Archive for the ‘French’ Category
Filed Under French, Photos
Mme. Collet’s students have spent time working together in the lab to make short presentations about French society and culture.
Collecting visual materials from the internet and writing short descriptions about what they found, student groups worked for several classes to create their presentations in Keynote. They finished the process by recording a narration of the contents . Students shared their presentations with each other in class later.
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Students working on Keynote presentations
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Mme Collet consults with students about their presentation
Filed Under French, Photos, Spanish
Welcome the World Language Lab’s 2009-2010 school year! We’ve had plenty of changes to mark the new year, not the least a new lab coordinator (me, Colin Warren)…
As the new lab coordinator, I’m pleased to announce the lab is up to date with the latest version of DiLL and many other software packages and we have new headsets throughout the lab. We will also be available for reservation during all periods of the day, starting this week. Please check the schedule (easily available through the Yuperstar blog page) and sign up when available.
If you have any questions about using the lab or our software, please feel free to sign up for an appointment, or send an email to me (cvwarren@ucls.uchicago.edu).
We’ve already had several classes in the lab, and are looking forward to watching everyone learn!
Mme. Schneider presenting to her French class
Sra. Hundley working on reflexive verbs
- Colin
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 French, YuperStars
Mr. Farver is the first teacher in our department to use EtherPad in the classroom. He checked out the iCarts and had students tell stories about an alien in the imperfect and perfect paste tenses. You can see the end result here, warts ‘n all:
The students started out by goofing around with the tool for about 10 minutes. Teachers should probably expect that there will be some playing around with a new tool. I know that with DiLL, classes have to come into the lab and use it three or four times before the novelty of hearing their voices in the microphone wears off and they are ready to get to work.
Other suggestions that came out of this morning’s experiment:
1) Start with individuals, partners, or small groups working on their own pads in a highly structured way (i.e. correcting each other’s work, or an error-ridden article provided by the teacher) BEFORE giving them a “free-for-all” impromptu writing exercise as a whole class. Too much freedom with too many users on a new tool may approach chaos.
2) Teach students that if they have questions about how to spell or express themselves, that they should use the chat window on the right hand side.
3) Once you have structured your EtherPad “handout” with questions or sections separated with asterisks and lots of line breaks (white space) to make it easy on the eyes, be sure to click the “Save Now” button to create a version that you can restore if you ever need to. Then regularly save versions while students are working in case a student accidentally deletes all of the text. Newer versions of EtherPad will have a “rewind” feature that should help with this.
4) A suggestion for the developers. After students have left the page, there is no way to tell who wrote what. Color coding isn’t reliable because there will never be enough colors for everyone. Once I have identified myself, however, it would be nice if the letters I type are associated somehow with the last name I entered on the top right. Then I can mouse over any character and see who the editor was. This will also improve individual accountability.
Mr. Farver did report, however, that once students got used to the tool, the room got very quiet and everyone was very focused on the task at hand. So the potential is definitely there; it will just take some getting used to!
Bravo, Mr. Farver for trying out this brand new technology!
Filed Under French, World Languages, YuperStars
Watch excerpts from the Skype video conference call between Mme. Romanelli’s 8th grade French class and their sister classroom in France. You will see the technical and practical difficulties of 13 students here connecting with 27 students there, but you will also see what an eye-opening experience it is for students to practice their language skills with native speakers. A lot of laughter too, which is always good.
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:
Performance Corners, carpeted in a different color in the corners of each of the outer 4 Performance/Kitchen classrooms are the same level as the floor and demarcate a place to read, tell stories, rehearse plays, and play games (“C”). Spotlights overhead create a stage-like atmosphere.
Speakers installed on the wall with a 3-input amplifier make it easy to hear students when parents come to see plays and presentations.
Lockable and mobile storage cabinets are available in each of the classrooms (“S”) for the teachers in that share the room. Mobile storage in the classrooms by itself would not be enough, however. There would need to be additional space for teachers to store curricular materials.
Adequate storage space for teacher materials exist between each set of faculty offices (“S” on salmon color). These storage closets include sturdy shelving and a place to hang costumes, coats, and other materials used in class.
Adequate storage space for rolling carts, A/V materials, office supplies, peripherals for check out, the document camera, the laminating machine, and other resources shared across the department (“A/V”).
Isolated studio for recording DiLL clips and interviewing other students on video without background noise. Audio and video editing stations (“Studio”).
