cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Silvia Tolisano
Posted By Barbara Lindsey on March 12, 2009
After a long hiatus we’ve started up our podcasts again by recording a fascinating conversation with Silvia Tolisano, a former Spanish and German teacher, who now supports the global studies curriculum of San Jose Episcopal Day School as their technology integration specialist.
Her blog, Langwitches: The Magic of Learning through Technology received two 2008 Edublogger nominations: for best tech support blog and best resource sharing blog and it’s easy to see why. As we referenced in an earlier post, Silvia has generously shared carefully crafted, thoughtfully designed units that take advantage of the global, collaborative potential of a variety of technology innovations such as blogs and podcasts. In addition, she regularly posts ‘how-tos’ on using tools such as Google Earth, Mixbook and Wordle.
If you take a look at the professional development blog Silvia created for school staff, you’ll see how she has been able to leverage the impact of individual attendance at conference workshops in ways that go beyond the standard report to the department chair or departmental meeting discussion. And Silvia’s Tech Connect is a great example of how we can include our students, parents and communities in our learning adventures.
We had the chance to talk a bit about some of the global collaboration initiatives Silvia has fostered, in particular, her current Around the World with 80 Schools project that uses Skype to connect students at her school with students in schools all over the world. This is such an easy, inexpensive and flexible project that you can adapt for any language, any level and any curricular objective. It’s well worth looking at these examples, especially as we explore new ways to connect to other discipline areas, address our students’ learning preferences and develop our students’ intercultural skills.
Kevin and I wanted to mention Call Recorder, a nifty little program for the Mac that allows you to easily and inexpensively (~$15) record your Skype calls—both audio and video, as Kevin shared with me in this podcast.
Do you know someone who is doing great work integrating technology into the language curriculum? Or do you know a tool that would be of interest to our readers? Let us know!
The wATw Podcast: An Interview with Silvia Tolisano [59:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (310)
cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Silvia Tolisano by Barbara Lindsey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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Music for our podcasts is courtesy of George Wood and is called Travelogue. You can find more of George Wood’s music at podsafeaudio.com
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