This Quarter my goal for growth in this class was:
I would like to further improve my technology integration by creating more options for students to demonstrate creativity and innovation in my classroom. Going hand-in-hand with this is the teacher standard of Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity.
I have already improved my knowledge of different technologies available that would be useful in my classroom, such as OneNote Class Notebooks and Office Mix.
I would like to further improve my technology integration by creating more options for students to demonstrate creativity and innovation in my classroom. Going hand-in-hand with this is the teacher standard of Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity.
To do this, I will use the 21st century rubrics to help plan lessons that
- Incorporate and explicitly teach students how to use
- Office Mix
- One Note Notebooks
- One Drive
to collaborate with one another, investigate and apply critical thinking skills to new situations.
- I will also have an English day (since my classroom is Spanish immersion) where I teach some of these tech skills and also discuss digital citizenship topics specifically related to research online and collaborating using technology.
I feel like I have just started on this journey. I have indeed incorporated OneNote Notebooks and have begun to incorporate OneDrive, although it has much more potential than what I have actually used it for. However, I don’t think I have inspired or facilitated student creativity. I have begun to improve my facilitation of knowledge construction, but innovation and creativity is something I’m not quite sure how to tackle in Spanish immersion…yet.
As I don’t think I fully achieved the goal of facilitating creativity and innovation, I guess the question is what prevented me.
I think my focus shifted once I began applying technology in the classroom. Knowledge construction for my subject area was a more natural area of focus, and the shift of focus from creativity and innovation just “happened.” I can’t easily think of ways to allow students to express creativity while using Spanish, except to write stories or create songs or videos. Either way, I want the experiences I create for my students to be relevant to the goals of the course and the standards. In this sense, I struggle to create meaningful activities that apply to my course’s standards and facilitate student innovation and creativity.
I am motivated to continue to network with colleagues via Twitter and Facebook. The ideas and resources I collect there I will share (as I’ve already begun to do this year) with my other World Language colleagues at my school.
I also will begin to attend and contribute to Thursday morning collaboration time with colleagues at my school. The goal of these 20 minute sharing sessions is to share innovative and meaningful work, often with technology, that is happening in our classrooms.
Finally, I will continue to be open to and to implement new technology in order to enhance my students’ learning. My successes and lessons learned will be shared with my colleagues. For example, immediate wants to try are:
-Skype for the classroom
-Choose your own homework tasks for students, almost all of which require the use of varied technology
-Trying out Google Cardboard and virtual fieldtrips
Overall, what you do you feel is the role of technology in your classroom with your community?
When teaching a world language, a very important aspect is exposing students to authentic language. This means language written by native speakers for native speakers. Most of this authentic language (if not all) is now found digitally. In my classroom we use “Twiccionario” which are tweets found on different relevent topics being discussed in class at that moment, we watch Youtube videos and commercials in Spanish, and we listen to songs in Spanish, all of which I pull from online.
I feel that in my classroom, technology is no longer an option, but an essential element that connects my students with the cultures they are studying. They can now talk, IN REAL TIME!, with peers their age around the world, who speak Spanish as a first language. They can read tweets in Spanish and make meaningful, personal connections to the language and see the real-world application.
What I now need to do now, as urgently as I possibly can, is design more investigative tasks where students have to go out and interact with these authentic materials, construct their own knowledge and interact with the real Spanish-speaking world in creative ways.
Theresa Vasquez's bPortfolio 