Wow, here I am, blogging on a Saturday night. Sad. Just trying to keep my head above water because this coming week is going to be tough.
Basically, Friday's class was a lot of fun! I was dreading the podcast assignment, because I seem to be plagued by technological incompetency. But Mindy and I actually put together a decent commercial, with good music, and uploaded and embedded it with no problems. I think podcasting will be a really useful tool in the Spanish classroom-- a great way for students to hear themselves speaking, so they can improve pronunciation, fluency, etc.
I really liked the "pleasantly frustrating" translation exercise that Jeff gave us. I think this would be a great activity to give Spanish students. It's an exercise that teaches them not to be overwhelmed by chunks of text that they don't understand, but rather to break it down piece by piece, using what they already know to essentially solve, or translate, the material.
Hillary,
ReplyDeleteWe had technical difficulties as well, but hopefully Jeff and Kristin will understand. It was fun at least. I like your Spanish class podcast idea-my pronunciation would have benefitted from such an exercise. My self esteem would have benefitted as well-I might have been able to notice improvements (I definitely didn't without a podcast).
Here's to Saturday blogging,
Danielle
Liked your idea of helping students break down text into chunks by giving them a non-linguistic sample to translate!
ReplyDeleteI'll have to listen to your commercial, Hilary. I'll bet it's a hoot. And I also liked the decoding exercise. I haven't figured out how I'll use it yet, but I know it will come in handy as inspiration. I can see myself saying to students, look how hard you thought this was, and it turned out to be easy. Think what else we can accomplish if we put our minds to it!
ReplyDelete--Joe
Wow, Hillary, implementing an exercise in a foreign language classroom similar to the translation exercise on Friday is such a good idea! I may just have to steal that from you, only for German students.
ReplyDeleteAlso, only cool kids blog on Saturdays. And it definitely makes you a trend setter. Good job!
-Stephanie
Hillary, I love the idea you created from your experience with the icon activity...the language classroom is the PERFECT place for this kind of decoding work. How can you help kids--maybe working in groups--to draw upon all of their knowledge (words, context, possible cognates) and intuition to tackle something bigger than they thought they could. I hope that you get an opportunity to try some things like this...
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