Fortunately, I had done some resource gathering for the inquiry phase of the project to equip a local business with children’s menu placemats back in Hawaii. UNfortunately, I hadn’t really fleshed out what I was going to do WITH those resources as of about 5AM Wednesday morning. So here’s the plan I threw together
I have the pleasure of picking Dr. Karen Tharrington’s brain regularly on #langchat, and once as a co-presenter for SCOLT! @kltharri is a Senior Lecturer and Methods Instructorat North Carolina State University and an advocate for online Professional Learning Networks, technology and online learning, as well as future language teachers Read more…
History and grammar are not always the most obvious hook for capturing students’ attention, but when it’s history and grammar in a cartoon, who wouldn’t be hooked? This year Spanish II and III decided they would win first place at the language festival in April by finally teaching people the Read more…
I wish I could infograph all day. Reading infographs, analyzing infographs, creating infographs–and it doesn’t matter the topic. From eyeliner to Einstein, ancient artifacts, augmented reality, or syllabuses: infographs my idea of a supercool hobby. (Note: this is probably why I myself will never actually be supercool.) Fortunately a good chunk Read more…
This time I am certain I’ve got a novice-appropriate Integrated Performance Assessment. And I’ve worked in a little cultural comparison. I might be getting the hang of this! I opted to find an authentic text–an infograph–about free-time activities to tie in with their Genius Hour interests and with our work with Read more…
Since my own co-taught World Studies class in 10th grade, I’ve wanted to co-teach a class. I haven’t had a chance since years ago when a science friend and I invented Bio-English, a summer class to prep for two of the biggest tests in 10th grade. But I happened to Read more…
I think I may be doing something right! The TCI/TPRS storyasking approach seems to be complementing my Project-Based Learning approach nicely, as students become more familiar with the vocabulary and structures we’re working with, and they are engaging more easily in interpersonal discussion as a class. Here’s how it’s gone Read more…
Gone are the days of laborious infograph building in Microsoft Word. No longer must I link page after page to convey semester essentials! Now I make a single infograph syllabus on Piktochart to convey the basics of the course, download the image in .jpg or .png form, then upload it to my ThingLink stream to Read more…
They originally wanted to make their skit for the upcoming language festival a talk show, full of celebrities and gossip. So we looked up some celebrities on People en Español (and on MSNLatino because of People’s lack of diversity–but that’s another post) and narrowed down countries we’d like to focus on. We Read more…
Once basic project-specific vocabulary is established, students can dig into the research, into some authentic resources about their passion. Now remember, our job is to modify the task, not the text, so if we start students off with some low-intensity texts like Pinterest pins and tweets to ease them into productive Read more…