Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Latin, Spanish, World Languages
Here is the result of our Flip camera footage taken at last week’s Faculty Development meeting.
Thanks to all of the teachers who were able to participate and share their thoughts. And double thanks to everyone in the department for their valiant efforts to consistently innovate and renovate how they use technology in the language classroom.
Enjoy!
Filed Under Chinese, YuperStars
Mr. Sun and his High School Chinese 1 class made several movie posters last week. They will be up on display in the lab with English translations in the Welcome Area. View a pdf version of the posters here.
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Latin, Spanish, World Languages
The department has continued to discuss what the ideal language classroom would look like. Last Tuesday, we met to brainstorm a few more concrete ideas and then I attempted to bring everyone’s ideas, needs, and requests together into an actual drawing using OmniGraffle. It’s nothing professional and not to scale, but the experience was actually kind of fun. What does language learning heaven look like for teachers at Lab? Click on the image to see a larger version and tell me what you think!
Download the entire World Language Department Outlook here.
Points to guide your viewing are listed below:
Filed Under Chinese
A good time yesterday in the cafeteria!
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Latin, Spanish, World Languages
Yesterday, the World Language Department met (after a rather unproductive but historic Inaugural school day!) for a very productive Faculty Development meeting. See details here. The longest portion of our meeting was devoted to narrowing down everyone’s comments from the master plan survey to a list of our top five priorities. Here’s what we came up with and plan to share with FGM and VDTA:
- Rooms need to be big enough to truly accommodate 23 students. This is especially true than when we are working in groups or rehearsing plays.
- The Lower School needs dedicated rooms for language instruction that are relatively close to lower school students’ homerooms.
- Each language (Spanish, German, French, Latin, Chinese) needs one or more dedicated language classroom with storage space for that language’s visual aids and project materials. Currently, teachers are doing a lot of traveling between departmental storage in UH207, their offices, and their several classrooms across the schools. This arrangement will also allow each language group to decorate the room with appropriate visual materials, which will greatly enhance the learning experience.
- It might be nice if performance and rehearsal spaces were built into the language-themed classrooms and/or the lower school language classrooms.
- Quality classroom spaces need 1. adequate sound proofing (real walls), 2. climate control, 3. technology & A/V in every classroom (unlike UH301, UH219, UH217, Judd 207d), 4. natural light as well as the ability to turn all of the lights off for movies and projecting the computer on the screen, 5. allow for multiple configurations in the same room so teachers don’t lose time setting up the room for different activities (part of the classroom with desks, another part with a rug for stories, and an open space for dancing).
- The department is regularly rehearsing and performing plays. Second only to adequate classroom space, they would like to have a theater at their disposal with adequate A/V equipment and lighting, clip-on microphones, and excellent acoustics for young voices. This space could be reserved and reservations could be worked out between the teachers well in advance to avoid conflict, since most of these plays occur annually. An ideal space would have a seating capacity of at least 60, ideally 100.
- It is really impossible to work with 12 other people in a single room. We can’t eat, talk, or collaboratively work without disturbing the entire group. 2/3 people max in a single office space.
- We’d like to see our offices closer to the language classrooms where we regularly work. This is not always possible, but it would be great if offices for a particular language were somewhere in the vicinity of the dedicated language classroom(s) (i.e. Spanish teachers’ offices are somewhere in the vicinity of the Spanish language-themed classroom(s).
- It would be nice if all of the language faculty offices were in the same vicinity, instead of divided between U-High and Belfield.
- It would be great if the language offices were closer to a photocopier.
- In our dreams, we’d like to see office space with windows and plenty of natural light.
- The department recognizes a real need for spaces where they can meet or retreat to when they need to concentrate (since the office is so busy).
