cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Jon Pennington
Posted By Barbara Lindsey on August 20, 2009
Once again Twitter worked its networking magic and led us to Jon Pennington, who is a high school teacher of Spanish at Hunterdon Central High School in New Jersey as well as an adjunct professor of Spanish at the College of New Jersey.
What caught our attention and led to this interview is Jon’s Spanish Connects Us project, an audio blog initiative connecting language learners with native speakers. Coming this fall, Jon will expand on this concept with a new undertaking called Language Connects Us, which he envisions as a network of student blogs where language learners can display and get feedback on their work.
Jon’s initiatives were borne out of a desire to provide his students with “personalized and authentic learning opportunities” to further their developing linguistic and intercultural skills. Jon’s student-centered global undertaking has two main components: recorded audio exchanges his students conduct with native speakers via Skype or a similar free, internet telephony, and a reflective, evaluative piece students write about their experiences. Students can then bring all their work together on a digital bilingual portfolio site Jon created. For those interested in some of the practical aspects of his projects, Five Internet Tools We Use in Class to Enhance Student Language Learning gives students, their parents and other teachers the educational purpose and student learning objectives of the technology tools students use in his classes. The three sites Jon has used successfully to connect his students with native speakers are soZiety, the MIXXER and LiveMocha. Be sure to look for the forthcoming book, Web 2.0 The New Digital Literacies, edited by Michael Thomas, which will include Jon’s case study of his use of Spanish Connects Us, Language Connects Us, Diigo and Twitter.
In the course of our conversation Jon shared with us how he designed these projects to empower his students as life-long language learners and why he chose to make his and his students’ work publicly available. We were interested to hear how these projects have re-energized Jon, both as a teacher and as a learner. We would do well to consider the powerful motivating effects these intercultural exchanges can have, not only in moving students into longer sequences of study and higher levels of linguistic and intercultural competencies, but also in keeping young teachers of Jon’s caliber in the profession.
As you listen to our interview with Jon and explore his sites, we hope you consider how such a simple yet powerfully effective project can function as
- dynamic student portfolios
- repositories for intercultural exchange artifacts
- action research projects
- a novel way to foster program articulation within and across institutions
To find out more about Jon’s work and where you can find him online, please point your browser to Jon D Pennington.
As always, if you know someone who is doing great work integrating technology into the language curriculum or have a tool to share that would be of interest to our readers, please let us know!
The wATw Podcast: An Interview with Jon Pennington [52:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (520)
cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Jon Pennington 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
About the author
Barbara Lindsey
Barbara Lindsey currently serves as director of the Multimedia Language Center at the University of Connecticut. She has given numerous presentations and workshops on Internet-based language instruction at the state and national level. Barbara has twelve years experience teaching German language at the university level, and for the private business sector as well as after school enrichment programs. She has served as project director on three federally funded grants and is a past president of the Connecticut Council of Language Teachers (2004-2006).Comments
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Another terrific site for K12 students to connect is ePals. This global community has about 600,000 teachers in 200 countries and territories, and the students in their classrooms speak more than 130 different languages. It's the largest K12 online community!
ePals is founded on core principles and practices of student safety and data security, and it has TRUSTe certification (like a Good Housekeeping seal for student privacy of data). And best of all, it's free to use the Global Community. Go to http://www.epals.com. You can search on other teacher profiles, but to contact anyone, YOU must have an approved profile.
Another terrific site for K12 students to connect is ePals. This global community has about 600,000 teachers in 200 countries and territories, and the students in their classrooms speak more than 130 different languages. It's the largest K12 online community!
ePals is founded on core principles and practices of student safety and data security, and it has TRUSTe certification (like a Good Housekeeping seal for student privacy of data). And best of all, it's free to use the Global Community. Go to http://www.epals.com. You can search on other teacher profiles, but to contact anyone, YOU must have an approved profile.