Matthew C’s Blog for EDC G 611

This course was a lesson in the best type of learning: learning-by-doing. By having to choose a Sandbox Unit topic relevant to my teaching and by exploring the benefits of some great applications on its implementation, I feel more prepared to share with my students the opportunities of this exciting time in education.

As a Spanish teacher, I am excited about:

• using RSS with my students to follow current events

• creating Voicethreads to practice vocabulary and narrate events

• blogging as a form of journaling and extended class discussion

• using Creative Commons images and Flikr to enhance presentations and start conversations

• practicing vocabulary online at Quizlet

• finding and sharing new ideas with fellow teachers at Ning

• and staying open to new ways to use the internet safely to make language, culture, and community come alive for my students!

For teachers, Ning is another great resource for sharing and discussing tools, both internet-based and traditional, to enlive and enhance instruction.

While exploring Classroom 2.0 I found threads where teachers from around the globe asked and answered questions about everything from vocabulary instuction to Voicethreads.  I also came across links to web 2.0 language instruction sites that use a community-based model to provide a platform for users to practice speaking, reading and writing.  I am looking forward to delving deeper into these sites to find out how they could be used in my classroom.

In addition to the resources provided, it was interesting to view some of the conversations around pedagogy taking place in the forums.  Ning provides a space for teachers to network and share ideas and practices.  I am interested in finding groups for teachers who use technology in the classroom to make language learning more relevant and global issues more accessible.

As described in this AP article from August 16th, another leftist president has been elected in Latin America. Directly following his inauguration, Fernando Lugo traveled to the largely impoverished region where he had spent eleven years as a Catholic bishop. While there he vowed to improve conditions for the country’s poorest citizens.

With the face of the region continuing to shift to the left following other recent elections in Bolivia, Ecuador, and elsewhere, it was also interesting that Lugo was was accompanied on his trip by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, a vocal opponent of U.S. foreign policy. Chavez announced petroleum back-ups for Paraguay that should serve as a stabilizing force for the Lugo presidency in a potentially volatile political and economic environment.

(Google Reader has already made it easier for me to follow interesting and important developments in the U.S./Latin America geopolitical landscape, as well as the Mets.)

I attended a presentation by global studies and technology teacher Silvia Tolisano tilted “Travel through Space and Time”. The presentation describes how technology was used to make her 2006 trip to China a valuable cultural experience for her entire school. She used a blog, website, podcasts, videoconferencing, and some creative hands-on tools (like a teddy bear the students had built a relationship with before the trip) to link her explorations in China to the global studies curriculum of her K-6 students back in Florida.

The presentation was well-prepared in terms of content and style, so it was definitely worthwhile. Silvia mentioned something very insightful that reframes some of my thinking about web 2.0 applications in my Spanish classes. A former Spanish teacher herself, Silvia said that part of her call to teaching a foreign language was to help develop an understanding of other cultures and global awareness in her students. This is an interest that along with many other teachers, I’m sure, I share. She drew a connection between global awareness and web 2.0 tools that articulated for me in a new way the interest I have as a Spanish teacher in the tools we have learned about.

While watching the presentation, I opened my word processor and took notes as I would at a physical conference. The virtual conference, however, allowed me to pause the speaker in mid-sentence to think more about certain points. Being able to return to watch other presentations later will also be a valuable resource.

Diigo provides a great space for organizing and sharing content on the web. It’s exciting to be able to see who else has bookmarked pages that I find interesting. Diigo is also a very efficient tool for finding sites that are relevant to a search topic or interest, some of which would have never been found otherwise.

The organizational power of Diigo is very promising for anyone trying to manage the hundreds of meaningful pages encountered during research. From my limited experience with the applicication and with tags in general, it seems that the more tags one adds to a page, and the more precise they are, the richer the Diigo experience will be for the entire community.

http://www.diigo.com/user/mateoc611

(Photo by Daquella manera at Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/daquellamanera/150451163/)

Flickr is a powerful tool to save, share, and discuss images with people all around the world. By using tags, teachers and students can search for pictures by category across millions of users’ pages.

