Ah, yes, technology.

Coming fresh out of a fabulous #SCOLT17 in Orlando, there were lots of technology ideas that floated around in sessions and conversations. These are great, because we do, indeed, live in the Information Age, a time where we can find nearly any piece of information at our fingertips. Therefore, we should definitely be using them with our students, and, even better, design learning opportunities with the technology in the hands of our students (not just us). Yet, school and how we ‘do‘ school largely hasn’t changed. We still require a certain number of hours, days, and credit hours, and students sit in front of adults all day largely sitting-and-getting, playing the game. We offer professional development sessions for teachers on how to get your students “up and moving” because what learning and learning in classrooms ‘look like’ has been ingrained into us to not include that, necessarily. Don’t believe me? Do a Google image search ‘students learning’ or ‘effective classroom’ or ‘good class’.

Seriously – search that now.

All done? All those fresh, scrubbed, smiling faces; don’t they look like our classrooms every day? Fed, prepared, excited, motivated. Ah yes, our students. Some days, absolutely. Other days? Not so much. Learning is hard work; learning is uncomfortable; learning is personal; learning is rewarding; learning is an EXPERIENCE, period. Students don’t remember activities, necessarily, they remember the holistic picture of a learning experience. Adults are no different; we don’t remember individual placards at the Smithsonian or specific landmark podiums at the Grand Canyon, but we remember those sites as a whole and what those experiences felt like. Students come in and out of our classrooms on a daily and yearly level, and they will remember what they felt like. They will remember what they can do and what they cannot do as a result of that experience, just like any person does in any phase of life, hopefully, as a result of an experience plus reflection.

So, where does technology fit into all of this? We teachers learn about all of these innovative maps, apps, and snaps, but aren’t always charged to reflect on where they fit into our overall educational philosophy. For me, that reflection came last year when a colleague asked me if I had been using the internet that day; it hadn’t been working for him. I responded that no, I hadn’t, but would check when I got a chance. He was dumbfounded, and said, “What? YOU, of all people, haven’t used the internet today?!” In that moment, I realized he perceived me as not just a technology-using teacher, but perhaps a technology-centered teacher, and within that a classroom technology-centered teacher, which isn’t true, and I hadn’t really had to think about those nuances before.

I use very little in-the-moment, in-the-classroom technology on a regular basis, except for in the preparation of lessons, and, because I am a strong believer in the classroom experience, am very anti-phone in the classroom. Sure, the occasional round of Quizlet Live can be rewarding, but only for about 10 min., because after 10 min. or 2-3 rounds, they are done: they’re clicking over to other apps, they’re bored and not moving toward their new group, and the novelty has worn off. Similarly, if you’re telling a story, giving new input, front-loading vocabulary, asking PQA, circling, or any other [insert REALLY input-/focus-heavy activity here], cell phones are a distraction.

I recently gave a session at #CSCTFL17 (here or here) in Chicago on what talk shows and classrooms have in common, and it touches on this: Talk shows have not largely changed in the last century, and we still tune in to watch two people talk. Are those two people on their phones? Are those two people listening to music with one or both earbuds in? Absolutely not. There is still novelty in talk shows, because the guests bring the magic, and everyone is on-board, tuned-in. Our classrooms can be the same way. Students are the guests, they bring the magic, everyone is tuned-in, and technology is capturing the moments, not creating them. We must reflect on if we are welcoming students or tolerating them (no judgment if it’s the latter!). We are the hosts of our own classrooms, the curators of learning: we design and coordinate the experience, and then invite our students to participate and bring the magic. If they are staring at a screen, or secretly texting in their lap, they aren’t 100% present, period.

Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon, Ellen DeGeneres: these are all great hosts who, like great teachers, bring their own personality, style, and observations to their work. The format of talk shows, for example, remains largely unchanged: there’s a band, big opening, monologue, interviews, games, laughter, wrap-up. Sound familiar? When studying best practices and brain primacy, a WL classroom should run much the same: big bangs in those first 10 min., a rundown of objectives, transitions, interactions, some humor infused, wrap-up, and so on. The parallels are clear. Don’t have your own personal classroom band? Have some music in the TL playing. Don’t have a sidekick to give you that drum rimshot when you’re funny? Good news: you definitely have a student dying to have the job of sound effects (I bought mine here). Can’t do your monologue because you’re busy with attendance and setup? Class jobs: attendance taker, personal assistant to set out markers and water, prop person to get class ready with the items you’ve listed on a sticky note left for them, hospitality helper offering anyone having a bad day some tea (bought my tea kettle on Amazon), cheerleader encouraging classmates on their bellringer and subsequent warmup, and more. Jimmy Fallon isn’t running like a madman every night adjusting the camera and putting on the final touches for games and interviews, he has people for that. So do we! I have 36+ people in each class dying to participate, not just attend, and class jobs set them up for that. Then, they own those jobs, and procedures, and improve them with new ideas – people don’t renovate what they don’t own, and if students don’t feel ownership in your class, they won’t improve it, they’ll simply put up with it.

