Helping Kids Manage their Digital Footprint

When I browse Facebook, sometimes I'm not proud of my friends in terms of what I see. Do you think that employers are really fooled by you editing cats over your beer cans and raised middle fingers? I don't think so! I believe that teaching kids to effectively manage their digital footprint is absolutely vital- from early on! If nobody ever teaches kids WHO can see what they post on social media and what the consequences can be for these seemingly meaningless posts, how would they know the harm they could potentially be causing their future selves?

I think that a teacher can have an active role in helping students use social media positively, however, I think that if there is an active parent/guardian in the students' life, it is their job to show their child right and wrong in the social media world. I loved Lisa Nielsen's idea of having the child use a Recall App in order to see a word/status cloud. A discussion on how the child and parent feel about what comes up in this cloud of commonly used words and statuses could be very valuable! Most importantly is the parent reminding their child how some of these words/statuses that may seem innocent could be viewed by other adults and therefore potential employers.

In school, helping students use social media effectively can be done by showing students where they can find blogs, Twitter pages or websites on their passions. In my classroom, I have students Tweeting Spanish to me so that I can respond. They know that Señorita Swigart will be seeing their Spanish tweet so they only post appropriate tweets to me... but that doesn't mean that everything on their page is so appropriate.

I think the conversation on whether teens should be using their real names online is very interesting. Reflecting on my personal experience, I have nothing that I am ashamed of on my Facebook page, however, in order that students cannot find me, I do not have my real full name attached to my Facebook. I think to think about controlling one's digital identity and what choosing to use one's real name or not means for that. Should my students use their real names online? If they are posting responsibly, why not?

These topics are incredibly interesting and as a Spanish teacher, I had not thought of having a talk with my students about acceptable/responsible use of social media. However, if I am encouraging the use of social media in order to get involved with Spanish, why shouldn't it be me to start this conversation? Someone needs to do it!

The MACUL Experience

The MACUL Technology Conference at the COBO Center in Detroit was a refreshing break from the usual. Don’t get me wrong, I love my students! However, for a day, I truly got to be the student as I sat and took notes on various speakers at this conference. I was extremely hopeful to find some technological resources that I could bring back to my placement and use in my everyday teaching. Luckily, I found a World Language focused speaker who had resources in order to improve the ability to assess speaking in the classroom. Giving oral exams is an incredibly time consuming process and it was great to hear that this teacher has been using technology in order to have students record their oral exams through programs like MSU Clear Conversations and Lingt Language. These tools allow you, the teacher, to record yourself saying questions and then the students record a response. The kicker is that the students are timed and on video, so it’s pretty clear if students are trying to use their notes or other resources on the test. It is incredibly difficult to simulate real conversation in an exam and these tools allow language teachers to save time and still assess students’ spoken skills. 

Another of the sessions that I sat in on was called "Lightning Talks." Now, the name can be slightly deceptive, there was no actual sudden electrostatic discharge during this event, however, the jolt of energy and enthusiasm that I got from listening to these passionate speakers allowed these talks to live up to their name. The idea behind "Lightning Talks" was that each of the speakers was given 5 minutes to talk, and their powerpoint presentation played behind them at a rate of 15 seconds per slide without their control. These speakers had to be succinct, powerful, well-spoken and above all, passionate. The most inspiring of these talks were the speakers who chose not to speak about content but spoke about kids. When it comes down to it, I cannot relate to every single content area but, we aren't here to be content-area teachers, we are here to teach kids!!! One woman talked about how we go through a process of judging and sorting people when we meet them. We do this with students as well. Students know the labels that we have placed above their heads because the way that we teach reflects these labels. She challenged us to tear down any negative words we have placed above students heads, no matter how infuriating their behavior or performance can be. She encouraged us to put positive words such as "scholar" and "high achiever"  above every kid because each student has this potential and needs us to believe it. I was inspired by her passion and her dedication to kids. 

