Y’all. I stopped reading For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood when I took the job in suburbia. My new school is the ethnic inverse of the Charlotte magnet school where I taught for one measly year. Honestly, Suburbia IS easier, if only for the numbers game (85 vs Read more…
My main goal at #ACTFL19 was to just gather as much as I could about interculturality to finally start making heads or tails of what I should be doing and how with my students, and there were three main presentations that helped me sort out where I could start…
I blame Snapchat filters and Carmen Scoggins. First of all, Snapchat filters are fun, and even with two teen wannabes at home, I wish I had more excuses to play with it. So what did Carmen do at our FLANC spring fling? Give me the excuses. The filters are kind Read more…
I asked Meredith Clark if her session was really for people like me. I’m not from a very large district, and I’m only an “LOTE leader” there because they’re no longer paying anyone to fill any such role officially. But I really want to get my colleagues on board with Read more…
Sr. Wooly cracks me UP. He has a handful of videos I could watch on repeat all day and just laugh until I cried the whole time. However. There are some stories on his list that I just don’t GET. I can see where they would be beneficial vocabulary wise, but Read more…
So you make a template–with instructions repeated on the template–and they still get confused. I mean, I thought portfolios could have been smooth sailing if I could have just shared a template on on Adobe Spark or Blogger or VoiceThread. I thought Google Slides might FINALLY be able to offer that perfect mix of customization Read more…
Blogging is just the beginning. It gives students a starting point, a place to hash out what they can–and want to–say about their goals and progress. Their compañeros can check in on them too. But you may have noticed in your own learning experience: real collaboration doesn’t happen in the comment Read more…
Things were going pretty smoothly with my Can-Do based portfolios and Flubaroo badges. But not smoothly enough. Not for me. This has been a common theme for me this year, despite admonitions from some of the people I admire most not to “sacrifice the good on the altar of the Read more…
This year has been a year of growth, without a doubt. After the single most successful semester of my teaching career, I decided to start from scratch on almost everything. I blame iFLT. Since I’m also on an early college schedule, I only got a week or two to process Read more…
ACTFL Can-Do Statements are holding my students back. I’ve been using them to evaluate porfolio submissions and award badges, and the badges just aren’t matching students’ abilities this way. I need a system that connects what we know about proficiency with what students can and want to do with the target language. Read more…