Reflections & AATSP recap from 6/10 & 6/11 sessions

Sadly the AATSP 2013 Conference is now over. I am sitting in the lobby of my hotel enjoying a margarita and reflecting on the great sessions I attended, and maybe even better, the connections I made with other teachers. The conference was wonderful and challenging for me. I was not prepared for most of the presentations to be in Spanish, and all the great conversational Spanish. I have to admit, by the time the Spanish part of my brain kicked in, the conference was practically over.

My biggest complaint for the conference is not a complaint about the conference at all, but an admonishment to myself for being so lax this summer. How can I expect m students to practice over the summer, or at least do a little listening and reading over the summer if I am not doing the same? Yes, I am reading an Isabelle Allende novel in Spanish, but other than a little "Dora the Explorer" Spanish to m three year old twins, I hadn't spoken Spanish since the third week of May. This is something that needs to change. So, I am asking my Spanish speaking friends out there to help me. When you write, send me emails in Spanish. If you talk to me, make it be in Spanish. Sure, I may have to think a bit more before I speak, but wild that really be a bad thing? ;)

Now to the sessions.

I did take it easy on the 10th to gear up for my presentation. I had planned on the AP session, but sadly, I found that I was so exhausted, I just couldn't get there at 8am. I was pleased with how my presentation went and had many good questions from those in attendance. I also found that I was now known, not as the "flipping woman", but "that woman with the blog". Strange to think that my musings here are how people think of me. (I must be more careful about what I write!)

At the end of the day, I attended a session I was happy to find as a last minute edition to the program - STEM in the language classroom. This is something I was very excited about because with. The new Colorado teaching evaluation, I need to find ways to incorporate Math in my classroom. (Yes, it terrifies me!)  the session had a small but mighty audience and we were presented with lots of ideas for incorporating Science and technology in the class as well as some Math. As often happens in these sessions, my fellow attendees had some fantastic ideas as well. Here is a list of ideas and websites from the session:

• Puzzle of the day - Math word problems translated (possibly taken directly for lower level may classes)
• Temperature conversions- use in conjunction with weather and clothes. (Explaining temperature to a foreign exchange students with proper attire.)
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar book - incorporate life cycle of butterfly
• Magic school bus - I had forgotten about these, which are often very scientific in nature - not sure about this for high school, but elementary or middle could use this
• Using current scientific happenings - volcanoes, floods, hurricanes, etc. in various countries
• Planets with days of the week - planets are aligned with days
• El Niño/La Niña - weather cycles which originate with Ecuadorian fisherman  
• Correlation between space station and houses - different parts of the space station owned by different countries - The space station idea is really cool because it can also include time, clothes, body parts... Check out http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/
• Incorporating constellations and astrology in superstition unit with horoscopes, calendars, etc.
• Globe Program which has resources for data reporting and experiments for things around the world. 
• Nighttime lights of the world shows the world map as it is seen at night with lights. This map is a great way to talk about culture - why are there no lights in some places? Why are some lights highly concentrated? Which  countries have the most lights? How does electricity, or lack of it, effect the life of the people into those places? These are all great higher level thinking questions.

Basically, once I really started putting my mind to it, there are many ways to incorporate STEM in he language classroom the best point made was that we need to try to surprise our kids and help the. Think about some of the basic content on more unusual and fun ways. Why not teach body parts and clothes with an astronaut?

Flipping Spanish your way - Good presentation by Ruth Valle, a college and high school teacher from Tennessee. She highlighted many video tools such as Jing, www.duolingo.com as well as the iPad apps Show Me and Markup. 

I then attended the Bridging the Gap session about writing in the target language. much of the information, although obvious, is good to hear periodically. We must work with our students on HOW to write. Students need to be reminded to stay away from complicated techniques they use in English. we as teachers also need to remember that many of our students struggle with writing in English, so how can we expect them to excel in the target language? Two highlights from her presentation were 1) to always keep in mind what you want to convey and 2) how you want your audience to react. This is great advice for video creation to help keep on track and focused.

