.  Why should parental involvement stop?  Why can't it just change to better suit student motivation and learning?  Studies have shown that increased parental involvement (not too much, however) helps increase student motivation and achievement...Students could also livestream for their parents in order to show them their class and what actually goes on in their school via ustream.tv.

As a whole, the presentation made me even more excited about trying new things in my own classroom, such as livestreaming students presenting in German for their parents.  It would be awesome for them to show their parents what they have learned, and most parents won't understand a single word!

Also, big Nelson Mandela fan...

    

Connections Across the Disciplines: Science-y Lesson Plan

Connections across disciplines in education have often intrigued me, especially when considering German.  We often hear about the value of collaborating with other professionals; however, we less often see evidence of results.  From my own high school experience, a disconnect was rather prevalent across the board.  Teachers did not seem to truly speak with one another in order to share ideas; the discrepancies between the most and least effective teachers were massive, even between subjects that seemed as if they could easily share resources and lesson ideas, such as history, French and English. Based off our in-class discussions, even science and math can offer insight into humanities and vice-versa, if the effort is effectively made.  Toss some technology into the mix, and it's amazing what types of somewhat newer and innovate lessons can arise.

A great example is demonstrated by Anthony, Katie and Lulu's lesson plan: https://docs.google.com/a/umich.edu/document/d/15qIX0LkUzhJaDpOfdiQVfv2_Qo2OSlOvrzyWdzvuX5k/edit.  If I were still in high school/middle school, I believe I would have enjoyed this lesson.  (And, just because photosynthesis still makes me think of sunflowers...)

Although mainly focused on biology with an additional twist of chem/math, this group not only integrated all components well, but enticed me to consider how some of their methods/use of technology could be incorporated into the German classroom.  Hooking the students with a short video could be a refreshing change every once in awhile, and the use of the PollRunner App could potentially be used to evaluate the pre-existing knowledge of students.  For example, before launching into a lesson on the past participle, it may be useful to first check their understanding of verb conjugations and the use of haben (to have) versus sein (to be) as helping verbs.

In addition, I enjoyed how towards the end of class, a return to the video was planned, followed by a discussion about what the students observed and what did/did not align with what they had just learned.  I find it useful to recap new materials in any class.  As a whole, the lesson plan was extremely solid and well explained; however, in order for the students to have a firm grasp of photosynthesis and all of its nuances, especially if they are learning it for the first time, the lesson would probably need to be revisited for at least a portion of the next class period.  Another point to consider: what if not all of the students have their own iPads?  Would the school provide them?  Would they need to go use a different computer?  What if several students do not have SmartPhones?  What are the intended ages of the students, and how technology literate are they?  As always, some issues do arise with BYOD.
   
That being said, the game seemed fun and educational.  If it could be worked into a lesson on photosynthesis, even if students only had the opportunity to later do it on their own time or all go to the computer lab at school, it would most likely be beneficial, especially for those not completely sold on being interested in math.  In addition, it reminded me of several enjoyable online German grammar games I wish to make accessible to my students, such as the following: http://grammatiktraining.de/spiele/krokoadj.html
                http://grammatiktraining.de/spielemenue.html