The Tuel Box

I have really learned in this class. I have gone from being someone who was a little leery of technology to being excited to develop lessons that incorporate technology. The lessons were well designed. The directions were usually clear, (except sometimes for those of us using Macs!). The activities made us actually use the tools we were learning. I am glad I took the course in the summer. I would not have had the time to commit to the class during the school year. I appreciated that the assignments were opened and we were allowed to work on them on our time schedule.

I know I will use many of the tools we have explored in this class. I will definitely use Delicious, Pageflakes, Google Docs, ToonDoo, and Zamzar. I am hoping these are not blocked at my school, but realize that Google Docs probably is, since Gmail is. I am so excited to use some of these tools that I am going to ask for a multi media projector so that I can better share items from my computer with my class.

I hope that we will have access to the class Wiki so that we will be able to go back and check on how to use a particular tool and use the class material as a reference. I would also be interested in taking a refresher class or a follow up class which explores more tools next summer. Thanks for a well done class.

It’s very easy to spend a large amount of time on Classroom 2.0 and the Ning networks, just as it is with the regular social network sites, like Facebook or My Space. One post or topic leads to another, then another. I did find several interesting sites and discussion items. It was a little frustrating because to really explore many of the sites or links you had to pay a membership fee. It seems that there is a plethora of items that would be very useful in the Spanish classroom, like authentic video and music clips.

I was surprised to see that many of the sites did not yet have a large number of members and had not been viewed by many persons. It was somewhat comforting to see the low numbers because I did not feel like all other younger teachers were aware of these resources and that I was really out of the latest developments.

I was also surprised that many of the blogs had not had many recent postings.

I believe that social networking sites for education will continue to develop and will probably really gain in popularity, just as the other social network sites have.

My experience trying to make the Podcast was frustrating. I think they are actually fairly easy to make, but the task was complicated by my using a Mac. When the directions said to right click on the download button, I was unable to do that since the mouse on my Mac is not a split mouse. I spent quite a bit of time unsuccessfully trying to figure out what to do to download the Vocaroo file to my desktop since I could not right click. Finally I contacted someone that I knew was familiar with Macs. He told me to hit the control and the Click at the same time and that allowed me to download the Vocaroo file. Once I was able to figure that out, the process was easy.

I can see several uses for a podcast in the classroom. I could teach students to do Podcasts and they could then create podcasts where they discuss a given topic or do some kind of speaking assignment in Spanish. It would be much easier to grade the podcasts that were collected together in a class folder than it has been to grade tapes submitted by the students, as I have done in the past.

It could also be used by the students to create songs or jingles that help students remember a grammar point or vocabulary in Spanish. Having the students do podcasts would allow the work to be shared easily with students in other classes.

It was very fun to work with Pageflakes. There was a little frustration at first because when I went to the Teacher Pageflakes it kept switching to the regular Pageflakes. I finally just stopped trying to get the Teacher Pageflakes to work and used the regular Pageflakes. It was very easy once I did that. It is nice that you can customize the page and have the tools that you would use most.

I am excited to use it in my classes. I will definitely want my students to use the public page I created, la página de la sra. Tuel. An ongoing assignment I have for my Spanish IV classes is to compare the coverage of an event or news topic in a U.S. newspaper with the coverage of the same event or topic in different Spanish newspapers. A pageflake will be very useful in doing this assignment. I could set up a Pageflake for anything else my students might be researching. Using a Pageflake seems to me to be very much like pulling a collection of books in a library for students to use for a specific research project.

An article that I found interesting was Writing Instruction Gone Wrong?. It talked of how difficult it is to move learners with very limited writing ability toward being competent writers. He also questioned how many errors to correct, and if and when to teach grammar. It was very interesting to me because those are some of the same questions that one always considers in teaching second language writing. The additional blog posts were also interesting and provided valuable links to teaching writing. The point was made that one should approach teaching writing as one would teaching someone to play an instrument or to play a sport. You should give a lesson and then practice, practice the skill taught. Another point was that beginning writers need very basic, formulaic structures. Although these are familiar ideas, it was good to be reminded of these as I begin to think about the coming school year and how I want to approach teaching students to write in Spanish.

