Tech Vocab for Maintaining TL Use in Distance Classes

Last week I realized that we had a hole in our class vocabulary: tech terms necessary for functions associated with distance learning.  When we are in class together, we don’t need terms like “mute” and “unmute”, but we certainly do in a remote setting, especially one where we are trying to maintain a high level of comprehensible and comprehended TL use.  Since my classes are levels 4 and AP this year, I’m striving to use Spanish for the vast majority of our time together, “saving” English only for when we need it the most.

After input from my Twitter PLN, I’ve made a resource to support students with some high frequency terms.  In addition to sharing this with students in class, I’ll add it to our digital tech notebook for their reference.  You can get a full size copy here.

Update 8/23: The power of the PLN is strong!  Ada Morley (@MmeMORLEY) has made a French edition, which you can access here.

Street Food Latin America

Netflix recently launched a drool-worthy series about food and culture including five Spanish-speaking Latin American countries: Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, and Peru. Though there is debate around whether certain foods highlighted are actually “street foods”, I think the series was fascinating and captivating.

I teamed up with two incredible colleagues–Kara Jacobs (@karacjacobs, ceauthres.com) and Maris Hawkins (@Marishawkins, marishawkins.wordpress.com)–to collaborate, conquer, and create viewing guides and activities to accompany each episode. There are intermediate level resources for each episode that include pre-viewing, during viewing, and post-viewing activities. There are interpretive reading tasks, cultural comparison activities, a touch of geography and much more!  Maris made also viewing guides with more scaffolding for middle school students for the Bolivia and Colombia episodes.  We also included activities to use to compare 2+ episodes to each other.  It’s been a lot of fun and I’m really proud of what we’ve produced! You can see it all for free here.

AP Preguntas Esenciales + Comparaciones Culturales (Structures & Strategies for supporting student success and teacher sanity)

As we are preparing to return to school remotely for at least the first quarter, I’m taking a fresh look at several resources that I use regularly in class to see how they might work in our current environment.  I’ve had students maintain a spreadsheet of topics for the cultural comparison task before, but students either loved it or hated it. As a result, it’s been in the back of my mind to revamp it.  I wanted to keep the positives and address the complaints and reservations that students had about the document.  I also wanted to make stronger connections between the essential questions and the things we are learning in class.  Finally, I wanted something that could be done remotely and still be organized and streamlined.

Enter one of my favorite productivity and design sites: SlidesMania.  SlidesMania offers dozens of free templates for PowerPoint and Google Slides, including interactive slide decks that allow me to edit rather than start from scratch.  It is a total gold mine!  Using one of their templates, I created a digital notebook for AP to bring this whole project together.  You can check it out here.  As always feedback is helpful, especially before I roll it out to classes in a couple weeks.