Was the story made up of webdings or wingdings? And what's the difference anyway? Regardless of my confusion on this matter, I thought the activity we did was very interesting. I was super confused at first because I thought that each symbol stood for a letter, instead of a concept. After my buddy Kyle kindly helped me see the error of my ways, the activity because much easier, and much more fun. The conversation that followed was interesting, and I particularly appreciated that we spent a bit of time discussing foreign languages. I often feel like we FL people get sort of forgotten when we're talking about literacy and standardized testing in our other classes, so it was nice to get a little recognition.
Also, I was reservedly excited about the whole podcast activity. I really like podcasts, but I don't like listening to myself...but I think that's just something I'm going to have to get over because it sounds like I'll be doing a lot of that this year. My own insecurities aside however, I think podcasts are an AWESOME tool, especially for language classes. Think of all the great applications! You could provide audio to texts that your students have to read so they get used to the cadence of the language. Students learn proper pronunciation when they listen to you or a native speaker on a podcast. Think how fun a lesson in dialects could be using podcasts! You could have students create their own podcasts and greatly increase the amount of speaking practice each student, not to mention speaking practice that can be heard by the teacher and evaluated. I feel like I could find 100+ ways to use podcasts in the classroom, and I think at least 99 of those ways would be ones with which students could have lots of creative fun.
Also, this is completely unrelated, but I was just thinking about how words have changed with the emergence of new technologies. For example, we all know what "click and drag" means now, but what would the meaning of those words together have been 50 years ago? My guess is that it would have been some tap dance move. YAY SEMANTICS!
Other people getting word-nerdy makes ME want to do a click-and-drag (the tap dance kind).
ReplyDeleteI wonder if we could get men who know German to read short texts for us, so our students can hear a non-woman voice speaking the target language.
I love the idea that the "click and drag" could have been a tap number someone did in lieu of The Charleston.
ReplyDeleteAnd Brianne, awesome idea about capturing male German voices. In Oakland County, there has been a decent influx of German-speaking employees related to the car industry. Very possible! Or you could trade podcasts with a male German teacher.