Office space for Lab Coordinator with an indoor window view of the WLL. Table just outside for one-on-one consultations with teachers (“Tech”).
Overhead projectors and speakers in every classroom and two in the World Language Lab for more sophisticated presentations (“P”). Wireless technology would allow the presenter can be anywhere in the room controlling projected visuals.
Two bathrooms (“B”) and one drinking fountain (“D”).
Kitchen for faculty to store their lunches, prepare food and to support small community events (“Kitchen”). If this kitchen were shared with another department, it might also house a photocopier.
Office spaces large enough to accommodate two to three faculty (“2-3”). Each office would have its own black and white printer. One color printer would live in the Kitchen and the other in the WLL.
Teachers would save money and enjoy the office spaces even more if the ceiling had access to natural light.
Large conference rooms with capacity for 8 people (“8”). Conference rooms would be a shared resource across the Schools and might include a flat screen monitor for collaboratively discussing information on one individual’s screen, or for viewing satellite TV (The Graduate School of Business has excellent examples of these types of spaces on the lower level).
Mini conference rooms large enough for 4 people (“4”). Ideal for the numerous parent-teacher conferences that occur throughout the year or for Independent Studies.
Study “booths” would be ideal for working on laptop, working in groups, individual study, and socializing (“5”).
Gathering places with soft seating ideal for informal socializing and discussion-based learning with smaller classes (“6”).
Round tables for students to talk with teachers, take Independent Study courses, or socialize (“3”).
Natural light overhead. Floor underneath these tables (on either side of the WLL) should be carpeted to keep conversation at a moderate level. These spaces create ample opportunities for teachers to interact with students.
Lockable glass display cases or bookcases with glass doors near the round tables (“3”) for displaying objects, artwork, student projects, and language books. Hallways also give ample space for bulletin boards to display work.
Desktop computers in World Language Lab and in Tech Focus classrooms (Maroon dots).
Small kitchenettes in the four outer Performance/Kitchen classrooms with half-size fridge, ample cabinet storage, and counter space for preparing food (“K”). Medium-high counters could be designed with bar stools.
One desk per classroom, relatively easy to move, for teachers to set out props and supplies for the incoming class (“T” on yellow).
Twenty individual desks with breaking wheels, or that are relatively easy to move on floor surface (blue rectangles). Each desk would be accompanied a durable, stackable chair (not shown).
Closet in World Language Lab (“WLL”) for server (“X”).
Indoor windows (floor to ceiling when possible) allow visitors to peak into classrooms or World
Language Lab without disturbing class or obstructing flow of traffic in the outer hallways. Windows are also bring in natural light coming from outer hallways (“W”).
World Language Lab (“WLL”) doubles as a conference room and meeting room for the entire department. 3-Desk configuration in the middle is relatively mobile and can be pushed to the front of the room against the wall and under the projector screens. Additional seating can be brought in for a maximum occupancy of 60.
Most of the larger rooms have two entrances both for safety and ease of entrance/exit. Neither entrance will disturb performances in progress in the Performance Corners.
Spaces are multipurpose. If the Schools should decide to reconfigure or rent out any of the classrooms, conference rooms, or the Lab, they would be readily usable for other purposes (i.e. conferences, small group work, faculty, staff, and committee meetings, or small gatherings requiring a kitchen).
Where there isn’t a window (marked with a bold line and a “W”), there are tall white magnetic boards, cork strips, bare wall, or bulletin boards permanently installed and suitable for hanging visual laminated images, tag board presentations, and large posters.
Tech-focused rooms feature flat screen TVs for viewing movies in smaller groups and accessing satellite TV (“TV”).
If the WLD Hub was positioned adjacent to Early Education classrooms, it would address the need of Lower School teachers to be closer to Lower School homerooms. Middle and High School students would not mind walking to another building for their language class. Depending on the layout, perhaps this area could be situated in a place equally accessible by students en each of the three Schools. This is particularly critical with Lower School classes, since the short 25-minute sessions are regularly shortened by long transit times between homerooms and classrooms.
The department has not discussed the flooring. For ease of cleaning, I might think about some kind of laminate or tile flooring for everywhere except the performance corners (“C”) and the round table gathering area (“3”).
Sturdy and portable whiteboards with breaking wheels, about 3 feet wide are ideal for bring written instruction to wherever students are working or are seated, instead of having to move students to where they can see a permanently installed whiteboard. These portable surfaces can also be used by students to show what they know.
