Technologies in the MI Merit Curriculum for the Spanish Classroom

After reviewing the MI Merit Curriculum Online Experience Guidelines, I believe that there are several technologies that could help me teach.  Blogging is something that I would really like to try with my Spanish students.  When they write weekly journals, I am the only person that reads them.  Having them blog potentially opens their posts up to the world, and other Spanish speakers.  This would help me leverage the extensive and powerful collaboration that is possible with Web 2.0 technologies.  I am also very intrigued with WebQuests.  I plan to use this tool to have my students explore topics in much more depth than we can in the classroom.  I can guide them to great content and allow the web to facilitate, and then bring everything to a whole in the classroom.  I created a Telling Time in Spanish stand along instructional design resource which would be a nice addition to a WebQuest of the same topic.  Technologies that would be harder to use with my students include anything that includes asynchronous discussion (of which the guidelines list none).  This is because an important element of learning a foreign language is spontanaety. Although a discussion board in a CMS is simple and easy to use, it would not be worth the time for my students.

Experimenting with Wikipedia

I have checked out Wikipedia to seek information, but I have never edited any content.  I am not a teacher in a public or private school right now, but I work at MSU so I figured that I would search that out on Wikipedia for part of the CEP 811 Session 5 Wiki lab assignment.  (Check it out here.) I added a tiny bit of info about MSU Dubai which, sadly, had to close for financial reasons in the current difficult economy.  Check it out above!  I was very proud to flex my HTML muscles and try to add a reference back to the source which was actually from the MSU Dubai web page.  Using HTML for me was akin to going to the batting cages after not going for years.  I used muscles I didn't remember or even know I had, and not very well.  It left me feeling a bit inadequate, but ready for some more practice!  When things slow down....

Using UDL to teach conjugation of regular -ar verbs

I was pretty blown away by our UDL lab.  I wanted to jump right in to my assignment to apply UDL concepts to my lesson plan and was very challenged by that!  As a Spanish teacher, I am constantly focusing on the four components of communication; reading, writing, listening, and speaking.  In fact, I tend to save much of the writing for homework and focus on the listening and speaking in the classroom.  I do this to harness the benefits of spontaneity to produce speech responses.  What many subjects gain from a lack of spontaneity online, foreign language teachers lose.  We try to get quick reactions with language, with less time for reflection, because that is how we use language and how we build confidence in speech in the new language.  I found this to be a huge barrier in applying UDL principles to my lesson plan.

I dove in and just tried to identify barriers and features however, as they are shown in this link.  About a quarter of the way through the lesson plan I decided I need to completely revamp the lesson into a WebQuest activity.  This way I can have students work through the comparing and contrasting activities, and the grammatical activities while providing adequate alternatives and opportunities to learn.  This was a major change in thinking for me because the lesson I wrote would normally take one class period.  A WebQuest would take much more work for me, and much more time for my students. But, aside from learning how to read, write, listen to, and speak Spanish, the goal is for my students to learn how to be learners and I think such a project would be worthwhile for all of these goals!