Puedo is for permission; quiero is for YOUR mission. Earlier in the semester, it became apparent that I needed a way for students to get what they needed, so I whipped up an interactive notebook page on Piktochart, and we ran through some gestures. (While I was at it, I included Read more…
I start the semester with passion projects. I end the semester with passion projects. It brings a sort of unity to the whole semester and gives kids a sense of relevance, of purpose for the whole studying Spanish thing. Now this does mean a little extra tap dancing on my part, Read more…
I was very happy with the personalized Genius Hour IPA last year, but I was more than a little discouraged by the overall listening performance. I know they could do better than Novice Mid! So if their abilities weren’t the problem, then what was it? It was the videos. The videos Read more…
Goodness knows I’ve done some experimenting with portfolio platforms. I’m pretty satisfied with the VoiceThread option at the moment, but when my Pinnacle amigo, @jkylewood demonstrated Seesaw (that’s web.seesaw.me NOT seesaw.com, by the way) after #langchat amiga @alenord had already been talking it up, I saw something broader than portfolios. Now Read more…
I would love to give you a template for my student interests vocabulary page, but you have to make your own. It really is the whole point of the page. Week 2 of Spanish I, students can generally figure out (with enough gesturing, of course) how to interpret questions like Read more…
TPaCK: Three ingredients blend for masterful instruction.[image from Umpqua Dairy] Pinnacle Personalized my Learning yesterday! I took a quiz built with a few Google Sheets formulas and Google Add-Ons (Copydown and AutoCrat), and it told me what I needed work on! Apparently I needed work on understanding the TPaCK framework Read more…
Would you look at that? The majority of my babies performed at Novice High or BETTER at the end of Spanish II! Except listening. Ouch. What you see is a graph of the results based on the personalized Genius Hour IPAs Spanish II completed during the week before exams (reading Read more…
Each of my students gets his or her very own personally tailored final exam this year. Students have spent the last three weeks prior to exams rounding up resources (infographs, articles, videos, and contacts–to say nothing of the Pinterest pins and Diigo list from earlier in the Genius Hour process) and Read more…
Today I am awesome. I have plenty–PLENTY–of days like my amiga Amy describes, but today? Today was not one of them. Brace yourself for a lot of typing in capitals. Today easily 90% of the class was in Spanish. Though I only actually caught about 1/3 of them using 90% target Read more…
From here on out, it’s all portfolios and passion projects. We accomplished our two big PBL projects (and took home a few trophies!). Both whole-class projects were time sensitive, so we couldn’t start with full-throttle Genius Hour, but these were my Genius Hour guinea pig kids last year, so unlike Spanish Read more…