The National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland held a free virtual conference on July 21-23 with a variety of sessions about 30 minutes in length. The sessions are available on YouTube until August 31, so I have been taking advantage of some amazing PD in my PJs over the past couple weeks. There are still many sessions I want to check out in the coming weeks, but I share my reflections here on a few that I especially enjoyed. (They happen to all be presentations by middle school teachers! Middle school teachers for the win! 😀)
"Let's Talk Tech" by Melissa Sarracino and Hannah Gallagher
Session summary: In this session, the presenters discuss innovative ways for using three different tech tools with their middle school students. They focus on unique ideas for using Padlet, Screencastify, and Flipgrid to engage students and build their language proficiency.
Ideas I love:
- Create a Padlet board for students to share their recent highs, lows, and something they are looking forward to in the target language. Hannah Gallagher calls it "Alto, Bajo, Maracuyá" (High, Low, Passion fruit), which I think is a such a fun title! Students can also include gifs or pictures to enhance their posts.
- Students use Screencastify to record their own videos. I think I have been hesitant to have students record their own videos because it always feels to me like it has to be a major project. However, Hannah and Melissa showed how you can incorporate videos with smaller tasks. For example, students recorded a short video of their screen while they explored the Airbnb website for homes in Costa Rica and answered a set of 8 questions in Spanish about the home.
- Students in 7th grade post a question on Flipgrid for the prompt "Ask an 8th grader a question about next year" and then 8th graders respond. I love the use of authentic audience for this task! Though I work with college students, I wonder if something like this could work for our students moving to the next level in their Spanish courses. Often students have questions about registration and what the next class will be like, so it could be fun to have them hear from their peers!
"Stations in the World Language Classroom Reimagined" by Trudy Anderson
Session summary: I'm a big fan of stations, so I was excited about this session by middle school Spanish teacher Trudy Anderson. She explains the benefits of stations, activities that work well with stations, and how to set up the logistics. She also suggests how to implement stations during remote learning.
Ideas I love:
- Stations are a way to make MAGIC, a concept from Trudy's colleague Jessica Haxhi. M = Movement, A = Authentic Resource, G = Gaming, I = Interaction, C = Challenge
- Extend activities that students do in stations. For example, Trudy had students write questions about an authentic piece of art during one station. Later, students played a Boggle game with the questions in which students took turns reading questions they wrote, and if others students wrote the same question, they crossed it off. The goal is to have a question that others didn't ask.
- For online stations, create a Google Slide for each group with links to the materials for the activity and the time they will spend on each activity (usually approximately 10 minutes).
- For accountability for student work in stations, be sure that students understand the purpose of the activities. Teachers can also choose one of the station activities to grade (perhaps just for completion), but they should not tell students which activity it will be.
"Learning Progressions for the New Now" by Rebecca Blouwolff
Session summary: In this session, ACTFL 2019 Teacher of the Year Rebecca Blouwolff, who teaches middle school French, discusses how to implement ACTFL's Core Practices during remote instruction. She focuses on the first three practices: Facilitate target language comprehensibility, Guide learners through interpreting authentic resources, and Design oral interpersonal communication tasks. Rebecca helps viewers understand how to logically sequence instruction and move from input to output in synchronous and asynchronous modes of instruction.
Ideas I love:
- As a pre-reading activity, students highlight or underline what they understand in the text. This builds confidence and helps students see how much they already know before they get in to the interpretive task that the teacher has designed.
- Provide purpose for interpersonal conversation with presentational follow-up tasks. Rebecca's students interviewed one another about their favorite activities in breakout rooms, then posted about their partner's response on Padlet. The Padlet can serve as a further avenue for discussion about students' responses.
- Provide "repetition that's not repetitious." For example, after students read an authentic text, the teacher writes a paraphrased version of the text that students interact with by filling in missing words or putting the text in order. It provides another way for students to get additional input with the same ideas from the text, but in a fresh way.
- Check comprehension on multiple-choice questions or poll your students on Zoom by having them respond non-verbally with A, B, C, or D in the ASL alphabet. Note: Provide a visual of those letters in the ASL alphabet on the slide so that students know how to respond.
- Scaffold an interpersonal conversation by assigning students roles. Student 1 asks a question, student 2 responds to the question, and student 3 asks a follow-up question. This encourages students to listen and respond appropriately to their peers. Students can switch roles every or every other question.
I'm excited to implement some of these ideas next semester and check out more sessions from the 2020 NFLC Virtual Summit!
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