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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.

Searching for Articles

It was difficult for me to preform the first assignment for this class. I was having a lot of trouble finding articles that pertained to the specific topic of teaching Math using Microsoft Word. In the past I could never master how to navigate around the article search through Ames. I would use Google or some other method which probably is not very reliable. Class on Thursday was very helpful in learning the best and most efficient ways to find exactly what I needed from credible references. Just having Professor Nillas show us how to search for individual publications is an important tool that will be helpful when searching for sources. I also think that the RefWorks files will come in handy not only throughout this semester, but also in future education classes. Hopefully we will continue to add to the Refworks files and compile a nice group of useful articles that can teach us how to best use technology in our future classrooms.