Time to start gathering the ideas for next year!

As a mom of four who is working on a huge new project, preparing for a conference, and supposed to be cleaning my house......I figured I would put all of that off to start working on some of the cool ideas I am seeing and looking at implementing next year. (Who says teachers don't work over the summer???)

• Pen Pal News - This has been completely revamped and I am so excited about it. They connect you and your students with classes across the globe based on your language, level, and maybe age (?). They give a free trial, and after that it is $1.99 per student. I am able to easily cover this cost with the fees students pay to be in Spanish class. It utilizes video tools to give some lessons and, of course, students are expected to write to their pen pals. It also helps meet some of those Common Core goals with 21st century learning and literacy.You can choose when your session is and for how long. I chose a six week session beginning in October, because I thought that would give me enough time to get the kids going. Check it out for yourself. 
• History Pin - This is a resource I found on Free technology for teachers. I think this looks like a great idea to find information, and classes can create lessons as well. Here is the description from Free tech for teachers - 
• Historypin is probably my favorite service for locating geo-located historical imagery. After writing my post about Views of Venice I explored Historypin for the first time in a few months and enjoyed exploring some of the Historypin channels and tours of geolocated imagery. On all of the Historypin channels you will find, at a minimum, galleries of historical images geolocated onto Google Maps. Many of the channels also include a tour that you can flip through to view connected image sets. Historypin is largely a crowd-sourced effort. Your students could contribute to an existing Historypin project or create projects of their own. Historypin allows anyone with a Google account to place images within the setting of current Google Maps Streetview imagery. Your students could create a Historypin project of their own by going to your local history society, scanning historical images, and placing them into a map. (Try using the CamScanner app for iOS and Android to scan images without having to use a dedicated scanner).
• Classroom blogs - I have been using a classroom blog, but not to its full potential. I am looking at increasing student usage for next year in meaningful ways. I think this is a great intro/rehash of why classroom blogs are so important. You can use Blogger, Wordpress, Edmodo - just remember to use the format that makes the most sense for yourself and your students. For example, we are a Google school, so Blogger made the most sense for me since our students already had the login information and can upload easily. Here is my blog from last year. Students in lower levels were not required to comment on others posts, and you can see how well that worked. I always choose prompts based on what we are learning, current events, or school activities.
• Using music in the classroom - Do you love music? Do you wish you could use more in your class, but don't have time to sift through lots of songs to find the right one? Then do I have the link for you. Thanks to El Mundo de Birch, here is a database of over 1200 songs!
• Here is a post that just came up with some great Ed Tech tools, especially for videos and engagement. Can't wait to try these out!

These are some of the things that I am checking out so far. If you find great info, please comment and share. Hopefully in July I will have another list of some of the great resources I have discovered in my curriculum planning and from FlipCon14.

Out of this world flipping in Mars and other PD

As FlipCon14 draws near, the excitement is building. As I have mentioned before, this is my favorite There is still time to register, and even if you can't make it, virtual attendance is a great option. If you are already registered, plan on attending all the great networking events through the conference. It will give you a great opportunity to meet the "Stars" at FlipCon and learn from the best as well as meet other people beginning to flip. Growing your PLN is a HUGE part of this conference. We all need support and someone to turn to who really "gets"  the flipped class.

I am excited about the opportunity to presenting "Planning for Flipped Class Success" which is geared toward all beginning flippers. This session is Wednesday, June 25th at 8:30 so get your coffee early and join me! We will be discussing getting support, choosing curriculum and teaching students to be successful. Here is the link to the pre-session homework since this session (and the whole conference) is flipped. Additionally I am going to be part of the panel of authors for Flipping 2.0 which will be Tuesday, June 24th at 2:15 here is the pre-session homework. Finally I will be moderating the content area session for World Language which is Tuesday, June 24th at 10:45.

If you have not starting planning your schedule, or if you are looking to register here is the link for FlipCon14. If you are unable to attend, I will post a recap of the sessions that I attend and my thoughts and ideas, so stay tuned!

If you are looking for some other WL PD to keep yourselves busy, how about LangCamp? Click the link to complete the form and be a part of this great sharing ideas. Want all the details? Check out Sra Spanglish's blog.

As far as some other cool innovative educator conferences and PD, Lisa Nielsen has compiled a great list of upcoming conferences for this year. You can see them on her blog post.

If you know of other great WL PD, please comment and add all the pertinent information. I will add as well as I see more come my way!

The big finish

I can't believe that it has been two months since I have written. I have so many things that have gone on this year that there will need to be lots of reflection and journaling as we wrap up. After today I will finish the last of my final exams. I am glad to put this school year in the books because it has probably been one of the most challenging ones I have had so far.

Trying to change the culture with Juniors that were able to skate by and get good grades last year has been a huge challenge. Some of my students really rose to the challenge, but too many were happy with mediocre grades and middle of the road work throughout the year. No where was this more apparent than in the final exam project.

For the Spanish III final exam, students completed the "Choice" projects that we did last year. On the advice of students last year, I moved this from being a regular project and made it the final exam. Many of my students this year did use the class time to do the research necessary on their topic of choice, but when it came time for the final presentation, it seemed like the majority of them were still put together the night before. I even had a few students that moved to English when they got stuck presenting.

I love the choice project because students do get the opportunity to work on something that is interesting to them. This year I had a wide variety of topics. Between all of the classes I had environment, math, culture, food, sports, music, etc. I have to say I was so proud of the kiddos that did math. They went over different vocab, how to do problems, the history of math. It was awesome!

My grades were a little lower this year than in previous years, and although my students made good strides in increasing their proficiency, they are behind the proficiency levels that I have seen in the first two years of my flip. I believe some of this is a result of the lackadasical Spanish II, but I also think that I missed too much school this year to be as effective as I normally am. So, I am cutting back on my presenting for next year and cutting back on my Student Council duties to be more available for my students next year.

I have a ton of new goals for next year, but they need to marinate a little more before I write them down. I hope all of you are enjoying your last days (or month) of school. ;)

On a personal note, my oldest is graduating this year, and I am looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. It is hard to imagine my daily life without him in it. So, I am still running around like crazy for the next week as we prepare for the influx of family.

I´m committed - Production formative assessments only!

It has been a crazy school year with lots of ups and downs, and we aren´t done yet. This semester I have really been tougher on my 3 students, and I am seeing some increased improvements not just in their fluency, but in their work habits. Finally, they seem to be understanding that they have to do their OWN work to be successful. After catching a few students, they have realized that they will not be successful if they cheat. I have been more inspired by them these last few weeks than I have been all year. Nothing energizes me like my students and seeing them making not just the language connections, but the life connections.

As my students have learned, so have I. I am going to work this summer on revamping my curriculum, yes - again. I think that good teachers are always tweaking and looking for ways to improve to help their students learn better. I am working on a new plan to use formative assessments with no written quizzes. I want all assessing to be based on production. I think that students have gotten too good at gaming the system and since the flip is no longer a new concept, they are finding ways to try to ¨game¨it as well.

This makes total sense. After all, I do believe that the only thing that counts in a World Language class is how the students can actually communicate. It will be a big step for me to move away from the few written assessments to all performance based assessments. I have a lot of thinking and planning to do to make it happen. But I am committed.....because I wrote it here!

On a final note - as I was preparing for my presentations this week, I found that on www.tagxedo.com I could create a cloud based on the words in my blog. I was excited to see what ideas carried the most importance. Just wanted to share the love with everyone!