Class jobs set students up for structure, and structure (even when it’s loose) begets efficient activity execution. All of those jobs mentioned are experiential, and can’t be done with an app – they rely on FaceTime 1.0, the analog version: real people, real faces, interacting. Technology, however, CAN capture those experiences, and it should. I’d be remiss to pretend as if we don’t live in 2017 where we can take pictures at the drop of a hat, so let’s use that superpower for good and not evil. So, another class job can be the captionist: choose a relevant caption with a current, isolated structure, or story piece, or whatever you want to emphasize, and assign a student to find a picture for that caption, like a caption contest in reverse. They get your device, or a class device (I have an iPad for work use only), and they work to find a moment in class to fit to that caption. Instant engagement. Furthermore, you can have a class photographer in general who sets up your phone/camera on the tripod if you want to record a certain activity, or take pictures of role play, and so on.

To that end, I also like to capitalize on what they’re already using, with the example of our class snapchat (@PRHSspanish). The filters provide plenty of input opportunities for repetition or new vocabulary, for fun/frivolity/enjoyment/entertainment, and its ability to scan QR codes and send messages said pictures allows for scavenger hunts, for example, and interpersonal writing, respectively. My students go on QR code scavenger hunts once a unit or so, and will soon do one that’s more of a race, Amazing Race style. Each QR code may be part of their current story within each themed topic, for example, therefore when they scan them, the text appears. They can then take a picture of their group personifying/acting out what the caption said, and send it back to me. I then have student-generated non-linguistic representations to use with writing prompts, speaking prompts, free writes, blog posts, social media posts (more input!), and much more. Want them reading others’ responses? Save the pictures they send back, head to Walgreens/CVS, plug into the kiosk, and print them out. They’re relatively inexpensive, and can then be part of a gallery wall for students to read, analyze, critique, whatever you want. They’re personalized and therefore compelling, and I didn’t have to make anything new. Again, the host isn’t inventing the guests, he’s bringing them onto the show to share their gifts. The museum curator isn’t creating the art AND displaying it, s/he is designing an exhibit to capitalize on the art’s features. There is a big difference, and teaching in 2017+ won’t be sustainable if teachers keep working harder than the students.

The same can be said for creating electronic art or student blogging – these are great artifacts, and the technology is convenient and useful, but then what? Now what? How can we fuel more organic, experiential learning with these products? And what is the audience, how are we sharing?

For teaching and learning to be effective, information must be memorable and not memorized. Our students must not merely be going through the motions of school, but rather active participants, apprentices in their own learning under the expert, us, their teachers. Technology can facilitate much of this, but it is not the touchstone of a master classroom: personal connections, effective practices, and organic, loving moments are and always will be.

Elena Giudice considers herself fortunate to have lived and worked in international schools in France, Puerto Rico, USA, The Bahamas, and Malta. Her studies in Intercultural Communications influenced her personal and professional growth in such positive ways that she strives to reach her students not only in their language growth but in the development of their social-emotional and cultural intelligence skills. Elena is currently Chair of the World Languages and Cultures Department at Saint Andrew’s School.

I always look to lower school for inspiration. I firmly believe that many lower school learning experiences model best teaching practices that can be adapted easily to the WL classroom at any level. Sometimes, we don’t even realize we are modeling lower school experiences.  For example, the lower school circle time is the moment in upper school when we begin class as a group, warm up, hook the students, share current events, and then move on to more differentiated or pair work, or small group activities. We may not be sitting on a carpet in a circle but we are starting class as a community – together.

I have always loved the concept of student roles in the lower school. I was always amazed as a Spanish lower school teacher that went from classroom to classroom how home room teachers created a variety of roles to make everyone feel relevant, and how children loved taking their roles seriously in their learning community. I always admired my own children’s Montessori classrooms where students have always had a big role in sustaining their environment. The plant waterer, the guinea pig or fish tank caretakers, and the snack bearer were certainly prestigious roles.