My favorite idea from this session was making reverse outlines. Although the presenters suggested this as a tool for learning how to create an effective outline, I was thinking that this could be a good technique for an interpretive activity. It would show if students can choose the main idea and supporting points from an article. It was also suggested that students should not be given any content to read which would take them longer than ten minutes. This would be difficult in 4 and AP, but I see the value in this for the lower levels because when authentic reading takes longer than that, the students tend to get frustrated and want to give up.

The last two sessions for the day were the most exciting for me. First, there was a session on Incorporating Proverbial Language. I loved the ideas for using proverbs to help teach vocabulary and grammar points. My favorite idea was to teach a few proverbs to the students and then have them write a story where the proverb was the moral to the story. This would really help me include more authentic language and culture in my Fairy Tale unit. I am thinking that I will teach two proverbs a week during that unit and then have students choose one when creating their own story. First, I will need to acquire a few more proverbs myself! (Here is a site with some good ones!) It was suggested that for teaching purposes, short and simple proverbs are used. Some of the longer ones get very difficult for students to remember and use correctly. In my AP class I think this would be very helpful for them on the exam where utilizing colloquial language where appropriate can help to boost scores.

The final session of the conference was my personal favorite - Interpreting Art in Spanish. This session brought me back to my college days where I spent many hours learning about art in the Prado Museum. I teach an art unit in Spanish IV, and this session was a good refresher for many of the terms and easy ways to explain art in Spanish. **On another note, in the depths of my basement this summer I also found my books from the Prado which are written in Spanish and will be a great resource for my students during the art unit. ** The presenter has a "museum day" where students dress and pose like various famous works of art for students to discuss similarities and differences to the real piece. This idea may be a great addition to my art unit and I may include this as a choice for the final assessment.

I enjoyed all the sessions, and wished I could have attended more sessions. I was sad that I was unable to attend the first day of the conference, but it is difficult to be away from home for too long with four children. If anyone else has thoughts on these sessions or others from the conference, please share them!

If you are looking for more information about flipping in the language class, check out the new book Flipping 2.0. Ordering information is available at the top of the blog on the right!

EUKENMAV333Z

Cultural activities across the levels

This time of year is the worst for teachers. Students have realized that their grades are not what they should be and are in full panic mode, and parents are on alert as well. The holiday season is also around the corner, and even though Christmas decorations have been up in stores for weeks, I am not ready for the work that comes with the holidays! With all of this going on, it is easy to focus on the negative and the frustrations in the classroom, but I am doing my best to focus on the positives.

This past week was a crazy one, with our fairy tale unit ending. As I have mentioned before, I have been working on a cross-level project between the Spanish 1's and Spanish 3's. I have felt that we spend so much time focusing on the harder vocabulary and more difficult conversations that the upper level students forget how to say some of the most basic things...the conversations that would be most important if they were in a foreign country.

So, the idea behind this project was to have the upper level kids create stores and sell to the lower levels. We planned and wrote assignment sheets and talked about vocabulary. I let my students choose what type of store to have, because as I have mentioned before, I firmly believe we need to give students choices whenever possible. Here is a copy of our assignment sheet. (I also put a copy in the Helpful Docs tab.) We also gave the kids a handout to practice key phrases, and add phrases of their own that they thought necessary.

The students created all types of stores, including music, movie, cafe, clothing, and a party store. I was so proud of my students. They stayed in the target language, even when the principal tried to talk to them in English. They were so generous, giving juice, soda, cookies, party favors, etc. to the lower level students. Since we were using Monopoly money, I had assured students they would get all of their items back.

Now, my PreAp class is during a time when there is no Spanish I, so we tried something  little different. We did a "Tourist Day" between Germany and Spain with the German III students. In this project, some of the students set up stores, and other students were tour guides. The tour guides were in charge of teaching key phrases and helping their groups at the stores. The stores were based on what a tourist would need: a hotel, souvenir shop, tour/ticket office, and cafe. The students then took turns leading the tours and shops.

