I feel pretty good about my DIY AAPPL tasks for reading! It’s not too hard to get text to do what you want on Google Slides, so making tasks that look like the real thing is totally doable! HOWEVER, the listening can be a whole other ball of wax, because as far as […]
“What did you do to these kids this year??” Kimberly was an amazing student last year. She’s one of my THREE Spanish 3 kiddos this year (woohoo! record for non-native speakers!), and, based on her AAPPL results last year, she’s going to be one of our first students to get […]
I WANT that Seal of Biliteracy on my students’ diplomas! But since our school schedules are set up in such a way that kids basically have to beg for even Spanish III to be squeezed in between college classes, a test is the only way to make that happen. And […]
I’ve kind of abandoned IPAs this year. I have always been really pleased with how my open-ended assessments compared to AAPPL rubrics allowed me to focus on what kids can do, but I’ve never really seen any crossover on their performances no matter how integrated the topics were. What’s more is […]
I have been using AAPPL rubrics for a few years, but I had never administered the test. Ordinarily I’m a very anti-test type person, but in the face of waning school budgets and waxing xenophobia, I wanted something tangible to point to in order to demonstrate the merits of learning […]
Studies suggest that students do better on tests with familiar formats. I’m afraid I was remiss in preparing my students for the AAPPL test, for even though I have been kind of obsessed with AAPPL rubrics for the past couple of years, and my kiddos know their scoring criteria better […]
See complete AAPPL rubrics at aappl.actfl.org/scores Interpretive Reading & Listening N1 Low individual words need visual cues N2 Mid words and phrases visual cues + knowledge of the topic + cognates/borrowed N3 Mid words, phrases, simple sentences visual cues + knowledge of the topic + cognates/borrowed + parts of words […]
I have been hyperconscious of my targets since the SWCOLT presentation at ACTFL ’14. The Benny Hill music with the moving targets really hit home what I had been asking of students with past incarnations of portfolios and learning objectives. So I’m spending extra time to make sure students see […]
I think tests are stupid. A test can’t tell you how well I do my job or live my life–or anything you really need to know about me. Now, I’m really good at taking tests, and if you were to look at various test scores I’ve accumulated in my life, […]
Aside from the in-home convenience and the plethora of topics we got to explore in our 10 hours together, here are a few other things I LOVED about finally setting up a PBLL workshop webinar…