Students Teaching Students

I'm thinking about projects. Our reading this week, Strategies for Discovery has me thinking about important features of good projects. Among some of the features:

Reach beyond school to involve others

Structured so that students learn with and from each other

Get at 21st-century skills and literacies,including communication, project management, and technology use.

Have students learn by doing


I would like to do a project with our Epals in Spain. My 5th grade classes exchanged eletters to students from a school in Zaragoza, Spain and have exchanged some videos. (here's my favorite)

I'd like to take this connection with our amigos in Spain further. My fifth graders will be starting a unit on balance and motion soon and one idea that occurred to me is to have students make their own instructional videos about how to balance different objects and explain to the students in Spain (in Spanish of course) how they to do it (using counterweights, etc). It would be interesting to have the class in Spain then respond with their own videos, following our instructions to see if they could balance the same objects. Students teaching students.

Skype Skype Hooray!

This is the blog I've been reading lately Langwitches
This blog was started by a 21st century learning specialist and an inspiring educator, Silvia Tolisano. One of the reasons I like this blog so much is that it promotes students learning from each other, globally. Silvia began her teaching career as a Spanish teacher and offers many fantastic ideas about integrating technology in the world language classroom. Silvia is no longer teaching Spanish in the elementary classroom, but in one of her posts from Nov 2008, she discussed what technologies she would use if she were in the classroom today. She touches on each of the 21st century skills: communicate, collaborate, connect, create. Silvia addresses each of these skills with a variety of technologies. Skype is the reoccurring thread. She mentions it's use in three of the four 21st century skills.

Silvia's hype for skype resonates with me. I am relatively new to Skype (and totally in love!). Since using it, I have seen what an amazing tool it can be. In October, I did my first ever (and maybe only?) skype birthday party. I skyped into my sister's house in Bend, Oregon and showed a group of 7 year old girls how to 'wai', say 'sawadee ka', and what the inside of a dragon fruit looked like. I couldn't believe how engaged and excited the girls were. It was at that moment, that I realized the amazing potential of skype. It really brought two distant worlds together for the first time, something that would have been unimaginable just years ago.

So my big question at this point is, how do I use skype in my classroom given constraints such as time zones? (most Spanish speaking countries are on the other side of the world and asleep when we are learning at ISB) AND...maybe someone knows the answer to this (Jeff?) How do I use skype at ISB? (it only seems to work from housing). I would love to talk to teachers here who have used it successfully to learn more.

Qué Quiero Aprender...

What is it that I want to learn from this course?

In 2002, I started my teaching career as a high school Spanish teacher in Redmond, Oregon. Redmond is a small farming town in the high desert of Central Oregon. It's located in the shadows of the beautiful snow capped volcanoes of the high cascades, in the middle of a seemingly endless expanse of wilderness. In other words, Redmond is remote. One of the reasons that I became a world language teacher is that I truly believe that knowing and experiencing other cultures is the path to creating a more peaceful, accepting, and caring world. So how did students in remote Redmond, Oregon in 2002 experience and know other cultures? Books, posters, songs, and videos, mostly. In other words, they had a glimpse, a peek- certainly not an authentic experience.

Fast forward to 2010... the evolution of technology in the past 8 years and the implications that this has for teachers and students of world languages is profound to say the least. At the heart of learning a language is communicating and connecting. Fortunately, technology now allows us to communicate globally and make connections to places and people all over the globe, even to remote Redmond, Oregon. Students today have the fortune of communicating and connecting via skype, voicethread, facebook, twitter, and youtube. These are technologies that didn't exist when I began teaching. As a language teacher I am thrilled that these tools exist to make language learning as authentic as possible. As a teacher who didn't grow up in the digital age, I know I need help navigating these technologies and how to use and implement them with my students. So as I think about the question, 'what do I want to learn from this course?' I immediately gravitate to this thought, I want to empower myself with the tools to create connection and communication for my students. I want them to experience and interact in the classroom, not only through books, posters, songs, and videos, but through authentic interaction with real students who live the language and culture. I want to use the power of technology to transport students from Bangkok to Barcelona.