- Spaces for teachers to hold their small (2-5 person) classes or independent studies
- Spaces for teachers to hold parent/teacher conferences
- Spaces for teachers to hold teacher/student conferences
- Spaces for students to collaborate on projects during or outside of class
- Spaces for teachers to go and grade or plan in silence
- At least one dedicated non-classroom space where we can build a foreign language library (think shelves and bamboo plants)
- The department does a lot of in-class cooking. Cooking is a great way to teach culture and interact with language. Currently, the teachers bring their heating elements, pots, and pans from the storage in UH207 to the individual classrooms and cook there from start to finish. There are a variety of solutions to this: create a culinary classroom just for language (and other subject area) use, build small kitchenettes into the dedicated language classrooms (this would be ideal), or at the very least, build a kitchen space next to world language offices, so that there is a safe place for faculty to prepare food. A separate kitchen space and eating area could serve both teachers and classes of 23 if it were big enough, may even double as a departmental meeting room, and could alleviate the lunch-time noise problem, since teachers would have a place to go to eat and discuss work together.
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Latin, Spanish, World Languages
Our community is in the midst of a year-long process working with FGM Architects to design spaces that are even more conducive to learning and teaching. In 2005, the department began jotting down their thoughts about what was needed to improve the learning environment here at lab. You can read some of their thoughts here. During the next three months, return back to this page to see the latest thoughts and ideas coming from the World Language Department.
Filed Under Best Bytes, Chinese, French, German, Latin, Spanish, Tools, World Languages
Yesterday, we had the pleasure of viewing a presentation by a Rosetta Stone representative. He graciously gave the department several days to trial several different languages (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Portguese, Irish, Hebrew, Arabic) and then came yesterday to show us how the online Classroom version works. Here are some of our impressions:
**PROS**
1. Rosetta Stone provides instantaneous feedback about pronunciation and gives students an opportunity to practice over and over again until they get it right. We don’t know of another program that has the feature of analyzing whether your oral communication is actually communicative. This is something that a human being (teacher) can’t do in the classroom in real time. And it’s something that would be costly for families to do with a tutor.
2. The pictures are clear, colorful, and multicultural.
3. Version 3 has a good mix of activities (listening, reading, typing, speaking) that would keep students engaged.
4. No English is used to explain language. It’s instant immersion and theoretically the brain will begin to “think” in the target language, if all you are seeing are visual prompts.
5. Having a Rosetta Stone site license would allow students to branch out into other languages that they are interested in (e.g. Italian), practice their pronunciation for music classes (e.g. French), or simply brush up on languages that they are no longer studying at school.
6. Rosetta Stone is very good for the independent language learner who is less comfortable venturing a guess out loud in the classroom and would prefer to make mistakes and get it right in front of a computer first.
7. The Rosetta Stone manager would allow teachers to create custom lesson paths using pre-existing language activities, tailored to fit the needs of individual students or groups of students within a classroom. There is also an easy way to see how much time students are spending with the software.
**CONS**
1. Teachers cannot upload their own images and sound prompts to create lessons that are more precisely focused on existing vocabulary lists used in our curriculum. This may be a feature in the future (we hope so!), because it would give teachers ultimate control. Even better, I’d like to see *students* creating their own vocabulary sets (like we do in iFlash) and then reviewing them, Rosetta Stone-style, until they have them down pat. There are lists of course content for each of the different languages that can aid teachers in determining how applicable the content might be to their classes.
2. Rosetta Stone does not approach the AP level. It ends with about 3rd year language skills in high school. It would be great if it had more advanced levels, but the company’s first goal is to get all 30 languages upgraded to Version 3 by middle of 2009.
3. Rosetta Stone Version 3 can be repetitive and boring. There is no easy way to jump ahead without knowing exactly what kind of new content you could be missing. The “Adaptive Recall” feature, which is supposed to remember which exercises you had trouble with and bring them back periodically, might be good in theory, but I think most language learners are going to want to see new content at a faster rate rather than constantly reviewing old content.
4. Rosetta Stone does not allow for student interaction either in the classroom or with other classrooms.
5. The speech recognition may not cover enough of a range of variation in pronunciation. Sometimes it does not recognize “correct” pronunciation as correct, and while an adult learner might just shrug their shoulders and move on to the next activity, that could be really frustrating to a student who wants to get it right.
