Archive for the ‘Latin’ Category
Filed Under German, World Languages, Latin, Chinese, Spanish, French, 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 think 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 World Languages, Latin
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).
QT movie of iFlash
iFlash is a great tool for memorizing anything. The students have fun building these decks. I highly recommend it for nailing those verb conjugations. =)
Filed Under Latin, Spanish
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:
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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, 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.
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IFLASH PROJECT 2008
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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 Latin, Best Bytes
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 German, Latin, French, Spanish, Best Bytes
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.