A while back, I led a department meeting that focused on sharing successful techniques and approaches that would help shift our classrooms towards a more student-centered class. In other words,  less “teacher talking” and an increase of target language use amongst the students. Two of our upper school colleagues shared their experiences leading Socratic Seminars including using a student chart to track student participation. This chart holds students accountable in a group discussion for a) offering new ideas,  b) asking questions to deepen the discussion, c) supporting a comment referenced by the text,  and d) building on someone else’s idea.  My first thought was: “great for upper levels, but too sophisticated for my novice level courses”, which I was teaching at that time. I noticed the different roles listed on the chart.  That, combined with my memories of student roles in the lower school, got me thinking about how to create and assign some roles to novice level students that would help them help me talk less in class. I came up with personality roles. Based on the roles, students would be “responsible” for commenting at relevant times certain expressions with the main purpose of maintaining the use of the target language. I created personality role cards with useful expressions that a person with a particular personality might say. These were my initial roles:

[lists style=”style6″ line=”0″]

• The Curious – the student who constantly asks questions
• The Cheerleader – the student who animates and encourages
• The Pessimist – the person who complains all the time
• The Optimist – the “everything is good” student
• The Incredulous – the student who doesn’t believe anyone
• The Philosopher – the deep thinker who challenges others to elaborate expression.
• The Boss – the student who tells everyone what to do
• The Romantic – the sweet, loving student
• The Slang Guru – the slang master (can be updated regularly)
• The Flirt – the student who compliments everyone[/lists] 

My goal was to slowly introduce and test this idea out rather than overwhelm the class by assigning roles to everyone. It was early in the first semester and most students were still feeling uncomfortable speaking out. I was getting impatient with the lack of oral participation. I decided to call out three students, the most vocal or advanced in my class and bring them into a mini-conspiracy. I explained the idea of the role cards and stressed that it was not about calling out the expressions randomly, rather finding the right time to go with the flow of class discussions. The students seemed to understand and were eager to go along.

During that class, I actually heard them call out a few expressions at the right time, but no one noticed as they did not pronounce them well, they didn’t use correct tone, and they lacked confidence in general. At the end of the class, somewhat disappointed, I thanked my students for their support and collected the cards and put them to the side wondering if I had wasted my time by creating these cards! Obviously, they were not ready and I should have thought of that. After all, these Spanish I students were only 6 weeks into their semester and still at a novice-low level.

I set the cards to a side and forgot them for while, still hoping to use them again, but thinking about when and how best to re-implement them.  I recently pulled them out and passed them out to my Spanish IIH students, a class that shifts from novice-high to intermediate-low, and a very lively class. I decided not to create a conspiracy this time. I simply arrived and told my students that in the next twenty minutes of class discussion they had a specific role to play and handed the cards out. No explanations needed. The conversation prompt was shared and an explosion of comments followed: Seriously? I hate that! Why? How sweet! Are you nuts? How romantic! They actually kept to the task and did a super job. They found it quite funny, too! They knew when to interject with the appropriate comments, they were not too distracted by the cards and they used the expressions when relevant. Most exciting, the flow made sense and it sounded really natural!

Looking back and reflecting between my first  “flop” to the surprisingly positive experience (my cards were not a waste of time!), I adjusted the cards for the novice-low to mid levels. The cards were too ambitious and overwhelming, and the timing was not appropriate for the novice level. There was also the lack of group development and collegial comfort found too early in the year.  Students need to feel secure and as uninhibited as possible and for that, you need some time for the group to get to know each other well.  I simplified the role cards for the novice-low to intermediate groups by splitting the expressions in half or less and dividing the expressions by level of difficulty,  from the very basic novice-low (A) to a more advanced novice-mid/high (B)  or the full set (C), the original set, for novice-high to intermediate-low. After intermediate-low I use the actual Socratic Seminar form.

When class begins, my students are now calling out to be the “pessimist”, a fun and popular role and we keep a few blank cards to add new unit expressions.

I hope you found this useful, try it in your classroom, and are inspired to create roles that best fit to the personalities of your students. Please leave a comment and share your experience. The best collaboration is when someone starts an idea and it evolves into something even better!

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So it’s not a surprise to anyone that I am a super fan of foldables, but I’ve realized that Twitter is not really the place to try to explain how to make and use them, so here we go.  Some of them are really complicated (the secret door foldable), but this one is really basic, so here it goes … a step by step of how I make my city foldable, and a way to use it communicatively.

What I’ve found is that foldables give me three really great things that I want in my classes.  First, they store the vocabulary and structures in a way that is simple, organized, and somewhat artistic. Second, that vocab-storage thing requires listening to me speaking in Spanish the whole time, and trying to make their creation look like mine. (Sra. Spanglish and I started a #foldablefailures hashtag for when the listening and the creating get out of sync) Finally, the foldable is the tool they use as their scaffolded security blanket resource for speaking.  

