[ola] Re: Kahoot...
- From: Amanda Miller <AMiller@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "ola@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <ola@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2014 18:55:36 +0000
If you haven't already, I highly recommend Arnold Bleicher's ACTFL webinar
about moving students from Novice to Intermediate for everyone. He recommends
using open-ended prompts versus closed questions (Describe your family vs. how
many brothers do you have?). I have been trying this more with my students, and
they absolutely have risen to the challenge to produce more language! This also
creates more ideas to run with for future conversations.
I hope everyone is having a healthy and happy new year :)
-Amanda
Amanda Miller
Division 1.3 Spanish Teacher
The Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School &
Sizer Teachers Center
Devens, Massachusetts
AMiller@xxxxxxxxxx
________________________________
From: ola-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [ola-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] on behalf of Nanosh
Lucas [nanoshlucas@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2014 12:48 PM
To: ola@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ola] Re: Kahoot...
I think that the goal in both cases is to do something relevant to the
students. The 2nd conversation starter is authentic in the sense that I’m
telling my own story, and I’m also looking at ways to keep the conversation
going should students be uninterested in the question. I guess I’m focusing
less on the past or present than to see how long I can get students to practice
the art of uttering speech, so that they can move from novice mid to high, then
to intermediate. My understanding is that this will happen less with a focus on
what verbs students can conjugate in isolated situations but on their overall
ability to communicate an idea. At the Spanish 2 level, I am not expecting
students to master the preterite at all. I’m going to watch the ACTFL webinar
on that same subject (leveling from novice to intermediate) that Arnold
Bleicher gave, which will probably give me some more insight, and I’d be glad
to share what I’ve gleaned from it and applied in the context of my own
classroom.
Meanwhile, I attached a PDF of a Powerpoint I made for my Spanish I class. I
used a mini roulette table and gave out candy to students whose numbers were
called, and then I had students switch places in the circle and talk to
different people using those questions, all the while trying to push them to
extend their length of speech (Example: ¿Cuál es tu comida favorita y DÓNDE te
gusta comerla? (What’s your favorite food and where do you like to eat it? -
then perhaps compare pizza @ Abby’s with pizza @ Pizza Hut). I had a Spanish 2
give me new questions to replace the old, which was VERY awesome - I got a lot
of repeats, but one person said, “Would you rather have a cat with no tail or a
dog with no hair? Another student, who prides himself on being the guy who
blurts out, “AMERICA!” in class to establish his distaste for learning anything
about another culture, contributed what I thought was the most valuable
question: “Do you like hanging out with your guy friends or girl friends?” We
expanded that to, “Can guys and girls be friends?”
I thought the roulette table was awesome because instead of having students bet
money, I had them put a little card with their name on it on a number of their
choosing. This made it easy to see who was absent in the class very quickly,
and I could also quickly make groups by grabbing the little cards in order from
1-36 (usually class sizes don’t exceed this number).
Additionally, Kahoot is really awesome - y’all should check it out. You can
make fun competitions with not very much technology.
Lastly, here is an article on the pitfalls of goal setting. I read this and it
has been changing my life on an hourly scale. I am not advocating against
setting goals, but it talks about how if we focus on daily habits, the goals
will reach themselves. I made it a goal to make class somewhere I want to be
every day. It has been almost two days, and I feel a huge difference in my
enjoyment of teaching. http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230333
Have a great day.
Nanosh
On Jan 7, 2014, at 4:46 PM, Calysta Phillips
<cphillips@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:cphillips@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Awesome Nanosh! Great explanation of pulling out threads and asking great
questions. Of course, in your second thread, you lost the past tense as you
start debating mustaches... Fine, right? Did you want to work more on the past
tense or just a little- with fui/fue? Do you expect your Spanish 2's to know
the preterite tense by the end of Spanish 2?
