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)