Another speaker gave what was more like a spoken word piece than an informative talk. It was absolutely chilling. He spoke about a girl who went to school while still taking care of her 2 baby sisters and alcoholic father at home, with no mother in the picture. He reminded us how some of our students have to be heroes every day and the Cs that they may be achieving in our classroom may be triumphs to them. Every student that comes into our classroom is dealing with something and it is our job to care about them and be solid mentors, role models and confidants for them. Ending the conference with that powerful 5 minute piece was a great end to an enlightening day. I look forward to opportunities to attend more conferences like this one and bring back passion, technology and revitalized energy to my classroom. 

Technology Teach-In

Look at that cute little frog! Not only is he a cute little guy, he appears on a language practice website that is incredibly useful for French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese and Spanish teachers.

For my Technology Teach-In lesson my students will be utilizing Conjuguemos.com, a website with vocab, grammar, listening and most valuably, verb conjugation practice. Verb conjugation can be a tedious skill to practice however, conjuguemos.com makes it more game-like and students can compete against themselves and against each other to race against the clock and conjugate as many verbs as possible correctly in the chosen tense. Sounds like fun, right? (I think it is, but, I am a Spanish teacher.)

Students will soon be learning the imperfect tense in my Spanish 2AC class. This verb tense is awesome because there are only 3 irregulars so mastery of the verb forms comes swiftly unlike it's past tense friend the preterit that can take weeks to learn. In order to help cut down on the time that it takes for students to feel confident conjugating these verbs I am going to use conjuguemos.com. This is a valuable tool because students get immediate feedback on whether they are right or wrong and they can practice tons of verbs individually in a very short time. It is impossible to give such individualized feedback on verb practice without such a tool!

I will be checking out the laptop carts at Pioneer, praying to the technology gods that the laptops are having a good day and the majority of them are functioning, and giving students time to practice imperfect verb conjugation. This will probably be done on the day after the verb tense is introduced to students so they will have a basic concept of how the tense is formed but not significant practice with it. The other awesome thing about conjuguemos.com is that when you have a teacher account, students can send their scores for activities directly to you. Not only is there individualized feedback but students can be held accountable easily for the work they are expected to complete. I will probably give them a goal, such as getting 98% accuracy or more on 20 verbs in 2 minutes. Basically what I usually do is see how many I can do accurately in a certain time frame and then cut it in half. Impressive, I know.

This technology gives my mentor teacher and I the opportunity to let students practice at their own pace, receive immediate feedback on their individual work and send their results to us with the single click of a button. Boom! Questions? Concerns? Feedback? Help a teacher out! And if you are a language teacher, use this website! It rocks! (AND, it's free :D)

Education Blog Browsing 

I've been doing a lot of browsing of Spanish teacher blogs in order to find different ideas to incorporate into my lesson plans. There is a wealth of knowledge out there but it can be a daunting task to sort through it all and find the hidden gems. I was really excited to find a blog called "The Organized Señorita" which is also written by a young student teacher who is in an education program somewhere out there. She had some really creative ideas for activities to make things like grammar and vocabulary more engaging and fun. I commented on one of her activities which I really wanted to use in my own classroom. I asked for her feedback on how to control behavior during such an activity and also told her how I planned to incorporate the lesson into my classes. She has not responded to me, which is fair because I only made the comment yesterday, and we all know how busy student teachers' lives are!!

It's been fun looking through this blog and seeing another young, like minded individual's opinions on how to run a Spanish classroom. This particular blog is run by a student teacher who is in a middle school, but I find that the activities are still applicable in a high school setting. 

The other blog that I looked at is absolutely fabulous and is called Zambobozo. This blog is incredibly organized. I have been looking a lot through the "Unidades" (Units) section of the blog where it is divided up into grammar points. It's a fantastic resource for activities based on certain tenses and grammar concepts! He also has funny things like comics and "Miaúcoles" which is... cats.. on Wednesdays. He really likes cats. I'm cool with it. Unfortunately there was not a method of commenting on his blog. I really would have liked to thank him and tell him how much of an awesome resource he has created for struggling Spanish teachers out there! 

Overall, blog browsing is an intimidating but exciting activity. There are some pretty bad blogs out there, I'm not going to lie. However, the blogs that are creative, organized and thoughtful definitely outweigh the unhelpful resources out there. If I had to sum up this perspective in one oversimplified statement I would say that good blogs are good, and bad blogs are bad. It's as simple as that. If the writers put time and effort towards their blogs, it really shows. I will be using more blogs to keep my ideas fresh and bring new materials into my classroom. I do not want my classroom to get stagnant. 

