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Sunday, September 2, 2007

Using Technology to teach Spanish

Lauren and I are both Spanish Secondary Education majors and we found a really useful article that discussed how to blend teaching both Spanish and technology into one. The article, entitled "Teaming Foreign Language with Technology", discusses how two teachers from Ohio have combined two disciplines, Spanish and technology, into one pedagogical approach. In the article, the teachers provide examples of how to use Spanish to teach technology and vice versa. For example, the students are encouraged to use Powerpoint to create review games such as Jeopardy. In addition, the students have been assigned to create travel brochures that advertise foreign Spanish speaking countries. In both of these activities, the students are required to use proper grammar, verb tenses, diverse sentence structure, and creativity. On a more elementary level, the article suggests using Photoshop or Word to create greeting cards or birthday cards in Spanish. Another example activity for younger ages would be to allow the kids to draw a person or creature on Photoshop or the Paint option, and then to have the students label the body parts in Spanish. In addition to offering possible activities to use in the classroom, the article provides a potential rubric for teachers to evaluate their students work with. The rubric stresses the importance of using technology to enhance the student's original ideas, Spanish grammar skills, and creativity.

In conclusion, these two teachers have found that by blending technology and Spanish the students have created outstanding work. The students are motivated to learn when these two disciplines are combined because they feel that they are accomplishing a lot by combining two subjects into one. The teacher, too, can benefit from combining technology and their subject matter because it allows for professional teamwork among different departments.

I highly recommend this article for everyone in our class because the examples provided are easily applicable to all subjects. This article is easy to read and understand. It offers simple and sensible suggestions in how to incorporate technology into the classroom.

2 comments:

LAN said...

I'm glad you talked about this article in your blog. I agree that in most cases the types of activities that can be done using technology or not content bound. We all can learn from each other regardless of our area of specialization. Take note of what you learned from the article as plan for the projects in this course.

Kathryn said...

I have had a class that used the idea of PowerPoint as a form to learn grammar. They did the jeopardy approach and it is very useful and a lot of fun, not to mention it makes the lesson more personal; which I noticed helps students remember and recall information faster. Even though some of these approaches may seem elementary, it is always fun to have a change of pace.