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 Latin
Ms. Spaltro and her HS Latin classes will be reenacting and filming the Ides of March again this Friday in the High School lobby, one at 8:55 AM and the other at 12:30 PM. I assume that Mr. Horvat and Mr. MacFarland will be stepping in again for Caesar…. Not to be missed!
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, 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 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 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 Latin, World Languages
Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) improved its speech synthesis with a new voice named ALEX. A decisive improvement over KATHY, BRUCE, and FRED, ALEX even recognizes commas and pauses accordingly.
Take Shakespeare’s sonnet, for example:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
===
Can you read my comma, thank you.
Can you read my question mark?
Can you read my question, Mark?
Can you read my question mark
Here’s Alex’s interpretation.
[Right click to open in new tab, Safari won't truncate the file.]
Now add to that, an iFlash deck that Ms. Spaltro compiled from her Latin classes. Here’s a movie of iFlash in action, changing card sides every 4 seconds or so. Only I checked a box in preferences that has ALEX reading words that students hadn’t recorded. See if you can tell the difference between ALEX and the humans (hint: ALEX sort of messes up the Latin pronunciation).
iFlash is a great tool for memorizing anything. The students have fun building these decks. I highly recommend it for nailing those verb conjugations. =)
This is what the lab looks like when we have 3 classes working in the Training, Project, and Instructional Areas simultaneously. See Mr. Reubelt’s Spanish Class, Ms. Pelliteri’s Latin Class, and Ms. Spaltro’s Latin Class busy at work/play/ish.
And here’s a copy of the activity that Mr. Reubelt was doing with his 7th graders on DiLL that day:
=========================
SITUACIONES: Ejercicios en laboratorio
=========================
You will be matched with random partners for each of the following situations. You and your partner will have 2-3 minutes to discuss what you will each say in your dialogue. Then, when you hear the signal, both of you should begin recording the dialogue. You will have 2-3 minutes to record each dialogue.
These are the situations for which you will create dialogues:
1. It’s the last day of school and you are talking with a friend about what each of you are going to do over the summer. (Remember to use voy a + infinitivo when discussing
future plans!) Use as many verbs as you can and be creative.
2. One of you is a famous actor and is being interviewed on television. The interviewer
will ask you about yourself, your family, friends, etc. Ask as many questions
as you can using the question words (qué, dónde, adónde, cómo, cuándo, etc.). Also
try to use as many adjectives as you can to describe people and things.
3. It’s the first day of classes and you are at a new school–in Oaxaca, México! You
make a new friend and he/she asks you about your life in the US and your school. Try
to use as many school-related words as you can, as well as gustar to describe what you
like or don’t like.
Filed Under Latin
A new feature has been added to the Latin class videos. View them both and vote for your favorite Caesar!
Filed Under Latin, YuperStars
Ms. Pelliteri has been working with with two of her Latin 3/4 classes on iFlash decks. Thanks to Ms. Spaltro for training Ms. Pelliteri. It’s a pretty sweet day when a teacher walks in here all ready to go with something new!
Filed Under Latin, World Languages
I have a Latin I rendition. Latin II forthcoming…
Filed Under Latin, YuperStars
Ms. Spaltro had her Latin class into the lab for the first time yesterday to do an iFlash project. I was really pleased to see her incorporating a lot of the things we had talked about prior to class, like using images from the Creative Commons. [Search 'creative commons' on this site to learn more about what it is.] Ms. Spaltro gave each student and separate vocab list to input with audio and images, with the original intent that we would combine everyone’s decks into one large mega deck at the end. But we learned that each student had their own way of designing their deck of cards (with a different number of card sides, for example) to better reflect the way that they studied. So, she’s decided to let them all create decks their own way and not worry about continuity for now. The same class will return today to review each other’s decks in a common file area and talk about the different ways of building decks of verbs, adjectives, nouns, etc.
I especially want to highlight Ms. Spaltro because she confessed after class that she was a little nervous going into this. She’d never taught iFlash before nor had she used the lab. So this was a double first and I’m very proud of her for taking the plunge!
The following is text from the worksheet Ms. Spaltro’s classes used to evaluate the iFlash decks.
==============
IFLASH PROJECT 2008
==============
I expect each review to be professional, thoughtful, kind, and constructive. Your review sheets are due on Tuesday, June 10 for Latin I and Monday, June 9 for Latin II.
1. Your Name:
2. iFlash Deck(s) for Stage #____ (note: there may be several decks for one stage, so you must review them all).
3. # cards in the Stage (include all sub-decks)_____
4. Rate this iFlash deck in the categories below, using a scale of 1 to 5, five being the highest and 1 being the lowest.
A. Correctness of forms
B. Thouroughness
C. Audio/pronunciation
D. Visuals
E. Overall functionality usefulness
F. Overall creativity and originality
G. Overall enjoyability factor
5. Please comment thoughtfully on the strengths of this particular deck:
6. What suggestions do you have for making this deck more enjoyable or effective to use for future students?
Filed Under Latin, Photos, YuperStars
I’ve been hoping students and teachers would take advantage of all the cool iLife ‘08 technology we have here in the Project Area. Today, four of Ms. Spaltro’s Latin class students came up to edit footage from the assassinations of Ceasar before break. I can’t wait to see the results!
Filed Under Best Bytes, Latin
Ms. Spaltro’s Latin classes reenacted the assassination of Julius Ceasar today, with Mr. Horvat and Mr. McFarlane serving as Ceasars of the day. The students will be editing all of the footage next week, but for a sneak preview of the AM enactment, watch this.
Filed Under Best Bytes, French, German, Latin, Spanish
Ahh, the glory days of verb conjugation. Yesterday, Sra. Salas-Damer showed me a pan of brownies that one of her classes gifted to her as an apology for not turning their homework in the day before. Instead of writing “lo sentimos” [we're sorry], they wrote in pink frosting “Nos sentamos” [we're sitting down].
Speaking of verb conjugation, I found a great little site, which allows students to practice conjugations in Spanish, German, French, and Latin until they are blue in the face. No, I’m not sorry that you have to practice your conjugations. I’m sitting down.
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