The kids were excited about this and it went very well. The students learned a few new phrases in a new language. They were also exposed to situations where they didn't understand what someone was saying, or how to respond and had to figure out how to get what they wanted. It was a great communication exercise for all of the students.

I was liberal with the assessment scores. I felt that if they were communicating in the target language during the duration of the activity (about an hour), and they helped the lower level students communicate as well, that was A work.

For me, it was a good week. Students did tons of communicating and had a great time. Hopefully this will be an annual tradition and something the students can look forward to. Now all I have to do is figure out how to do it again in the Spring. I think I will put my students on it! They have the best ideas.

Increase your World Language PLN today!

There are many things that make being a World Language teacher difficult, but I think the hardest part is a feeling of isolation. Often, World Language departments in schools are small, and like-minded collaboration is difficult. Additionally, there is little professional development for us at the school level. When schools have professional development, we often don't fit in. We aren't a core class, but we don't fit in with most electives either. So, for professional development, we head to local conferences as well as national conferences like ACTFL in the hopes of learning new techniques, gathering new materials and meeting new contacts to help us improve our classes.

Thankfully, we also have the magic of technology to allow us to find our own professional development. So, it is time to get out there and find your PLN (personal learning network) and get some great ideas to improve your class!

Blogs are great ways to learn new things. Best of all, they enable us to learn from the successes and mistakes of others to save us valuable time. I have a long list of blogs that I read (ok, sometimes I skim). The ideas on these blogs can save us hours of searching and writing our own plans. The teachers that write these blogs are always open to sharing ideas, making them a very valuable resource. (If you are a blogger, or know a great WL blog, please add it on the form at the end of this post!) Check out the list so far!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aob9qf9ypisidFMzLUxfNmF2b093OTNuc0YzMDNGdHc

Social media is another way to find great resources and other WL teachers to collaborate with. I know many people shudder at the thought of Twitter, I was always the same way. However, I have found that just with my small amount of activity, I have met some other great teachers, found some great resources and participated in some wonderful chats. If you are ready to give it a try, here are some great people to follow:

@SraSpanglish
@viajando_kj
@Riete
@espanoles2amigo
@SecCottrell
@Zjonesspanish

Great conversations happen quickly on Twitter. Here are some I like to try to participate in:

#flipchat is every Monday at 8EST
#edtech is every Sunday at 8EST
#langchat is every Thursday at 8EST

And of course, there are many webinars available. I have one on November 13, you can register here. I am also co-presenting in December 5th with French middle school teacher Ellen Dill, and you can register here. If you are interested in Project Based Learning, check out this one. You can find a webinar on just about anything if you look. Although I think it is best to do them live so you can ask questions, most are recorded so you can watch them when your schedule allows.

So, now that the weather is turning cooler (it snowed this week in Denver!) cuddle up to your computer and learn something new today!

Flipping for Fluency Webinar Follow Up

First, I wanted to begin by thanking Taylor Pettis and www.sophia.org for hosting the webinar on Tuesday. I think that the webinar went really well and hope that all of the participants got what they were looking for from it. I know some people were looking for more information about assessment and video creation, but I followed the poll from the blog to create the content. They have asked me to do another webinar, and maybe I will be able to focus more on those topics then.

I know there was some time confusion since the time was CST, and there were some of you interested that just couldn't make the webinar. Good news! Here is the link to the recorded webinar.

***I have just added some documents discussed in the webinar under the "Helpful Documents" tab above. This includes our unit planning document, and the assignments and project for Unit 1 - Challenges in Teen Life I use in my level 3 classes.

I am always interested in feedback, so if you attended the webinar live or if you view the recorded version, please fill out the following survey.




Thanks so much for you time!