6. There is no direct explanation or even review of grammar points. Students would need to get that support elsewhere, from sites like BBC Languages or teacher websites.
7. The Chinese program sometimes uses pinyin in the place of the original Chinese characters. They should always be used together.
8. The price tag. Rosetta Stone prices their licenses based on total student population, not on actual users. For our school (1700 students or so), the cost per year would be $20,000. This works out to about $10 - 25/student. Not all students would use the software, so all parents would be paying an extra $25 / year for the privilege. The good news is that accounts not being used by students can be used by other members of the Lab Schools community, which would give family members, faculty, and staff a chance to dabble in many different languages on their own time.
To summarize, while the Rosetta Stone approach does have its limitations, we think that having this resource at our disposal would most certainly increase students’ exposure to different languages, would give teachers another way of differentiating instruction, and would mark the Lab Schools as a community that is committed to connecting and communicating with a multilingual, multicultural world. I think the opportunity for students to learn languages on their own would be a terrific preparation for college-level language classes. And it would be a valuable support to students who prefer to learn by themselves and at their own pace.
We’d be most interested to hear from the opinions of our parents about this software. Feel free to leave your comments below.
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Tools, YuperStars
Frau Zemil has been in the lab at least three times so far this year to learn and implement a great piece of software called Apple Remote Desktop (ARD). ARD allows teachers to see the screens of all of the students in the Instructional Area. This is especially useful when you are giving instructions to students, because you can actually see if everyone is following along okay with your directives.
Frau Zemil has used the tool to open up web pages on the students’ desktops, send Word documents with instructions for the day, and most importantly, to log third and fourth graders into DiLL (since they don’t have their own LabNet IDs). We are finding this tool to be a great time saver, since we can have the lab set up and ready to go *before* fourth graders enter the lab. All they have to do is sit down and everything that they need for the day’s lesson is opened up and ready to go.
Kudos to Frau Zemil, Mme Collet, Mme Romanelli, Mme Jackson, and others in the department for learning this great tool.
Here is the Remote Desktop Cheat Sheet I’ve been using to train.
Filed Under Best Bytes, Chinese, French, German, Latin, Spanish, Tools, World Languages
At this year’s TechWeek, 10 new faculty signed up for a UCLS WordPress blog. Blogging is new to most of the faculty in this department, so we’ll see how often they end up using them to post homework assignments. Blogs can be a great tool for one- and two-way communication in the language classroom. This is a good start.
World Language Department Blogs
Grace Romanelli - French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/bloger
Deb Foote - Spanish
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/pieblog
Suzanne Baum - French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/sbaumfr
Suzanne Baum - Spanish
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/sbaum
Jon Sun - Chinese
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/greenpanda
Steve Farver - French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/sfarver
Catherine Collet - French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/colletblog
Diane Jackson - French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/djackso
Xing-lu Liang - Chinese
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/chineseclass
Ann Beck - Spanish & French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/beckblog
Laura Salas-Damer - Spanish
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/estoy
Craig Reubelt
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/ser
Mythili Venkataraman
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/bb
Angelica Guerrero
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/smg
Annette Steinbarth
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/midsv
Marianne Zemil
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/apgerman
French Trip
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/frenchtrip
Filed Under Best Bytes, Chinese
Ms. Liang recommends the following websites for learning Chinese:
http://www.languageguide.org (theme words with pictures, Chinese characters, pinyin, & audio)
http://www.nciku.com (Featuring real-life situations with dialogues)
http://chinese.hm68.com (Highlighting culture, history, poems, myths, games, and more)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/games (Learn how to write 60 basic Chinese characters)
http://www.minmm.com/minc/classes.php (English translations included)
http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/online.htm (An index for all the Chinese learning websites out there. Get lost!)