The Google Docs will be very useful to me, my colleagues, and my students. For me, I often do work at home then either have to send it to myself as an attachment or put it on a jump drive to take it to school. Then if I work on it at school I have to repeat the same process if I want to work on it at home again. Using Google Docs to do my work would eliminate this cumbersome process.

It will also be very useful to us as a department when we work on making the common assessments we want to use as a department. In the past we have had to do the revisions either by working on it together before or after school because we do not have common planning or by trading e-mails with attachments numerous times. It was very confusing to keep straight which was the revision that we had all agreed upon and to make sure that each person had seen each revision.

I think Google Docs. will also be very useful to my students. Oftentimes students do a project at home, but for some reason they are unable to print it at home. They try to bring it to school on a jump drive or e-mail it to themselves or me, but then they are unable to open it at school. Using Google Docs would eliminate such problems.

Google Docs seems very easy to use, since it works very much like Word. It was very nice to be able to spell check a document I had written in Spanish.There were some difficulties when I uploaded a document. The formatting (spacing and alignment) were messed up and had to be redone. I also think the presentation tool, although very easy to use, is more limited than a regular PowerPoint program. I did not find out a way to do some of the transition options that can be done with PowerPoint.

Despite the limitations, I know I will use Google Docs often and will encourage my students to so so also.

YouTube videos can be very entertaining, but they can also be used for educational purposes. I found many popular songs in Spanish that I can use in my classroom. One in particular is “La Historia de Juan” by Juanes. This particular song can be used for a listening exercise in class, but it can also be used to discuss cultural aspects or as a springboard for other debates or discussions in Spanish in class.

I have always had my students perform skits in order to further their use of the Spanish language. This year several students wanted to make videos instead of performing the skits live in class. I allowed them to do so. After viewing some of the videos I told the students they should put their videos on YouTube. They replied that they already had. I think that the prospect of using YouTube or TeacherTube to have their video seen by a broader audience is really an incentive for many students. It encourages them to produce a better video because they know students from other schools and just more people in general will see their video.

Another use I see in YouTube or TeacherTube is to show a video that other students have produced as an introduction to a story or novel.

I was also excited to hear about the Zamzar service and hope it makes it easier to view YouTube videos at school, since YouTube is blocked at our school.

I was surprised to see that there were so many podcasts that existed in Spanish. However, upon exploring more I was disappointed with several of them. Many of the podcasts were nothing more than the old audioingual method of language learning which was used in the 70′s. In this method students heard phrases and repeated after the instructor. The Coffee Break Spanish series seemed to be one such podcast.

There were also podcasts that basically instructed in grammar as one might do in the classroom, especially a few years ago. One such podcast was Rolling R’s Spanish Podcast. 

I did find some that provided some authentic language that would be good to use in the classroom. On some of these I would just want to use snipets of the podcast in the class, as the person speaking on the podcast talked for too long as an introduction. A podcast that I may use parts of is Spanish with Rojas.

At this point I do not see myself using the podcasts much in the classroom. It does not seem that it would be worth the time I would have to invest in it to try to find a few things I might use. I could see myself using it for personal use, such as listening to shows like Bill Moyers that I may have missed.

I found Library Thing to be very interesting, but probably more for my personal use than for professional use at this point. It was interesting to look at the different groups and discussions. If I had more time (like in retirement) I would enjoy being part of the groups and discussions. It would be fun to be part of a reading group where you could read together and discuss. The discussion group on Don Quixote was particularly interesting to me. 

My husband is a high school librarian and I am sure that after I pass the information on to him he will use it for his personal use and will refer students to it.

The reason I don’t believe it will be that useful to me professionally at this point is that my students are beginning language students who are not very capable of reading books in Spanish. I do think I could use it for my own professional benefit, by searching for specific educational topics.