Constantly Changing

I have heard teachers on twitter talking about using Podcasts for their “lectures” as homework assignments instead of doing them in class.  That strategy really intrigues me so I decided to try it in a different form.  I had to go to the dentist last Thursday and instead of writing up lesson plans of work to keep my French students busy and quiet for the substitute, I made a Power Point presentation of the new material we were learning.  It was really fun to make and really didn’t take me any longer than making a regular lesson plan.  Unfortunately, the chance of getting a substitute who can speak French is pretty low so I thought it was a great opportunity to try out a little “distance learning” of sorts.

I really wanted to write a blog about it and embed it. I’ve been trying for 3 days to get a code that will work on wordpress. I couldn’t find a site that will keep the sound and the videos I embedded in it, but thankfully today one of my twitter friends, @angelamaiers, posted Author Stream that will at least keep the sound.  The videos aren’t there, but just imagine them.  Whenever you see a TV slide, picture a youtube video of a frog giving the numbers in French.  My students love the frog!  I also added a listening activity which didn’t transfer either, but oh well.

The best part is that the next day when I returned to school, my French students had no trouble working with the numbers!  I hate to say it, but I think it was even better than when I normally teach it to them.  My first thought was, “They don’t need me!” Now it is making me rethink my whole teaching strategy.  Another benefit is that my student who is in Richmond being a page for the General Assembly, has great access to what we are learning.

A down side is that I have to listen to my own voice, which is not fun at all!

I am thrilled that my experiment worked and I am sure that I will try to do more of our grammar sessions like this. My students responded well and it was fun for me to make. Do any of you use Podcasts for your teaching? I would love to know how well it works.

If you have checked out my French class blog, you will notice a few things.  First you will notice that there isn’t much French on it.  There are lots of crazy posts about baseball, MySpace, recycling and other stuff that 8th graders care about.  School purists may say, “That isn’t learning French.”  And they would be correct.  It is community building.  One goal of mine in introducing a class blog was to build a class community.  My class is small, only 8 students, but they each are unique and have interests and lives outside of first period French.

In my PLP group, I have gotten to experience how community building can increase learning and collaboration.  We did a few “digital field trips” that allowed us to learn some new tools, but mostly to learn about each other.  The first project was a photo a day for the month of October.  Were we talking only about pedagogy and our students, and our teaching philosophies?   Not even close.  We were commenting on photos of our kids, the barn near our house, changing leaves, and jack-0-lanterns.   But those seemingly unimportant conversations made it so we had no trouble commenting on the “serious” things on the PLP Ning.

So, when you look at my class blog, and notice that even I posted a video of the Muppets, know that we are building relationships.  Once those online relationships are built and the comfort level is there with using WordPress, you will see some amazing French happening at Le Café Français.

I love when a plan comes together.  Today we had the 5th graders come to visit the Middle School.  I had about ten 5th graders mixed in with my 6th grade Geography class.  I asked one of my students how they would describe their Geography class.  She told them that it is about learning to work together and then explained how they can use delicious to share great websites.  It was all I could do not to start crying right there on the spot.

It is working.  I really want to thank all of you who are too numerous to name for all of your help in making me a better teacher.  I am so grateful and am loving every minute of it.

Cross Posted from Le Café Français.

I am old.  Do you realize that I didn’t even have a computer until I was out of college?  I never had to worry about the things that you all have to face in your lives.  You face many challenges in your online world.  How much private information should you share?  Who will be looking at your online life?  How will your online presence reflect on you?

But there are so many benefits, do the positives outweigh the negatives?  Yes.  How often did I get to talk to other people around the world…never.  I did have a French pen pal for a while, but our letters took a couple of weeks to go back and forth.  It’s not exactly the same as emailing or IMing or Twittering (my favorite).  In our class, I am hoping to introduce you to people around the world.  You can talk to them, interact with them and share experiences.  Imagine if when we talk about French schools you got to talk to French students to ask them what school is like for them?  I’m quite sure that our book doesn’t necessarily give a truly accurate picture of French teenagers.  Are there any pictures of them in our book with a cell phone.?  I don’t think so and I’m sure they all have them just like you guys do.

Thanks for going on this journey with me.  I am learning and I hope you will find this experience a memorable part of middle school.

Mme

Tania Sheko tagged me in a meme. So now I am sharing 7 things that my readers may not know about me.

Voila:

1. I have lived in Virginia all my life, but I have lived in 17 different houses (and only 4 in the last 16 years). My parents like to move.

2. I was born on my grandfather’s birthday…my mom was born on her grandfather’s birthday…and my son was born on his grandfather’s birthday. My mom and I were both born on a Sunday at 5:30 pm. Timmy and his grandfather were both born on a Wednesday at 1:40 pm. One of my students and I share the same birthday and it is also her grandfather’s birthday. (And my birthday is in 9 days so start picking out a card.)

3. When I was in sixth grade I ruptured my spleen running up a set of flagstone steps. I spent 2 days in PICU, a week in the hospital and three weeks at home in my bed in the middle of the living room. I had to lay flat on my back without getting up or even sitting up for three weeks, but my spleen completely healed. 

4. I played on a three year undefeated girls lacrosse team in high school.

5. I don’t drink and drive because I buried two friends on the same day who did when I was in high school and I vowed to learn from their mistakes.

6. I was a telemarketer and I loved it and was really good at it.

7. The first time I ever ate in a restaurant by myself was two years ago when I went to Paris all by myself for a week. It was an amazing week.

So now for the hard part…I have to tag 7 more people.

Susanne Nobles
Jennifer Clark-Evans
Ed Shepherd

Melanie Hutchinson

J. McMahon

Hiram Cuevas

Francois Nel

It has happened. I have gone from being a mom who would so much rather that my children were nowhere to be seen on the internet, to a mom who wholeheartedly believes that my children need to have a positive digital footprint.

