April+15

Announcements:
Thursday - Assessment (bring laptops, can use notes and Wiki -- see concepts http://languagelinks2006.wikispaces.com/What+we%27ve+been+thinking+about +.+.+. Tuesday - 4/22 - Intern Panel (strike?) FT - goal is about 50 hours Please email me if you'd like to contribute to Anny's presentation -- TLRP, Chinese lessons, discussion board

Cool Tech Tools -- What have you used/discovered? Please post your experience incorporating technology into your classes. What questions do you have? (Don't forget to sign your post!)
http://www.lamphere.k12.mi.us/education/staff/staff.php?sectiondetailid=1376

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

VoiceThread: http://kerrylitwinski.weebly.com/educator-blog.html

CLEAR mashups: http://clear.msu.edu/login/

If you're at a school with limited technology: www.zamzar.com

http://www.jumpcut.com/

http://www.studyspanish.com/

Some really cool things that I've discovered are: [|VoiceThread] (Transforming media into collaborative spaces with video, voice and text commenting.), [|Drop.io] (where you can create a website and 'drop' files up to 100MB for someone else to 'pick up') and [|Moodle] (sort of like ANGEL, but anyone can use it to create a learning community for their classroom!) P.S. Check out my [|del.icio.us] account because I have so many I can't even count! user:litwins5

Have you ever seen a class website actually utilized in a classroom? Do you have one that your mentor teacher uses in your placement? If yes, could you send me their link? Did your high school teacher use one? What kinds of things did s/he post or have on it? user:litwins5

I think the greatest form of technology that I've seen in a foreign language classroom was when I was in French class in my high school. We had language labs for world languages and would use this usually once a week or so. We would frequently use this time to work on our pronunciation by recording ourselves on a cassette (similar to audacity) and could replay and re-record, and also replay the native speaker that says the same passage. What was great about this was that the teacher had controls to listen in on anyone and talk to a particular student, but students couldn't tell if/when the teacher was listening in, so this forced students to work the whole hour. user:picmanns

That's an awesome technology! I'm wondering if you'd be willing to contact that teacher to find out what s/he used and if it was district specific? It sounds like it's something that we could all benefit from! user:litwins5

The only technology that I have used in the classroom so far was that I made a CD of MSN voiceclips which were responses of a native speaker to questions that students in my class had written to him. It would have been cool to have a piece of technology that could write out the words that were spoken, but I do not have this technology, so I transcribed the responses myself. Still, this was a great way to get students to hear a native speaker - and his responses were very personal to the students. Each response for each student was on a different track of the CD. It was a lot of fun! user:L2teach

In our technology class we learned about blogs, which I knew about but it hadn't really occurred to me to use them in the classroom. They can be used to keep in touch with parents/guardians and also to display student work. I have to say, I think one of my favorite technologies I've found this year (although I have to say, I love VoiceThread - see Litwins5's post above) is Google Calendar. In addition to making it easier to organize my own life, It's a great way to keep parents/guardians up to date on what's going on in the classroom, and it's a great resource for students who might be absent. user:sarahew

On Saturday morning, Amy, Kerry, and I attended a session at World Language Day about an internet program called "Rich Internet Applications for Language Learning." The program was creating by researches at MSU and is free for teachers to use in their classrooms. The program involves many different features such as audio dropboxes, the ability to create audio interviews with students, the ability to create interactivite exercises, and many other things. The website for this program is [|http://ria.clear.msu.edu.] user:WhitneyLynnMSU

I've used CLEAR for a class before and it was really helpful! You can make mashups for short online quizzes and it's really easy to navigate and understand. I don't usually use technology all that much other than YouTube for videos and the occasional online dictionary to check vocabulary. The one that I use is dict.cc and I also use welt.de which is a German newspaper, which also offers podcasts for free. Our classroom doesn't have a movie projecter or anything, so it's a bit difficult. I'm really leery of too much technology in a classroom, however, because of my last two years of German in high school. I was in a high-tech classroom that had video cameras all over and two big screen tv's, and the classroom was connected through cameras/internet/microphones to another classroom across town; only there was only one teacher for both classrooms. It was a bit difficult to learn, so I'm still leery about too much technology being used. user:alyxx

I do not usually use a lot of technology in my teaching. I don't feel very comfortable with it yet, but I am working on it. For my last field teach I downloaded film clips from www.youtube.com of French commercials and played them off my computer. This didn't go exactly how I planned, but I was happy that I tried it. One tech tool that I used in a language class at MSU was www.audioportfolios.com. I mentioned this earlier in the year, but it is a great way to keep and organize samples of oral language and it gives the teacher an easy way to give individual feedback. I think that I will definitely use this as a resource in my own classroom. user:adamolau

I've used a lot of PowerPoint and recently I've used some music. My teacher today was using newspapers from Spanish-speaking countries that she just found online, which was really neat and authentic. I've also seen her use YouTube a lot- even though the school has it blocked, she uses another program to get around it. user:kendal53

I haven't used a whole lot of technology in my classroom, besides the standard powerpoint slideshows. I feel like I can't do a lesson without that program! I also have used zamzar.com (thanks for Kerry for the tip). Because most schools have blocked Youtube, this website allows you to type in the link of the youtube video and it sends a downloaded copy to your e-mail so that you can save it to your computer. This way you can play it for the students, and you don't even have to worry about internet connections or anything! user:KathrynHin

I've tried using technology in the classroom when it would be useful. I remember one lesson that Amy and I did where we incorporated voice clips from native Spanish speakers from Mexico in the lesson. The class was covering Dia de los Muertos and we thought it would be great for students to hear real native speakers, if they celebrated it and why or why not. The students really seemed to be into it...but there were problems as well. The native speakers spoke too fast for them (or so they say) and we had technological issues that caused a long break in our lesson. Obviously you need to know it will work before teaching using it!! My question involving technology has to mainly do with copyright issues. How do we know whether or not we can use certain images, videos, and sound clips?? user:ZirollerCoaster

I I haven't had the opportunity to use much technology in either of my field placements. The classrooms that I'm in don't have the projector's to use powerpoints, so I haven't even really used those in the classroom. It's difficult to incorporate technology because the classroom only has the kind of overhead that uses transparencies. I have used Zamzar to get songs to play for the students in class but without a projector I can't play the videos. Also the class only has a VHS player so that makes it hard to utilize Zamzar to show videos as well. I would say that it has been helpful to have to do lessons without being able to use technology actually, although I would like to try recording students speaking in the target language sometime. user:lucasme2

Studyspanish.com offers online quizzes and practice. Students can also send their scores to the teacher so that way we can make sure they are doing their homework. user:gerouxje