I'm looking very forward to our project dealing with the tsunami in Japan, and feeling very grateful that we will have the opportunity to work with all these librarians. I'm already trying to think of ways that this topic could be used in a world language classroom; it doesn't seem like the most obvious framework for dealing with this topic but I'm willing to admit to a (hopefully temporary) lack of imagination.
Somewhat relatedly, I watched the TED talk with Dan Meyer that Antonia (or Kristen?) linked to on Twitter and I found it really compelling. To a large extent, I think what he has to say resonates across subject lines. I kept thinking about, for instance, prescriptive grammar rules like math formulas. We can teach children foreign languages by just giving them the "formulas" and giving them texts to plug in those formulas. Or we can make them think about those rules and what they mean and why they mean that and really work to figure out how to apply them. I'm excited to develop ideas over the next year of how technology can be part of that process of me learning to engage my students in genuine learning.
I'm also curious about how to fit the tsunami exercise into a world language context. In a way we might have more freedom than others (even though our students will be inhibited by vocabulary). During the 2008 election I compared German newspapers' headlines as a way to compare their relative political leanings. I can see using current events to teach students that not all sources from the target country are equal.
ReplyDeleteGood call! The two ideas I had were teaching kids to find newspapers and other online resources in Spanish (or whatever the language) to find out how their newspapers covered the tsunami or to find out how the governments of whatever country (in your case Germany or Austria or whatever, in my case, god, take your pick) responded to the disaster. I also thought about places like Peru where this is a large Japanese population to see if there was any kind of angle there to investigate (obviously this is a pretty half-formed idea) but, yeah, I like your idea!
ReplyDeleteSounds like you two are ready for tomorrow! Here's another thought - world language teachers don't just teach language. They teach CULTURE ... how might that help form connections? (This is a no-obligation blog comment. You can also ignore me.)
ReplyDeleteTry one-minute Twitter .. like you'll check it for one minute before leaving the house, stay after class one minute, etc. See if it works.
I was also worried that because Twitter can do SO much, I wouldn't know where to start, so I would just give up before really even trying. I finally jumped on the Twitter Train today during the tsunami project when I found a couple of really cool Latin networks to follow. They don't require a lot of activity on my part, but I can already see how they will help me when teaching What I've decided to do is just follow these for now so I don't get overwhelmed by everything else. I can always add more later. I'd encourage you to maybe find a couple of really good Spanish networks and follow those.
ReplyDelete