- Taking the 20,000 foot view on my class
- Ending the semester, Lessons Learned (Part 4: Assessment)
- The Backwards Syllabus
- Low hanging fruit
- VoiceThread as Final Exam
- Teaching outside of the textbook and inside of the museum
- Digital Storytelling and Language Learning
- Blogging their scholarship
- Professional development: Simple, small-scale, and cost-effective
- Why I teach.
- Teaching Transparently: Scuba diving in 2nd year college Spanish
- Ending the semester, lessons learned (Part 3)
- Social Networking and Octegenarians
- Ending the semester, lessons learned (Part 2)
- Ending the semester, lessons learned (Part 1) … (of what will be many)
- Midterm assessment: My turn
- What’s under the hood: letting the outside in
- Informal Assessment, Disruption & Repair: Making change happen.
- Week 4: What? You don’t want me to write a paper?
- Welcome to the free fall
- Struggling with the Syllabus
- Imagining a college without grades
- Reflections from the Chair Swing, Moving into the Summer
- Syllabus Hacking with Bryan and the bava
- Well this is embarrassing
- There is no mystery in grading
- Using Can-Do statements for student self assessment
- El Proyecto Personal: Creating Conversations, Taking Risks, Learning to Prepare for the World Outside the Classroom
- Creating Radio in the Language Classroom
- Teaching Acceptance through Storytelling
- Improvisational teaching
- Fear, Motivation, Social Consciousness and Language Learning: the graph
- Using Radio Ambulante in the Spanish language classroom
- Creating, Uploading, Commenting and Sharing Audio via SoundCloud
- Notes I jotted to myself at the end of the term
- Student-centered, project-based learning…and a medical emergency
- Taking a tour of the HISP 205 class blog
- Let’s go bowling!
- Cooking with Drag Queens: Teaching Inclusion and Discovering the Limits of the Spanish Language
- Tune Up and a Smack down (part 2): The gringa returns to Bogotá
- A tune-up and a smack-down: The gringa returns to Bogotá
- Rethinking the role of the language textbook
- Our WordPress Class Blogging Tool: Now Yours Too
- A few shout outs and a woof
- Mid semester evaluation: Do it.
- What we did in class today, and no I can’t get you the notes.
- Searching for blogs in all the wrong places.
- Planning for HISP205-09… in Second Life
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This fall we had an overabundance of enrollments in the first semester of 2nd year Spanish class. And with that came the opportunity for me teach in the fall as well as the spring…something that I have been hankering to do for a while now.
HISP 202 is where a lot of first year students land after several years of high school Spanish (other than the AP kids…they jump right to third year). I am sure it is like a lot of intermediate level college language classes… there are 12 chapters in the book, we have to get through the first 6 my the end of the semester so the next class will pick up at chapter 7. We start off with the preterite and the imperfect and then dive right in to the fabulous world of the subjunctive (usually right after drop/add is over…funny how that happens). The themes for the chapters? The same as always: the environment, human rights, fads and hobbies, celebrations… you know the drill.
I have used social media to teach a Spanish conversation class. When I have talked about this at conferences or on this blog, generally people have been supportive, but a few folks have wondered whether the use of these tools could be as successful, or even successful at all, if it were a non terminal class, that is, a class that is part of a series of classes that forms a requirement. (My conversation class does not lead to another course, does not follow a textbook, and sometimes is the ONLY language class a non major takes)
Would it be possible incorporate social media (as a way to bring the outside world into the class) with a syllabus that follows a textbook, has a prescribed beginning, middle and end, and is one of several sections of the same course ??
More important than the tools…would students be able to scuba dive (vs snorkel) through the course…pausing where needed, when needed…and still make it to the finish line? And (my personal goal): could I get students to move from completing isolated grammar exercises and fill in the blank tests to assessments that required them to listen, write, speak, and interact with native speakers… even with the equivalent of two semesters of college Spanish under their belt?
I dunno the answers, but as we round the bend to the mid term and approach fall break in this class I have a few observations to share. More to follow.