This year for Christmas, my son’s father had the idea of making a website for Jeffrey. He got it up and running today, just in time for Christmas tomorrow. It is a great site and I love the title…The Jeffrey Experience. When he was around 3 we used to say that we should hand out cards that say, “you’ve had the Jeffrey experience” whenever a stranger met Jeffrey. He is the epitome of outgoing and has a way about him that makes it so there is no such thing as a stranger. At 3 he was in the vault at Van Cleef and Arpels on Rodeo Drive because he struck up a converstation with the store manager. There are so many moments like this, it would take all day to tell them all.

So, if you have a second, please check out his website and even sign his guest book.

Can you tell what I have been focusing on this year?
Check out this wordle of my delicious account.

www.wordle.net 

Thanks to Vinnie Vrotny, I learned something new I can do with Wordle today!

One of my favorite things about being a teacher is that we like to share.  There is no reason not to.  What would happen if I share something with a teacher in Canada?  Do I have to worry that my students will leave FA and move there for that awesome teacher.  Not likely, of course. 

So not only do I willingly share anything others may want, I am more than willing to keep that sharing cycle going by borrowing great ideas from other teachers.  Recently I totally swiped an awesome project from Chris Harbeck off of twitter, a math poetry project.  I tweaked it to fit French, borrowed his eloquent descriptions of different types of poetry, and gave the assignment to my students. 

Here are some of the results:

Les maths est

Quelquefois

Facile,

Toujours

L’apres-midi,

Quelquefois

Pas terrible,

Toujours

Barbant étudier.

Quelquefois

Après le français,

quelquefois

la geographie pour moi.

by KN

Oui OR Si

(free verse)

What’s the difference between oui and si?

What ever it is it’s confusing me

One for the happy, one for the sad

I don’t like French anymore, it’s really bad

It is hard, and its rough

It’s just to tough

No More! No More!

I don’t like French, its such a bore

But now something has come over me

I found the true meaning of si

A moment of happiness and light

YES!!! I had finally gotten it right

I found it in my sentence, ‘I don’t like French’

Am I awake just, give me a pinch!

Si is for not like, Oui is for like

I have found it, the true meaning of life

French is the greatest biggest and best

But now……

I have that big French test

by JD

Pas Moi

J’aime la pizza

          Pas Moi

J’aime la glace

          Moi, non

J’aime le frite, et tu?

          Non, pas trop

Je n’aime pas l’ecole

          Moi si

They did a great job using the elements we are reviewing for exams and creating the poetry.  I am lucky that they had a great teacher last year who did a wonderful poetry unit with them.

You can pretty much guess that if I am doing something cool in my classroom in some way it was influenced by someone else.  Nothing I do is entirely just me.  And I’m proud of that. 

Photo Courtesy of Blue Moon in her Eyes

It finally happened.  I hit a wall.  In doing my International PLP I knew that one of the goals was to push the participants out of their comfort zone.  And that has happened to me to a certain point, but I grasped onto the experience and figured that the only way to get the most out of the it was to participate in as many aspects of it as possible.  So on Twitter, I sat back and just watched for a while before I said much.  On the Ning I stuck to comfortable places like the flickr activity and left fairly innocuous comments on the rest of it.  All of the things I tried weren’t too crazy for me (after all talking to people I don’t know is certainly a comfortable place for me).

But today it happened.  I was pushed to a place where my first reaction was to run the other direction.  On our Ning site, we have 5 new Expert Voices.  I’m up for anything so I figure I’ll join all five in their specialties.  Then I read a post on Ben Hazzard’s page that changed everything.  His focus on our ning is Classroom Communities.  In order to model building a community in our classroom he is starting a running club using Nike+iPod. 

That is when the brick wall hit me. 

Running?  I was willing to do anything for this PLP, to get everything I could out of it, and now he wants me to go running? 

I get it now.  that is the feeling that my students get whenever I ask them to do something new.  It is that feeling of pushing them out of their comfort zone to a point where they can really learn.  So I will run (mostly walk) and why?  For my students.  So when I ask them to do something that seems scary to them, I will understand and will do a better job of walking them around that brick wall.  And I am sure in the process I will learn more about myself.

This year has been life-changing for me.  I have entered the technology world and there is no turning back.  On September 8th I sat in the Reed Theater at Fredericksburg Academy and started a journey that would change how I look at the world, how I teach and how I learn.  

I became part of an International PLP in which I get to interact with other educators all over the world.  We participate on a ning site with educators from the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  I remember sitting in that first f2f meeting and thinking, “Huh?”  It was overwhelming, especially because I was only two weeks into school and hadn’t gotten my “school legs” yet.  But I quickly found that the International PLP was going to give me just what I needed, a learning network to make myself a better learner and teacher. 

The best part of the network for me was that they gave me permission to NOT use the tools I am learning in the classroom yet.  My assignment was to simply use the tools in my own learning as an educator and go from there.  That was refreshing for me and proved to be just the advice I needed.

Since September I have found a way to have an awesome learning network of people all over the world.  I have tweeted twittered posted 367 tweets on twitter, posted numerous responses on our PLP ning, joined a Foreign Language Ning, called into a radio show on the CBC about edtech, tagged away on delicious, joined a K-12 online conference Elluminate session, watched numerous conferences online that happened in Canada and elsewhere, took a photo a day for a month on flickr and found a network of people who would help me learn as an educator. 

I can’t recall a time when I have learned so much in such a short period of time, and yet it just opened up a world of things yet to learn.  Of course, I have changed not only how I learn, but also have changed many things I do in the classroom with my students.  I hope to share in this blog, my thoughts, ideas, trials and tribulations, successes and ”learning experiences”.