I have started to put speaking activities in the middle of things instead of after just to help chunk the content a little more and squeeze in more targeted conversation practice.  So, with that all being said, this is my city foldable for Level 2.  Level 1 has a city foldable as well, which looks exactly the same structurally, but the stores are different.  It’s helpful to do twice because they remember it from level 1 and get why we’re doing the folding.

Materials you will need

Materials for the initial set up: a few markers, scissors, and a legal size (or larger) sheet of paper.  It can be done with copy paper but it feels real small. 

Step 1: Folding the Paper

To start, I have everyone fold the paper into a side-by-side refrigerator with a 2-finger space in the center.  The space is important because that is going to become one of the main roads in the city.  After they have the space, they fold it in half to make a tent.

Step 2: Creating the Flaps

Then they cut the top flaps in half, making 4 total flaps.  I tell them they need 4 blocks for the city.  Make sure you remind them to cut from inside to outside and ONLY ON THE TOP!  I say that a lot, loudly, in Spanish, and try to catch the ones who are about to get it wrong. (#foldablefailures abound at this step)

  

Step 3: Creating the Streets and a Language Teaching Moment

Next we cut to make a finger space sized road running east-west across the middle, which makes the cross street.  

This is a good moment to add the lines and dashes to make streets, label them in the TL (I use north avenue, south avenue, west street and east street) and add the stop light (and its label) in the middle of town.  It gives us a little coloring break from cutting and folding and allows me to teach “Will you lend me _____?” because they always want the correct colors for the stoplight, and didn’t pick the red, yellow, green at the beginning.  Don’t tell them which colors they need to start with, just have the “Will you lend me ____?” phrase on the board and draw their attention to it when they start scrambling for colors (and asking in English).

Step 4: Labeling the City Elements

After that, we cut each block into 3 parts, so we have 12 flaps for the different shops.  I put the list of all the stores on the board and ask them in the TL “Where do we want to put the _____?” and someone raises their hand and says “on the top left part in the middle” or something like that and we write in the name of the store.  My next question is “Looking at the word __________ what do you think is sold there?” In Spanish, it’s pretty easy: zapatería-zapatos, pescadería-pescado and so on.  If they get it right, we draw a little icon next to the word so they remember what it is.

  

Once they have 6 of the 12 places, we take a 2 minute timed stand-up break, and with our foldables, we wander around asking 3 different people “Do you like to go to this store?  Why/Why not?” or “What is your favorite shoe store? Why?”  They’re simple questions that don’t require new vocab, but do require them to talk to another human and move their bodies out of their desks.

Step 5: Expanding Vocabulary

When the timer beeps (I recommend the full-screen timers that you can project that make horrible noises when they ring), everyone sits back down and I have them open one flap.  I write “objects” on one side and “actions” on the other, and we brainstorm together what is specific to that place.  I add in new vocab for that place, and we draw in reminder icons. We did 3 together before I let them loose in their groups to work.

   

At that point, they get a new timer, and are free to do the other ones in their table groups.  If they come up with vocabulary they don’t know, they are allowed to look it up, but I designate one person as the Word Reference person, and they have to draw a reminder icon for the word they look up.  That way they’re not all on their technology being distracted, and the kid looking up the word is feeling pressure from the group members to do the job so they can all move forward.

Step 6: Let’s Talk!

Once all six places are filled in, it’s time for another speaking activity. While they were working I put up the 0-9 conversation questions.  The questions are open-ended or have follow-up questions, and are only labeled 0-9 because I have spinners that have 0-9 spaces on them.  I’d do 6 questions if I used dice, and it works the same.  I separate them from groups into pairs, and they have to go sit with their new partner.  The first person spins and reads the corresponding question.  The partner answers the question and shoots a follow-up question back to person 1.   They spin and speak for 3 minutes, then everyone gets up and finds a different partner (I usually have them match shoe color or birthday months or something) and the process is repeated. 

The ticket out the door, after a few rounds of conversation practice, is that everyone has to write their answers to 5 of the 9 questions with the best Spanish they can manage.  They should be pretty comfortable, having done so much speaking, so it doesn’t usually take them long.

The next day is the rest of the foldable, the same way, but with no more handholding.  They already know the process and can do it in groups more quickly.  They come up with the vocabulary that they think is important, and when it’s time to move around, they are already used to the rhythm of spin & speak.  The only thing I have to do is change the questions to fit the last set of 6 places, and they have all new things to talk about.The most important thing remember while doing this foldable with the speaking interruptions and the group work is to use the timer.  When I started this with my first class I didn’t use a timer and was just judging roughly based on the wall clock.  The flow was off and I didn’t get the right things happening in the right amounts of time.  It wasn’t bad, it was just clunky.  I used a timer with my second section of the day, and it went much better.

Hope this helps!  Have fun!