http://sites.google.com/site/uclsartsfest2009/

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.

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!)

Maestra Guerrero’s 6th graders were in the Instructional Area that same hour to do a fun Yabla activity!

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!

Bravo, Mme Romanelli, for plunging right in this year!

Practice in French, German, Spanish, or Italian.

You can do the same thing in other subject areas. There are 10 levels of difficulty.

Not a bad strategy for broadening world consciousness, eh?

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

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!)

I’m also impressed by a Japanese start-up, iKnow, that has creating an online language learning community. ReadWriteWeb reviews it here.

I’ve only just taken a quick look, but here are some of the things you can do:

1. Share YouTube videos in target language (songs with lyrics, for example) with separate tabs for listing the key vocabulary words and a forum for posting colloquial phrases you’re apt to hear in pop songs. Community members can contribute translations for difficult sentences, much like the highly popular translation site, ProZ.

2. Pick a course (i.e. Advanced SAT vocabulary) and drill vocab with flash cards, dictation (typing based on visual and aural cues), and my favorite of all, a speed-recognition game called BrainSpeed, that allows you to test your knowledge and speed reading skills.

3. Compatible with mobile devices, although I haven’t seen what this actually looks like yet.

4. Open API means developers and teachers will be able to use the framework to create new courses (in languages other than English and Japanese), to which users will be able to add content.

5. ADAPTIVE. iKnow “knows” when you have learned a vocab word well enough. It also knows how to reintroduce it into your daily schedule time. Based on how quickly you learn new content, it uses algorithms to determine when you should be forced “out of the blue” to remember it. It’s in the remembering of facts that we commit them to memory, so theoretically, if you were to do this a little each day, you would really master the building blocks of a language.

Sites like iKnow could potentially put more responsibility on independent learners to do the nitty-gritty drilling stuff at home,
freeing up class time for more interesting and complex input and output activities.

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.

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.”

(Excerpt from ICE Cube, Volume 2008, Issue 3)

What does this mean to language learners? It means that increasingly Lab students will be required to read and write in second and third languages if they intend to interface with other nations and cultures. Communities and countries that never had streamlined access to brick and mortar publishing houses will be carefully cultivating their web presence to connect with other communities around the world and create new [income-producing] opportunities. We will miss out on all kinds of opportunities if we don’t know how to read and write in their language. Intercultural web communications (how people of different cultures interact online) will be a big field of study in coming decades, I’m sure.

After two hours of trial and error and reading every post I could find on the topic, I arrived at the magic combination. No, you can’t do just one or two of these items to get this fixed; you must do them all! Hopefully this will help other iMac users out there running Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard).

Step 1. REMOVE “com.apple.iWork.Keynote.plist” from User/Library/Preferences. If you have never opened Keynote before, open it and then delete the first preference file it creates.

Step 2. DOWNLOAD Pacifist at this link, install, and drag to your Applications Folder.

Step 3. DOWNLOAD QuickTime 7.4.5 (yes, you’re going to have to downgrade until Apple comes up with some kind of a patch). When the Installer opens, quit it and drag the .pkg over the Pacifist Application.

Step 4. Click on the lock on the top right corner of Pacifist and Authenticate. Click on the top row of the QuickTime package summary to select it and then click the “Install” button on the top left corner.

Step 5. Twice, Pacifist will ask you if you want to Replace certain items. Select the check box for all future items and click the “Replace” button.

Step 6. LOG OUT and log back in. Open a Keynote file and you should now be able to export video and audio to QT without any problems.

I’m a big Apple champion, but stuff like this, wow. Tries my patience.

p.s. Oh, and another discovery: iMovie ‘08 will *only* work with QT 7.5, according to an error I get on some of the lab machines. Others seem to be working fine with 7.4.5.. so we’ll just have to see…

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.

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!

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.