Filed Under Chinese, YuperStars
Ms. Liang brought her 5th and 4th graders into the lab this week to learn the words to the Beijing Olympic theme song. See a short video of the kids’ singing/plaintive howling here. Both classes had a lot of fun with the activity and I understand that they will memorize the words and perform this song during Language Day next spring. Kudos to Ms. Liang for using the iWeb activity page she created during TechWeek and being the first teacher to bring her class to the lab this year!
Ms. Liang is *also* the first teacher to learn how to use Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) to log fourth graders on to their computers, log them in to DiLL, and copy a webpage to all of the workstations in the Instructional Area. Remote Desktop, which was installed on the Teacher’s Station over the summer, allows a teacher to observe each of the student’s desktops from their station at the head of the room.
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Latin, Spanish, World Languages, YuperStars
SO. A short time to reflect as we begin a new school year.
This department, the World Language Department at the Laboratory Schools, is really a special group of people. It was incredible to see everybody working together, helping each other, and really staying on task during our Professional Development week. I am blessed to work with generous, creative, upbeat, and dedicated teachers. I enjoyed their companionship and sharing the same space with them as much as I did watching them improve their tech integration skills.
I set a goal last January for the lab to reach 30 reservations per week. We exceeded that goal. For this coming school year, I think we’ll see a natural increase to at least 35 reservations per week. But what I’m hoping for more is to see teachers trying out new things in the classroom, learning from their experiences, and sharing them on a monthly basis at our eight departmental meetings. That will be my new measure of success, now that we are all starting to use the lab on a regular basis.
This year, I’d like to see 40 Yuperstar posts on this blog. That’s a fairly ambitious goal, since there are only 37 weeks in the year. But I think we can do it. 40 documented occasions where teachers have tried something new in the classroom involving technology in one way or another. We’ll still track tech learning activities here and
here, but I think that the most important indicator of our success will be the number of times students leave the lab or their classrooms saying to their teacher, “that was a really interesting class period”, “that was something different”, and “I really learned something today.”
Filed Under Best Bytes, Chinese
Word is that this is a good Chinese to English dictionary. Our two Chinese faculty have agreed to make a list of their favorite Chinese language web resources, so more along these lines very soon…
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Spanish, World Languages, YuperStars
Today was slated as an open workday for teachers to finish up the Lesson Plans they had started during the week. We continued to set people up with blogs, work out the kinks in iWeb, and filled out a Summary&Feedback form (in Pages ‘08) to help us improve future technology training.
At 1pm we had an optional training session in the afternoon for teachers interested in getting a WordPress blog set up. To my delight, we had 10 teachers listen in on the training (done via DiLL so that other teachers could continue working at their workstations), and by the end of the day, almost all of them had configured the basic settings on their blog and written a few sample posts. For some teachers, iWeb was intuitive and easy; for others, the blog solution seemed much simpler.
Pretty much everybody in the department is now signed up with their own personalized blog for posting homework. It will be interesting to see how this pans out during the school year and what the students think about the new trend.
Teachers spent the day completing lesson plans they had started during Days 1-4. (See the Summer2008 page on our wiki for sample work.)
All-in-all, this week was a great success. Teachers in the department got to know each other better as they worked toward a common goal. There were a lot of “firsts” this week: “my first Keynote presentation”, “my first website”, “my first blog”, “my first iMovie”. That was very gratifying to hear! I commend the teachers for being willing to pay the price and devote the time necessary to really dig into these technologies. We are poised for a great year as we continue to innovate with new applications of technology in the classroom and report on our findings at our monthly Faculty Development meetings.
Thanks to the Laboratory Schools’ Professional Development committee for providing this much-needed opportunity for our department. We all hope to see more of this kind of training for teachers across the Schools in coming years.
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Spanish, World Languages, YuperStars
Today, we began with an intense introduction to the features in iWeb. This software was by far the most difficult to learn for many of the teachers. We drilled down into more of the features available in the Inspector, which will help everyone as they continue to work with iLife and iWork applications throughout the year. But it was a tough day. My lesson plan (an online treasure hunt) was too complicated, but teachers overlooked that and went on to design some simple and effective iWeb activity pages of their own. (See the Summer2008 page on our wiki for sample work.)