Flipped for Fluency Webinar Update

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the webinar, scheduled for September 18th was sold out yesterday. Luckily, my friends at www.sophia.org were able to add 20 more seats. So, if you haven't registered yet, now is the time!  http://www.eventbrite.com/event/4078709530

I have received almost 70 responses to my survey for content for the webinar. By popular demand, I will be focusing on classroom structure and lesson planning. I will try to incorporate some assessment, but might have to just post a video to the blog to cover this topic. If you have any specific concerns, please feel free to email me, and I will do my best to address them. I have written to many people looking to implement the flip right away, and I am happy to answer any questions or concerns.

I am looking forward to "seeing" you in September!

Heather

****UPDATE - As of 8/30 the webinar is totally sold out and we can't add any more seats. Hopefully we can do another one in the near future!

Demonstrating Proficiency using PBL and the ACTFL scale

This year, my focus is going to be having the students demonstrate proficiency. I am moving away from the old written tests. I want my students to demonstrate their proficiency with new and old skills and concepts. I know, many of you may be saying "Duh", and although I have known this is the way to go, only recently have I found a way that I think will really be effective. I working to utilize Project Based Learning. If you are unfamiliar with this, check out this recorded webinar. It is a fantastic explanation of PBL.

In order to demonstrate not only proficiency, but movement on the ACTFL scale, I am also beginning the year with a baseline speaking assessment. I am going to do a baseline written assessment at the end of the review/beginning of Unit 1. I am hoping that these assessments will not only help determine students progress as we move through the year, but help me to identify common gaps in learning so that I can address them quickly.

My assessment plan for the beginning of the year
Students will be given videos to review previously learned grammar points. They will then do quick written practice and then demonstrate their proficiency with basic grammar and vocabulary through projects of their choice. I am giving them a question to answer, and they can demonstrate their proficiency in any way they choose. The first one is shown below. I asking for a 1-2 minute presentation from my regular Spanish 3 class, 2-3 in PreAp and 3-4 in level 4. My thought is to begin these PBL projects small so the students don't get overwhelmed. The project for Unit 1 is more involved and complex. I am also giving students three of these projects in the first 2 weeks - Present, Past, and Future.

As students are working on these assignments, I will be administering individual benchmark speaking assessments. I will be using a rubric that I was discussed in the Creative Language Class blog. They did a great series on assessing on the ACTFL scale and if you haven't read it, you should check it out. The challenge in this benchmark assessment is to find a way to do determine student abilities without demoralizing them. I am using a prompt that I found on the Creative Language Class blog which is as follows:

Your class has been working with students in Barcelona, Spain and you have shared lots of information about your daily lives with them. It’s time to find out more about what students’ lives are like in Spain so you have to interview a student there to find out what his/her daily life is like. Since your partner may not remember what you said about your daily life, be prepared to answer any questions he/she might have about your daily life. You may want to find out:

What your partner does daily at home, school, and/or work;
What your partner does most every week at home, school, and/or work;
Anything else you would like to learn about daily life in Spain.

Remember to greet your partner and thank your partner for his/her time. And don’t forget, your partner will probably ask you questions about your life as well.

After much consideration and searching the net, I decided this was a good benchmark for level 3 because the students should have enough knowledge to answer the questions coming into the class, and there is room for the students to show growth as we progress through the review and Unit 1. For me, I need to give the same assessment to be able to determine growth accurately. I will be assessing the students with this prompt after Unit 1, Challenges in Teen Life. With the new vocabulary students learn in that unit, as well as the continuous language use in class, I am expecting to see a big increase in abilities. My best guess is that students will score Novice Low - Novice Mid on the benchmark assessment. I hope they will be at Novice High when I reassess in October.

My goal for the students in level 3 is to be able to be consistently at Intermediate Low, and level 4 to be at Intermediate High in all activities by the end of the year. I am hopeful that with the tools from ACTFL* I will be able to accurately assess not only where students are, but be able to show them the areas where they need to improve.

I realize that approaching assessment in this way will be a big change for the students, but I am hoping that they will quickly embrace it. I think it is so much better for students to demonstrate their knowledge using these tools and projects then be stuck staring at huge tests. Since school starts on August 20th, I don't have long to wait to see how these new changes are received.