Filed Under French, Spanish, YuperStars
Yesterday in our Faculty Development meeting, we heard from three of our faculty about activities they have done with DiLL that have kept their students engaged and having fun.
The abridged version of their activities go something like this:
1. Teacher pre-records 1-4 simple stories and ask students to illustrate what they are hearing in Keynote, a way to check comprehension.
2. Teacher hands out scenario prompts to students, based on vocab and language structures they have been studying. They have 2 minutes to plan out a dialogue with a randomly-selected partner and then 2 minutes to record. Mr. Reubelt then broadcasts student recordings to the rest of the class.
3. Teacher hands out different fairy tales that they students must write up as a play. They submit the play for corrections, make corrections. Then students rehearse the play during class time and then, instead of performing for each other live, they all record at once in DiLL. The final recordings are downloaded and saved on a CD for the students to enjoy.
Filed Under French, Tools, YuperStars
ARD is not the easiest tool to learn, but teachers are motivated by the fact that they can monitor what is happening on all of their students’ screens. Mme. Collet has been using this tool of late to log her 3rd graders in when they come to the lab, both on the computer and on DiLL. This is a screen shot of her students working on Keynote presentations. Click to expand.
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:
1. Classroom Spaces
- 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).
2. Performance Spaces
- 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.
3. Office Spaces
- 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.
4. Meeting Spaces
- 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)
5. Kitchen Spaces
- 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 French
Some great pictures from the visit of St. Nicolas. I think a couple of seniors were covering for St Nick!
Filed Under Best Bytes, French, YuperStars
Design by Brienne Ellis and Layla Ehsan
Ms. Ann Beck and her French 4 class have been looking at the economic challenges that Haitians face and thinking about how they can help. Between now and December 19th, they’ve decided to raise seed money to buy t-shirts. Then they will stencil original designs on the t-shirts and sell them to community members in and outside of Lab for $12 each. All proceeds will go to an Haitian NGO that one of our Lab parents is involved in. They’ll be stenciling the shirts the last week of classes. If you would like to donate money to help students purchase the t-shirts and other materials, please contact Ann Beck directly (abeck@ucls.uchicago.edu).
Filed Under French, YuperStars
Mme Jackson is working on two cool iMovie projects.
Her 8th graders are putting together intro movies for their friends at the Lycée André Malraux in France. All of the footage was captured on Flip cameras in the classroom and then copied on to each of the mac Minis in the Project Area. Students are using their basic french vocabulary to introduce themselves, talk about their likes and dislikes, and their daily routines.
Her 7th graders are creating movies based on the French makeover TV series, Change de Look. Students take on the role of a fashion expert, a fashion disaster, and a narrator. Each of the four groups are writing scripts and then filming with clothing props and (hopefully) adding effects to the final video. Download rubric and assignment here.
Look forward to seeing the final products!
Filed Under French, YuperStars
Check out this movie that Ms. Romanelli made with her 8th grade French students. Students introduce themselves to their French friends and show clips of the Halloween festivities.
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 French, YuperStars
Mme Collet did a fun activity last week with DiLL. She gave her students a visual prompt:
and then recorded questions for the students to respond to (i.e. Audio prompt: No. 1. Is her hair brown? Response: No, her hair is not brown. It’s blond). Yet another fun application of DiLL that her students really enjoyed (especially the pictures of Madonna’s changing hair color!)
Filed Under French, YuperStars
We welcome Mme Romanelli to the World Language Department this year, who is filling in for Mme Schneider while she takes a year off. [Mme Schneider, by the way, is posting her reflections and some of her writing on a WordPress blog that she set up this past summer. Take a look!]
Mme Romanelli showed no hesitation in signing up for the lab the second week of school and bringing her 8th grade class to do three activities in DiLL. This is really wonderful and shows a lot of courage on her part, since she just barely learned about DiLL three weeks ago!
First, she had the class do a “pre-assigned task” that she had recorded in Garage Band and uploaded to the DiLL catalog. Students responded to her audio questions and their responses were recorded to the server for later review.
Then she enabled the new Self-Grouping feature in DiLL, so that when students were finished with their assignment, they could make themselves “Available” (just like we do with Instant Messaging) and be automatically paired to other students who were also “Available”. This way the students who had completed the task on their own could practice it in pairs.
Finally, she posted scenarios on the projected screen and asked students to create their own dialogs in pairs. She randomly paired the class four or five different times so that they could work with different partners for each scenario.
Bravo, Mme Romanelli, for plunging right in this year!
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