The A/C came back on yesterday, so today was a little easier on our bodies. Good thing, because everyone’s brains were on overdrive!
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Spanish, World Languages, YuperStars
Today, we began with a simple lesson plan that had teachers working with the built-in iSight cameras on their iMacs or our new Flip Cameras to create a simple movie in iMovie ‘08. Some of the finished products were really funny and enjoyable. (See the Summer2008 page on our wiki for sample work.)
Everyone paired off and worked on lesson plans until Lunch. At 1pm we met again to cover additional topics of interest, like GoogleEarth, Google Maps, VoiceThread, and PulpMotion. At 3pm, we met in the cool MS276 classroom to share our movies and discuss how these projects could be implemented in the classroom.
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Spanish, World Languages, YuperStars
We began with a simple lesson plan that had teachers creating five simple slides in Keynote about any topic of interest using Creative Commons images from flickr.com (download the Five Slide Podcast activity at our wiki). Then we exported them to QuickTime (7.4.5!) and created movies that could be posted online or distributed as Podcasts.
Everyone paired off and worked on lesson plans until Lunch. At 1pm we met again to cover additional topics of interest, like how to use iFlash decks to practice vocabulary, how to access Visual Thesaurus, and some of the changes in Max OS 10.5 (Leopard). Many of the teachers had their old PowerBook G4s swapped out for the newer Intel MacBooks. At 3pm, we met in the A/C Middle School to share our movies and discuss how these projects could be implemented in the classroom.
Everything was saved to the Projects server for future reference.
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Spanish, World Languages
Today, we began with a simple activity that involved individual and group participation. See the Summer2008 page on our wiki for the sample lesson plan “Five Sentences in DiLL”. After going through the lesson together and reviewing how to use the new DiLL Lab Controller (the application for teachers), we discussed variations on the suggested Lesson Plan and how to use the random grouping feature. I handed out the ProjectPlanning worksheet to help teachers focus their energy on gathering together the essential pieces for a successful new lesson plan involving technology. The goal was, by the end of the week, to have have four new lesson plan ideas mostly ready to go, from start to finish.
During the morning session, we practiced connecting to the Projects file server, made annotations on the departmental Wiki, and documented our tech activities on the “Dashboard” (a tool we’ll be using this coming year to track tech learning activities and success in the classroom). I also started showing features of Remote Desktop, which I continued to highlight throughout the week, so that teachers could at least be familiar with what is possible.
The 20 teachers paired off and worked on lesson plans until Lunch. At 1pm we met again to cover additional topics of interest, like how to make a simple recording in Garage Band, export as a mp3 and then upload to DiLL using the DiLL Catalog Manager. At 1:30, teachers worked on finishing their projects and at 3:00 we met to discuss what each individual or pair had come up with. Everybody had interesting ideas and now they are all saved to our Projects server so we can access them throughout the year!
We emphasized that teachers should always consult the author of a Lesson Plan before using it, so that we don’t accidently do an activity in one grade or level that is slated for the next grade or level. Transfer of lesson plan ideas between languages is less problematic.
This week we were without A/C, but the teachers were cool-headed about it and we survived!
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Spanish, World Languages
Lots of students taking AP tests this week. Thanks to passersby for using their quiet voices. =)
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Spanish
AP Tests are coming up. They will be administered in the World Language Lab (UH207) at these times:
French Language: May 5, 12 PM - 4 PM
Spanish Language: May 6, 8 AM - 12 NOON
Chinese Language: May 7, 12 PM - 4 PM (Off-site)
Italian Language: May 14, 8 AM - 12 NOON
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German Literature: May 8, 8 AM - 12 PM
French Literature: May 8, 12 PM - 4 PM
Spanish Literature: May 16, 8 AM - 12 PM
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The National Spanish Exam and The National French Contest have also been in the works here in the Lab…
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