This is an exciting resource for the study of current events. It provides access to images captured by people on-the-ground in the places making headlines. It also allows students to enter into discussions about those images and issues, making real world applications of their study a reality.

As a teacher, I could use images found on Flickr to enhance presentations and decorate the classroom. Students could create slide shows and narrate them in Spanish, adding their thousand words to someone else’s picture. Maybe they could even upload photos of their own and discuss each others’ work through Flickr’s comments section. There are many great possibilities to be explored!

I think Creative Commons (CC) will affect my teaching practice by making me more aware of copyright issues and encouraging me to “remix” the content I encounter.

By adapting and reshaping the images, audio clips, and lessons licensed under CC, I can make them better fit the needs of my courses and my students. Knowing that this chain of enhancement can continue when I license my work under CC provides further inspiration to make contributions to the growing body of knowledge and tools being shared by teachers and others around the globe.

Up until now, I have only seen mention of CC when clicking on the captions for photos on Wikipedia articles. Without having a real understanding of what that designation meant, I assumed that the photos could be taken and used elsewhere legally. After having read more about CC, I realize that the non-commercial designation is also an important aspect of certain CC licenses.

As far as I can tell, podcasts are not federally regulated in the same way radio and tv are.

I have enjoyed El podcast de Olallo Rubio, a Mexican social commentary show packaged as an audio comic that often discusses the importance of maintaining free speech in the realm of podcasting.

matts-thoughts-on-free-speech-and-el-podcast-de-olallo-rubio

By providing students with access to authentic language content, news podcasts are valuable tools for developing listening skills and an understanding of current events.

matts-review-of-spanish-news-podcasts-for-the-language-classroom2

This past year the students in my Spanish 5 class read current events articles from Spanish-language newspapers online. We discussed their findings in class every Monday.

For my Sandbox Unit Topic, I am looking for applications to help students follow single ongoing current events over the course of the semester rather than a different one each week. We will continue our weekly discussions in class, and I hope to add an online component as well (maybe a blog or adding comments to online news articles).

After several failed tries from home, I decided to head to the University library for help from one of the reference librarians. The search that he helped me conduct was similar to the one I had tried earlier with a few small, important differences. The librarian suggested searching EBSCOhost and also using synonyms for some of the keywords.

The results yielded several scholarly articles involving blogs and RSS feeds that matched my Sandbox Unit. One titled “Emerging technologies: blogs and wikis: environments for on-line collaboration” (Goodwin-Jones, 2003) was from the Journal Language, Learning &Technology. Perfect! The article included some helpful information on RSS feeds, which I think will be a very important tool for my students this year. The authors described how students can track certain topics (in newspapers, blogs, and search engine results) by using RSS. This should make it easy to follow a single current event over the course of a semester. I am really looking forward to seeing how this plays out next year!

The other scholarly article I found to be of the most help was “Reflections from the introduction of blogs and RSS feeds into a preservice instructional technology course” (West, Wright, Gabbitas, and Graham, 2006) from TechTrends (which I know doesn’t sound like a scholarly journal, but the article has parenthetical citations, a bibliography, and is written in a scholarly tone in a journal free of advertisements). This article discussed some of the difficulties the authors and their students had had when they implemented the use of blogs and RSS into their classes. Some of the challenges they faced were: students felt overwhelmed with the number of websites they had to check when monitoring classmates’ blogs and that the assignments lacked structure. The authors suggested that teachers model good blogging and RSS practices for the students throughout the year. Also, they recommended highly structured assignments at the beginning of the year to give students a chance to become comfortable with the new tools. As a teacher planning to use these applications for the first time next year, I am reminded that it is important for me to get as much practice ahead of time with the applications we will use, to be patient, to plan as thoroughly as possible, and to enlist the support of the technology staff in my district.

References

Goodwin-Jones, Robert. (2003) Emerging technologies: blogs and wikis: environments for on-line collaboration. Journal Language, Learning &Technology, 7(2) p.12 (2665 words).

West, Richard; Wright, Geoff; Gabbitas, Bruce; Graham, Charles. (2006) Reflections from the introduction of logs and RSS feeds into a preservice instructional technology course. TechTrends, 50(4), 54-60.