The World A.T. Ways

Posted By Barbara Lindsey on April 21, 2011

Every Thursday night (8-9 p.m. EST: Time zone converter) for the past four months language educators across the United States have been meeting online to discuss and share ways to improve their professional practice. They do this using Twitter, the free online service that allows you to send out public or private messages of 140 characters or less and the hashtag #langchat. Based on the hugely successful #edchat movement started in 2009 by Steven Anderson, Shelly Terrell and Tom Whitby, language educators Diego Ojeda, Elvira Deyamport, Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell and Erica Fischer serve as Twitter chat moderators for these online sessions. Recent discussion topics addressed Differentiated Instruction in the Language Classroom, Teaching World Languages Without a Textbook and Using Music in the Classroom. Tonight’s session will be a continuation of last week’s chat: Standards-based grading in the World Language Classroom. Each week’s topic is crowdsourced in advance by participants and then voted on.

In a previous post we shared survey research results from both ACTFL and the NCLRC on which of the five standards language educators found most difficult to implement with their students. Both findings reinforce what most of us intuitively know: the most difficult are connections and communities. What was surprising were teacher elaborations on why the communities standard is so challenging—the limited resources available in local communities. In other words, teachers restricted their definition of communities to their local target language communities. And technology was rarely mentioned as a vehicle to connect students with language communities beyond the immediate geographic area. The conclusion at the ACTFL session was that the profession needs to do a better job at providing world language teachers with scenarios that demonstrate the kinds of community connections our students can make. What better way to do this than to participate ourselves in online communities? As more language professionals join #langchat, I am convinced this will be an important avenue for us to be able to experience, reflect on, model and implement extended communities of practice with our colleagues and students.

If you’re interested in joining this online community and would like more information have a look at some of these resources:

New to Twitter? Read our take on why and how to use Twitter. It includes some nice how-to resources created by fellow educators.

Need information on #langchat? The LangChat on Twitter wiki has it all, including an embedded livestream of tweets devoted to #langchat. Don’t forget to click on the LangChat Resources link where you’ll find an archive of past sessions.

Want a way to easily follow, filter and participate in #langchat? Use TweetChat. I’ve created a brief screencast to show just how easy and useful it is. Hope to see you Thursday nights for #langchat!

TweetChat Demo from Barbara on Vimeo.

We’ve shared how innovative educators are using online tools to crowdsource teaching ideas and how they are connecting their students with language communities in our interview series:

An Interview with Larry Ferlazzo
An Interview with Jon Pennington
An Interview with Enza Antenos-Conforti
An Interview with Silvia Tolisano

What are some of the ways you have connected with a larger community of language professionals? How have you connected your students to target language communities outside your local area?

Category: Standards, Teaching and Learning, Twitter feeds | View Comments
Tags: Barbara, communities, communities of practice, langchat, nectfl11, standards, teachers, twitter

Posted By Kevin Gaugler on April 20, 2011

Dr. Kevin Gaugler: Charting New Courses in Languages toward the 21st Century from gaugler on Vimeo.

Category: scholarship, Teaching and Learning | View Comments
Tags: 21st Century Skills, ACTFL, future, Kevin

Posted By Barbara Lindsey on April 14, 2011

A great session I attended at NECTFL 2011 was The Impact of the National Standards on Language Education & National Initiatives with Marty Abbott, Eileen Glisan and June Phillips. Shared in this session were the results of a national (U.S.) survey of world language teachers on how and to what extent the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century shape classroom language practice.

When language teachers were asked to rank which were the most difficult goal areas to teach, Communities and Connections rose to the top. This supports findings reported by Anna Chamot and Sheila W. Cockey of the National Capital Language Resource Center. You can download their NECTFL 2008 presentation, “Communities and Connections: Hardest Standards to Meet or Greatest Opportunities” on the NCLRC NECTFL Presentations page.

Looking specifically at feedback regarding the Connections Standard, the NECTFL 2011 presenters shared that teachers felt there wasn’t enough time in the curriculum and that it was difficult to connect with other disciplines and other departments. They were also concerned that they lacked the necessary expertise to address other content areas.

But if we focus on creating those interdisciplinary connections for our students through the comparison and analysis of readily available data sets on a variety of global issues, then Gapminder World is an easy-to-use, online/offline (and free!) tool to do just that. Gapminder makes world data sets more accessible by presenting them in a visually compelling, dynamic, graphical interface. Information on all the data sets are available on the data tab and the creators intend to regularly update the data. If you have issues with internet access you can use the free Gapminder Desktop. In this video, Hans Rosling, one of Gapminder’s co-founders, explains why and how to use the free desktop version of Gapminder.