On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Nanosh Lucas
<nanoshlucas@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:nanoshlucas@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Hello,
Have you seen getkahoot.com<http://getkahoot.com/>? It’s sort of like poll
everywhere with a twist - much easier to set up, and it looks like it would be
easy to use in a classroom full of students, many of whom have access to
smartphones. It is basically an online quizzing software. You can have students
work on it individually or in groups with one phone, iPad, or laptop. The main
screen is your digital projector hooked to your computer with the quiz running.
All free, as of now.
Here is an example of my process:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnLNUMHz57M&feature=em-upload_owner
I used Voki to make a Snowman say something about his vacation, then I cropped
and broadcast the video to Youtube using a program called ScreenFlow for the
Mac. Then, I referenced the video in Kahoot and set up a quiz. (You could skip
a few steps by having you or another person simply make a video and upload it
to Youtube).
My goal is to have students in Spanish 2 be able to say something about their
vacation - it seems like the most relevant thing to do now. I’m showing them
how to say where they went, or where someone else went, through using the verb
“ir” in the preterite. This is an interpretive exercise that calls on them to
do more than correlates to their level in Spanish (NM heading to NH), but I
believe they can use their intuition to figure it out, as interpretive skills
are typically stronger than productive skills. They’ve also practiced using
this before.
I’m planning on making a few more questions for this particular exercise (Where
did he stay? Who did he visit?) and to make the statements by the avatars more
and more complex. While this set of activities seems like it’s tiered for
ability levels and awesome for class, I believe the only thing that will make
it interesting will be the medium through which students are accessing it
(competition and technology). Once those have worn off their luster, students
will become bored with it, like anything else. From this small sprout, I’m
relying a lot on the technology, but it’s very easy from here to build a solid
unit based on “Qué hiciste durante tus vacaciones?
What else I will be doing, however, is showing students a picture of me with a
full beard, and another with a mustache, and another dressed up as Donald Trump
during a murder mystery party. These are a few of the things that I did over
the break: grow a beard, chop it down to a mustache, and dress up like Donald
Trump. The question is the same - What did you do during the break? My answers
to this question are also going to be uninteresting to students even with the
emphasis of content over form (See paragraph above - all form).
In the 1st set, I expect my conversation to dry up a lot faster when I try to
run a progression from it: “Where did you go during your break?” “What did you
do?” “Some people like to stay at home, did you stay at home?” “Who visited
family?” “Who else swam at the Y?” I’m dependent on the random student or two
who has an interesting story to tell.
In the 2nd set, my conversation simply has more potential avenues - all
students have an opinion on mustaches: “Do you prefer mustaches, beards, or
neither?” “Do I look creepy in that mustache?” “Does Dalí look creepy with his
mustache?” “Who in your family has a mustache?” “Is he creepy?” “Did you visit
him during your vacation?” “Is a mustache a sign of masculinity?” “Who are some
famous people with mustaches?” “What about beards?” “Are you treated
differently if you look like Paul Bunyan than an Imam, an Orthodox Jew, or an
Amish person?” “Which one of these look more manly to you?” “Here are pictures
of people who run the world’s fortune 500 companies - how many of them have
beards?” “Is it necessary to shave?” “Should women shave?, Why or why not?" On
and on and on and on… At some point, I expect I will find a hook that will get
students talking, which will give me a new place to move to.
And basically, that to me is the essence of OWL - we are trying to get students
to talk to one another in order that their language can move from level to
level. More importantly, they move from being unable to express an idea to
another person to being able to express it. Whether one uses units or not to
accomplish that goal is immaterial. I think I’m responding to Thomas Hinkle’s
post a while back on the ambivalence of whether it might not be more
advantageous to put together solid units when compared to times when “stuck”
using OWL. What I have noticed so far, having just put together an assessment
for students based on a very strict set of sentence frames is that students
produce exactly what I’ve asked them to produce, and they seldom surprise with
their language. Whereas when my goal is to bring them something interesting to
explore, I am always surprised, excited, and even a little scared to be
swimming in uncharted territory.
I hope these ramblings are helpful to someone out there in teacher land.
Best,
Nanosh
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