I really enjoyed the presentation on Socrative. Starting out the presentation with a mock lesson that showed a comparison between using Socrative for a quiz and using regular paper and pencil was a fantastic idea. This comparison really led me to think about the benefits and the downfalls of using this online assessment tool.

I see Socrative as a really beneficial tool for simple assessments of knowledge. I think it would work well for vocabulary or simple conjugation quizzes in a language classroom. I like that students can get immediate feedback and can move at their own pace.

Socrative is one of the tools that definitely makes you consider access to technology. I would not want students to be held back by lack of access to technology when it comes to assessment. If my school had great access to laptops for the students, I would definitely use this tool in class so that students can see their mistakes right away. If my school had constant problems with laptop carts, slow moving and non-functioning computers, I would probably steer clear of this resource unless I knew all of my students had internet and computer access at home.

Overall, Socrative seems like a great teacher tool and I will keep it in consideration for future use. The in class presentation on it really sold me on some of the benefits that a website like this can offer your classroom!

Guest Presenter: Tom Ward

I was very interested in Tom Ward's presentation as I know I am not great about keeping up to date with social media sites and technology but I know this is an important factor of relating to my students. I do not use Twitter personally but I see Twitter as a valuable education resource since high school students are addicted to it. I love the idea of incorporating social media and technology into assignments because students are skilled at using these and they enjoy using them.

In terms of Twitter, I am already designing lesson plans that incorporate tweets as homework. I created a professional Twitter where students can follow me, and I am only following Spanish speaking sports players, musicians, actors/actresses and news. I can assign short writing assignments as tweets and correct them as students tweet them at me. Students are able to see their classmates posts and can be inspired and also learn to use correct grammar.

In Tom's presentation he proved how he engages his students using video by drawing us all in with the example of the basketball player attempting to make a shot. He had us guess whether or not we thought the player was successful. He paused the video for dramatic effect and drew out the amount of time before we were able to see whether or not we were right or wrong about the shot. This type of activity, just as it engaged us master's students, engages high school students very well.

This presentation reminded me that despite my views of technology, this does not stop the fact that the majority of my students think that their phone is a part of their body they cannot live without. Instead of letting this work against me, I can use it in the classroom and let students use technology in a way that engages them in the material as well as forces them to practice it.

Tech in My Placement

Overall, my findings for the Tech in My Placement assignment depressed me. Pioneer is one of the top high schools in Ann Arbor, however the technology available to students and teachers is outdated and frequently broken. My mentor teacher taught at Pioneer for most of her career and then moved to Skyline for a few years. At Skyline, teachers are spoiled by the technology they have available to them as well as the support from the technology staff. When she returned to Pioneer, the stark difference between the technology resources available at Pioneer vs. Skyline have been a source of many complaints.

The laptop carts available at Pioneer are older, very slow, and often broken. If a teacher wants to use technology for a day in class, they must allot a large amount of time solely to letting the computers start up and have students switch out their non-functioning computers with functioning ones. My mentor teacher has had issues with her projecting system making all sorts of weird/loud sounds and the technology staff has just said, that's how it is, there is no way to fix it. In a Spanish classroom, functioning sound is vital to hear authentic speech and music.

It took months for my teacher to get the Doc Cam that she requested at the beginning of the year. Eventually, she did receive the Doc Cam but it frequently malfunctions. Compared to the Doc Cams that are in classrooms here at UofM, the Doc Cam in my classroom is just not a great piece of technology.

There are many great online Spanish practice resources that I would love to be able to use in the classroom. However, without reliable laptops this becomes very difficult. Students can access some of these items on their phones, but not all of them. Not all students have a smartphone to begin with. This limits the activities that one can use that involve technology and requires that students use these helpful practice resources at home. If they don't have computers at home, then access to these resources is limited to time they go to the library to use the computers there.

Overall, it seems many people are in the same boat as me at their schools. Their technological resources are lacking. Some questions that this has raised for me are: How do schools raise money to improve technological resources? Do other teacher's see the technology at Pioneer as normal, or sub-par? What sort of budget does a school have for technology and where does this money go?