The site itself has a wealth of resources including two that I think will be very useful in helping to create target language learning scenarios that are authentic and address important global issues.

The ‘For Teachers‘ area offers a featured resources section with a variety of lesson activities and guides that you can use to get a sense of the many learning possibilities this tool has to offer. Don’t forget to view the video on this site to see how some students use the data to formulate interesting questions and hypotheses about Haiti’s life expectancy and income compared to other countries. Although it’s a small group at the moment, there is a forum where you can share ideas and learn from others. You can also adapt and use any of the featured resources, one of which—the Human Development Trends, 2005—is particularly interesting because it is available in twelve languages.

The ‘Labs‘ section has some pre-made sets of data to compare (no lesson plans included) that you could use as part of a lesson you’ve already created or as the basis for a new unit or activity. As with the charts you create, you can ‘play’ the statistics in chart mode, with or without trails, and/or in map mode. You can modify them by adding countries and then share your final chart via email or by posting it on a blog or other website. With the Gapminder USA lab, you can compare U.S. states on a variety of statistics with each other or with other countries of the world.

While I haven’t developed an activity yet using Gapminder, I will definitely be looking to create a professional development session on this for pre- and in-service language teachers. If you have used Gapminder with your students we’d love to hear from you!

Hat tip to Carl Anderson and Hubert Lalande who tweeted 10 Awesome Free Tools To Make Infographics where I rediscovered Gapminder World.

Category: Standards, Teaching and Learning | View Comments
Tags: Barbara, bloom's taxonomy, comparisons, connections, data, free, information, nectfl11, standards, world

Posted By Barbara Lindsey on April 10, 2011

In the early nineties a blind student enrolled in my beginning level German course. In addition to her guide dog, she also had a student assistant who would help by describing to her the texts and graphics he saw displayed during class and tell her what I and the other students were doing. Since I taught in the target language and her assistant wasn’t tasked with learning alongside her, it was a challenging proposition. I didn’t realize until then just how much of my classroom instruction relied on visuals, physical movement and peer interactions, none of which were helpful for this student. I wish I could revisit that experience and improve on the kinds of support I offered her. To this day, it remains my most frustrating teaching experience.

So when a graduate student participating in our Beyond WebCT course first told me about universal design for instruction, I was eager to learn more. Since then I’ve asked her to share her experiences and expertise with new members of our course, the last time during a LearnCentral session that focused on online learning in higher education. I also signed up to participate as a faculty reviewer for the University of Connecticut’s UDI Online Project which has been a great learning experience for me. Through this process I have come to understand the implementation of UDI as

• a way to provide proactive instructional strategies to support the broadest range of learners possible
• respectful of where we are as teachers in the teaching/learning paradigm—we can start with small changes and move on from there
• another opportunity to reflect on and re-evaluate our instructional practices to see what works and what could be improved upon

At the 2011 NECTFL conference I shared what I learned about UDI along with some free, online tools we can use to “diminish the need for accommodations for individual students by proactively designing courses with accessibility, usability, and effectiveness in mind.”

I was also fortunate to be able to attend a terrific, interactive session on UDI given by Wade Edwards and Sally Scott. It has inspired me to explore offering a similar series of workshops for our graduate students. You can find out more about their federally funded project and download the resources they shared with us at Project LINC: Learning in Inclusive Classrooms.

What are some of the ways in which you “proactively design” your curricula to support the broadest range of learners possible? Are there any free, easy-to-use online tools you’d like to share with us that you didn’t see listed in this presentation?

Category: Standards, Teaching and Learning, web 2.0 | View Comments
Tags: Barbara, bloom's taxonomy, differentiated learning, national standards, standards, udi

Posted By Kevin Gaugler on April 3, 2011

Last year, for the first time, I taught an intensive two-week pre-college Spanish summer course at Marist College. In designing the course I set out to produce a 21st century Spanish composition and conversation course. In the class students discussed global issues, enhanced their media and information literacy skills, explored Hispanic culture in their local environment and conversed with native speakers of Spanish on-line. The experiment was a success and Marist will again offer Spanish for the 21st Century this summer from July 10th- July 23d. The college has also put together a video of the class in preparation of this summer’s enrollment. If you want to know more, please send me your questions or comments or watch this interview with one of the students who took the course last year. If you know a high-school student wishing to earn 3 college credits in Spanish this summer, send them to the Marist site to enroll or please have them contact me with any questions.

Category: Teaching, Teaching and Learning | View Comments
Tags: 21stCentury, Kevin, pre-college, Spanish