*I am adding the Performance Assessment Rubric from the Creative Language Class blog to the Helpful Class Documents tab.

**Many of my students have not done conversation and listening in a meaningful way in level 2, which is why I believe that they are going to begin low on the ACTFL scale. (I hope they prove me wrong!)

Path to Success in Spanish Graphic

I am playing around with creating some graphics to post in my classroom next year, as well as some of the cool online graphic tools. I really want to have some things that I can point to in my room to remind students that learning a language is not always easy, or doing things the right way is really worth it. I created the visual using Word, and the roll over definitions on www.thinglink.com.

I think this is close, but as always, value comments and/or suggestions.

Flipping for Fluency...the first weeks of school

I want to get the blog focus back to the classroom, and that is easy to do because it is all I have been working on for the past 2 weeks. I have been reworking videos, writing PBL assignments, and creating better parent communication.

My new focus for grammar videos is a quick intro and then a story, or some other catchy way to show students how to implement the new concepts. I have been working with a variety of sources to make this happen.

I made a cute video for the future tense with GoAnimate, which will be published soon, but in order to push it out to YouTube I have to pay a small fee, so I am trying to do a couple at once so I can only pay once (or get it all done in the 30 day free trial!). This was cool because I typed the script and chose character voices. This was awesome because I could actually choose Hispanic speakers, so it makes it more like a real listening exercise! I am going to use it that way and have students answer questions and hypothesize in the future about possible outcomes.

Yesterday, I finished a video that I am planning to send to the parents of my students this year. It is using PowToon, which is still in the Beta, but looks really cool. Flipped for Fluency parent video was easy to put together once I decided what to say! I am going to send this out with my parent letter about a week before school starts. A word of caution though..have your script together before you start playing or you will be working on it forever! (I fell into the trap I always warn my student about when using cool technology!)

I have written some PBL exercises for my Mini Review Unit, which is the first two weeks of school. I am covering present, past, and future. I cut down the worksheets to just some quick conjugation worksheets to get the kids thinking in Spanish again. Then they will work on the PBL projects which are a combination of solo and group work. The Present Assignment Sheet outlines a "getting to know you" presentation. I do think that this is going to be a much more effective way to let the kids demonstrate their proficiency. Hence, I have decided to call them Proficiency Demonstrations. In the 6 regular units of study, these will replace my Unit Assessments from last year.

When creating the PBL assignments, I have tried to leave as many choices as possible open for the students. This is probably more apparent in the one I wrote for Unit 1 Proficiency Demonstration. I gave some guidance by giving them steps to consider, but left the topic and method of presentation up to them. I also decided to cut the vocabulary list down to the bare minimum 54 words for a 5 week unit. I decided that the students will have to discover many words pertinent to their topic on their own, so they did not need an exhaustive list from me.

I am looking at my assessing strategies and going to make some big changes to improve for next year. I need to get more things straight in my own head before I can commit them to the blog though.

On another note, I am going to be working with Sofia to have a Foreign Language Flipped Webinar in the middle of September. I will blog, post and tweet the details when I have them!

How I began my flipped class

After many questions and much prompting (and frankly some jealousy over some other teachers' videos), I have made a video about my how I came to the flipped classroom. It is nothing super fancy, but hopefully it answers many of the questions about how a foreign language teacher decided to start flipping.

My flipped class story

Here is the AP thematic document I refer to for those who have not seen it. This is from the AP College Board course framework for the Spanish Language exam.

Student Culture Presentations

The culture projects were an interesting experience.  Students could choose their own topics, and I had a wide range - everything from Dali to the Spanish Space Program to local cuisine and fashion.  I had the opportunity to learn many cool things from my students, which was a pleasant change! I had many students that were very excited about their presentations and worked hard for hours and hours on getting them just right. Unfortunately, I had some (not too many) on the other end of the spectrum that didn't follow the assignment directions and/or murdered the language that I love because although their project was well researched, they didn't practice it. I also had too many students that just READ which makes me crazy.

