Posts
I will begin my first blog post by stating that I am a high school Spanish teacher.
I might use a blog in my classroom to pose questions in English like “Why is taking a world language important?” or “How do you plan to use a world language in your future career?” during Discover Languages Month. This is the type of discussion that Kathy Martin posed to her students in this week’s learning resources. My department did a blog similar to this during this school year and the student responses were surprising and thoughtful.
I could also use a blog as a forum to have students actually communicate in Spanish with each other. I could pose a question in Spanish and require students to post an answer to the question in the target language and respond to others. Using a blog can enhance my content and lessons because it allows students time to prepare their answer so it feels like a safe place for them to use their Spanish and a blog in Spanish may elicit a response from a larger community such as Spanish speakers in our community or around the world.
I can see how blogs may be a good tool to introduce students to the global perspective of learning a language and provide them a real world context to apply what students learn during class. I am open to other ideas or comments on how a blog could be beneficial in my content area! I appreciate any suggestions.
The global perspective of blogging seems a great way to incorporate a blog into your Spanish classroom. I like your idea of opening up a question to your students and having them answer it on your blog.
ReplyDeleteIf you open your blog up to your students to speak Spanish to each other, will you have to approve the blog comments? Will you count the blogging as part of a class grade?
I think that I would definitely have to approve the blog comments before I allowed them to be posted not so much to make sure that they write appropriate comments but so I am sure they are not using online translators. They may even have to write the blog post on paper and then type it out to check for this. I would definitely make a blog post part of my students' grade but students will need computers provided in class to complete the assignment because many of my students do not have computer access in their home. Thank you for your questions. They made me think deeper about how to use blogs effectively in my classroom!
DeleteI think this sounds like a great idea. I know that when I was in high school, we did not use a blog, but we did have to have conversation partners and that was something that could be enhanced with blogging.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the challenges would be to teach them how to use the different characters they use in Spanish. It is possible on a keyboard, but it would be something to go over with the students. I think though this sounds like a great idea!
Dan,
DeleteYou are so right about the accent characters! They are definitely tricky and can trip students up. I will have to spend quite a bit of time showing them how to type those characters confidently before we even start with blogs and wikis. Luckily with Microsoft Office 2010 they made it much easier to do. This may have been something I would have overlooked. Thank you for your suggestion!
Jenny