Fun with the future!

I have been working through future tense, future perfect, and future of probability since the beginning of the semester. I did a number of great things that the students enjoyed, I sent my native-speaking student assistant to work looking for some YouTube videos that I could use to encourage the use of future/future of probability. He found some awesome ones that I thought I would share. First, I showed the students the videos up to just before the climax of the video, paused it and had the students predict or say what would “probably” happen. They loved it and afterward I wished I had more prepared for them, they were so motivated to speak.

Hopefully you find some of these useful!

Voicethread

Voicethread (VT) has been a recent best friend of my classroom.  I absolutely love this site for speaking activities.  There are so many possibilities for its use.  I like to describe Voicethread as Powerpoint on steroids.  Visuals can be pictures or video (the video has to be downloaded onto the computer before VT can use it) which is incredible for vocabulary use.   Once you have uploaded you visuals, I have found a few really awesome ways to get my students talking using VT, here they are:

1) From my teacher page I created a presentation with pictures that contain our chapter vocab.  I also typed a question that appears with each image and then the students record a response to the question. I have also done this without the prompt for older students.

2) I often use VT also for vocabulary reinforcement in form of an assignment. Students log into their own account and create their own. I typically have them select 12-15 vocab words from the list that they don’t think they’ll remember easily (i.e. not cognates or review words). They upload pictures that represent their word and write or record a sentence using that word.

3) I have had students do sports commentaries on athletes, an idea shared with me by @amorocho. The options are endless with projects, but these are what I have done thus far.

Voicethread has a couple of different usage options. A free account is offered that allows you to create 3 VTs. I used it so much last year that I ended up setting aside money in our department budget to purchase ed.voicethread accounts for the other Spanish teacher and I. For a single teacher account it is $60 for 100 accounts. It allows sharing within a class and among the ed.voicethread community so projects could be shared with other classes of other teachers and other schools. The potential is amazing. ed.voicethread offers other great options for schools and districts, check them out!

If you’re a VT user and have other ideas, please share!

Edmodo

Sometime late last winter I found out about Edmodo, a Facebook-like web tool for made for education and the classroom. I have just begun to use it this year and am loving it!  I’ve taken it slow and am primarily using it as a communication tool to reach my students.

Here’s how I use it:

As a teacher I can create classes and with a code my students can enroll.  Once enrolled in the course, they can add their cell phone number for texts, Twitter username, or email address where they receive alerts that I send reminding them of quizzes and tests.  It has been phenomenal to have a way to remind students about assessments and other information.  I don’t personally have to have their cell phone numbers to send them these text alerts which is okay with them and me!

Edmodo has features that could allow a teacher to use it as his or her classroom website with a calendar, grading feature, and message board.  It has a polling feature which is great for a warm-up, students can use the message board for discussion in or out of class, a library to store classroom documents, useful links commonly used in your classroom or homework assignments for example.

I anticipate there are endless uses but for now I plan to stick to using it as a communication piece and wait to find an extra pocket of time to integrate its other features in my classes.  If you’re not using it, I recommend checking it out-it is super easy to use.  If you are already using it and have some great ways that you are using it, please share!!!

Here I go…

I hoped to be blogging for a while by now but it always seemed to fall to the end of my list.  Lesson plans were a bit more pressing!  However, I am here now! Today I presented a number of technologies that I use to colleagues from across the state of Nebraska at the Nebraska International Languages Association‘s annual conference.  I decided this was the perfect spring board to get me started and I am going to be disciplined to share these tools on the web as well.  I look forward to the challenge and the opportunities for reflection and collaboration that I hope will ensue.  My first posts will be a series on web-based tools that I use in my classroom and look forward to hearing your ideas as well!  Look for these links to appear on my page soon.  Enjoy!