So, I have decided not to do this as a final project for next year. I am going to do it again, just not for the exam. I have also decided that one of my main focuses for next year is going to be teaching my students HOW to present. (I have ideas cooking on that...more to come later in the summer.)

However, since I have never really shared student work before, I wanted to share some of my favorites. Although the language may not be perfect, there is huge growth and effort in each of these presentations.

Animals of the Amazon - This was done by a student that went from "I can't say anything in Spanish" to a peer tutor! She was so excited about her research that she asked if she could add the English subtitles.

Alternate Link: http://sdrv.ms/Js7Jlq

Guitar Music of Spain - This video is great (if you discount the Lady Gaga wig). After the video, he did a presentation about the origin and music of Flamenco. I wish it was on the video as well!

Alternate Link: http://www.screencast.com/t/LzAggODSIpTQ
Honduras Tourism Video - One of my "super smarties" that really struggled with the move to the flipped classroom. It was hard for her to go from being good at "the game of school" to actually being good in the class of Spanish.

Alternate Link: http://sdrv.ms/Js7O8L
Mexican Fashion - I had a couple of fashion presentations, all of which were really good. I had quite a few projects using this online book tool.

Mexican Fashion

Just to reiterate how much I love the flipped class.....the kids got to allocate their time in class, so many had quite a bit of class time to work on their presentations and ask me questions about the programs and content. Without the flip, this probably would have had to be a total "at home" project.

Spanish Resources for the flip and beyond!

In an effort to help the other Spanish teachers out there looking for more information about the flipped class, I have put together some resources for the flip and online news, listening, and other goodies. The flipped information is for all languages, but most of the resources are for Spanish. Please share more if you have some great ones!

Thanks to my new virtual friend Emilia Carrillo for the idea of putting stuff together! We are working on more specifically geared towards foreign language flippers, so stay tuned!

http://www.scoop.it/t/foreign-language-flipped-class-resources

Teaching Listening Follow Up

So in my earlier post Is it possible to teach listening? I talked about some problems I was having with my students listening, and more importantly my teaching of listening.

So, I went back to the two listenings and gave the students the scripts from the listenings to follow along with while we listened. As we did each one, when we got to the questions, I encouraged the students to feel free to change their answer if they felt it was now incorrect. The first listening was very short, about a minute and a half. There were really no unknown words in the listening. In the listening the narrator talked about how fast paced life was now and how she just longed for the slow life. This was the listening that had one of the answers as "we should return to prehistoric times." After a gave the students the answers, we went over them, and I was amazed that there were still about 40% that still had that answer chosen. (Now that is in my regular 3 classes. In my PreAP, they all had it correct.) When I talked to them about it, I even had some students try to argue with me and pointed in the script to where is said that. They totally missed the "no" in the sentence. Out of the three questions in this listening, most had 2 out of 3 correct.

In the second listening, which is about 2 and a half minutes, a guy is looking for something talking to a friend and she is commenting on how dark and disorganized his place was. They talk about the problem, he explains the problem, and then the friend offers to come over and help him organize. Now in this listening , there is a small amount of new vocabulary. Between that and the longer length, I did not expect the students to do quite as well. However, after following the same process as above, I was very surprised that the majority only got 2 of five questions correct.

I am hoping that you Spanish (or any other foreign language teachers out there) might be able to help. I am not sure what else to try. Clearly, it is too late for me to make changes this year, but I want to improve for next year. How can I better present the listenings? How can I best utilize my time in the flipped class to help the students improve this vital skill?

Sydney TeachMeet Presentation

Wanted to send thanks to everyone at the Sydney TeachMeet yesterday. Although I am sure I talked for longer than my seven minutes, I got some great feedback and there are some future flippers down under! I look forward to hearing from all the new and old language flippers. The best ideas are those that are shared!