Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Thing 1-B

  • Consider the ways in which Web 2.0 tools might change (or have already changed) your professional practice. Just amazingly exciting what Web 2.0 offers the language teacher. Before (way back in my early years as student and teacher) all we had were slides, movies, and albums... maybe penpals who could write and weeks later (plus postage!) you might get a letter back. Now, students can hear live (without the annoyance of short-wave radio connections at night) radio broadcasts, chat with students in their new language, connect with authentic and up-to-date cultural aspects of people who speak the language, etc.! The ideas seem limitless! This is what I want to learn more about in the course!
  • Since I am not in the classroom, I will start changing gears and think about ways to engage families using Web 2.0 (as BCS Family Engagement Specialist-Latino Families), and also for my Spanish class training I lead for the District, and the Translation/Interpeting aspect of my job.
  • How might you be able to use these new tools to to engage today's "digital learners? I can envision parents being able to access critical information by logging on to their computers at home and to a Wikispace...all current events and important news from the schools is liste in Spanish nd English...tere are links to forms that need to be completed by a certain date, and ways to schedule conferences...all in their own language. I envision that they can link to a translation page...create a message to the teacher or to the school, click and the message is translated for them and an avatar appears, speaking aloud the message and they can send that to the teacher or to the school! I think I cn do this now once I learn the "things" better! I can see new strategies to use the "Lee y SerĂ¡s" course we have in place now, but offer it with Web-2 technologies.
  • Why would you want to? What better way to make a language "have life" for students and not just be an academic exercise! I remember when the "oral proficiency movement" dominated all the trends and standards in FL or L2 methodology. So now I think "Web-2 proficiency" ought to take over!

3 comments:

  1. Yes I am he!!! Were you an Alph or a Beta? :)

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  2. It is you! You are the King! Man, that was so much fun! I was an Alpha by the way. I would love to play that with our kids in an easier way of course. We had a hard time as grown-ups there for a while!! I think they would learn so much from each other. Is there any resource like that out there?

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