Cool Tools

Of all the cool tools I am citing, I know that I will use www.homeworknow.com the most. I use this literally every day to update homework assignments. I ask my students to check it for their homework and often include links on it to resources for them. It is much easier to maintain than posting to the school's web site (for which I have to ask our school's technology coordinator to update every time I make changes to my professional page). My school has an account with homeworknow.com and many of the other teachers use it, and so our students are familiar with the site. This is not, perhaps, the most creative or original use of technology to support the classroom, but it is very very useful and very very practical. It not only helps students who have been absent and want to check what work they missed, but it also is a place for the students to go if they forget what their homework is, or if they want a "one stop shop" for links to other online resources. I have lots of links from there to handouts, other helpful web sites, online review, etc. I definitely could NOT imagine not having that site. If your schools do not use it, I would strongly recommend you talk to your principals about getting a school account.

Revising Project

The project I have finally decided on is to have my Spanish 2 students make a movie, narrated PowerPoint, or printed picture book illustrating what they do during the day. This project is supposed to demonstrate their knowledge of reflexive verbs, and one of the requirements is they use at least 8 reflexive verbs. I have thought about ways to increase creativity with this, and have decided that with the three options of project possibilities, that might be enough wiggle room for creativity in and of itself. I would rather not decrease the amount of reflexive verbs used, to allow for more creativity: the reflexive verbs is the grammatical purpose of this project. I have told them they may use pictures they've taken themselves from their digital cameras, which hopefully many of them will do. We will be in the computer lab this coming Wednesday to work on the project, at which time I'll tell them how to use the narration feature of PowerPoint, and teach them how to make movies and/or record sounds. I will allow them (and encourage them) to actually use video from their digital cameras and will encourage them to add music to their videos if they chooses. Without having to teach them how to use Audacity, however (which I think would be superflous and not a good use of instructional time), I'm afraid their projects will be a little long (as they don't know how to "shorten" songs), and I will strongly encourage their narration to be at the beginning of the project ( so I can grade their pronunciation and content first, and then skim through the rest of the video.) I think with these options, there will be enough room for the students to be creative with it, but still accomplish the language goals of the project. I hope these turn out well: I have done this project many times in the past, but it was always just the print "Daily Routine" book and I'm glad I'm requiring more elements of technology this year. At a minimum their project must be typed, include digital photos or other computerized graphics (printed in color for more credit) and include a digital narration of their project. (Yes, this narration, which was not formerly part of the project, will add time to my grading it, but I will feel like they've gotten more speaking practice and will be ultimately a good idea, as I have a hard time implementing many speaking activities.)

Assessing student learning

I have a feeling this may be a somewhat contraversial topic: assessing student learning, especially with PBL. My personal thought is that PBL learning is much more time consuming to assess and that it can and should be used, but should probably be used sparingly, as it is so time consuming to assess. Creating real products are a great authentic idea, but take a lot longer to assess than a standard pen-and-paper test. In real life, teachers have lives outside of school and cannot grade every unit as a PBL--it's just not realistic. I think PBL is good to use (in my case as a high school teacher) once or maybe twice a semester. More than this and I think the teacher will get burned out having to grade assignments that require a lot of thought to score correctly. In an ideal situation, PBL would be a great method to use all the time, but given reality with time constraints and the reality of standardized testing, there's only so much time available for assessing PBL projects.