Thursday, February 16, 2017

Chromebooks in the Spanish Classroom for Native Speaker Rotations

This has been the longest week and it's only Thursday. I wrote an article about my Spanish III class' use of Chromebooks for native speaker rotations: http://edtechreview.in/trends-insights/insights/2658-chromebooks-in-the-spanish-classroom Also, on Tuesday I was evaluated in that class. I will get my results this afternoon; hopefully they will be good. One thing I can say is that they were talking more Spanish during those 70 minutes than ever. I have had that class only since January, so I feel that we are certainly on the right track as far as speaking abilities are concerned. The native speaker rotations are working fabulously. But we will see what the observer thought is this. So, today we are doing Genius Hour. I had the students give short updates this morning and I am very excited about what they are doing. So many ideas: an art gallery, a coffee shop, a Mexican fast food place, a goat breeding operation, various websites that sell items, trips to Spanish-speaking countries, fishing tours, under the ocean habitats, dresses and furniture designed based on Hispanic themes and much more. Each student in my classes is doing a different project that is based on personal interest as long as it has to do with the Spanish language and culture. Next week we will set the project deadlines. Updates to come later. Update: Evaluation results were wonderful. The observer really appreciated my efforts to include the native speakers in my lesson the way I do with the rotations.

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

A five-day weekend

We came back from a four-day weekend yesterday, just to be sent home for a five-day one due to illness in the school system with numerous teachers also being affected. My first reaction was disappointment because my evaluation was supposed to happen today in fourth period. Now is it scheduled for Valentine's Day. I suppose it will be ok anyway. It's just very difficult to keep the momentum going when you are out this much. We practiced a little bit for it and now actually have a chance to practice some more on Monday. It's mainly a matter of practicing the routine. I especially love our native speaker group rotations, where students speak to three Hispanics in Spanish about the assigned topic, in this case sports. I am also going to catch up on grading my online South College course today. Lesson plans? I can just use this week's plans, so I believe we do not make out new ones. What to do over the long weekend? I will think about it and let you know.

Thursday, February 2, 2017

End of 30 days of blogging challenge

I just found out that today is the end of the 30 days of blogging challenge posted by A.J. Juliani. I was surprised as I had completely forgotten when we started the challenge. A lot has happened in one month since I began with my new students in January. Blogging is a great activity to reflect on what is going well and what needs changing in our professional lives. For the most part it has been a great experience. There was only one day last month that I would rather have not experienced the way it happened, but that's not bad in the great scheme of things. Today I gave my first chapter test and it was very typical. There were some 100's, a lot of down the middle and a few failures. I still need to re-teach the whole subject-verb agreement deal until they finally get this. I am not quite sure if they actually didn't know the conjugations or if they still do not understand how it works in Spanish. But I will find out. Monday will be subject-verb agreement day. Update: There will be no school until Tuesday due to sickness. I guess I will get a four-day mini vacation. How nice! Buncee rocks. I took their webinar yesterday.