http://www.techlearning.com/features/0039/being-social-how-social-media-can-transform-your-school-classrooms/53437
This article on Tech & Learning made me very excited thinking about the role that technology can play in connecting my students with other students, classrooms, and cultures throughout the nation and even the world. As a future Spanish teacher, culture and language are so important and the best way to learn these things is to experience them in action. This article provided many new insights into ways to use technology that I hadn't really thought of before. One of the ideas was to use a program called VoiceThread to allow the students to record their thoughts and responses as well as listen to their answers. This would provide a great opportunity for students to practice speaking Spanish in a non-threatening way (sometimes it's scary to speak in front of the class, I know I find it to be!). One of my favorite ideas is the use of EPals. The program EPals allows teachers to select classrooms from 200 different countries from a specific language and age group and set up a global community between their classroom and yours. And it's completely free! (Skype would be great here as well) I'm so excited about the atmosphere and culture that this would bring to a classroom, it could really open students' eyes to the culture and language that they are learning about in class. Another idea that I loved was the creation of Wikia novelas, or pieces of fiction through role-playing simulation. This would be a great way for students to collaborate their Spanish writing and speaking together to create a story. The program also allows you to see who contributed what to the wiki, which would be helpful for grading. The last idea that I fell in love with was the use of the program LiveMocha. It is a worldwide community of language learners that lets students connect with people from across the world. "Students get feedback from native speakers as they practice reading and writing skills and give feedback to users who are learning English." What an awesome and unique cross-cultural opportunity for learning that would be! This article really opened my eyes to all the benefits that technology can bring, usually I am against too much use of technology, but I'm starting to see that it can be such a great facilitator of community!
I think that using VoiceThread would be very beneficial to the students, as well. In my spanish classes in high school, we used a program that was very similar to this one, which gave us really nice feedback to our understanding of the material. It was nice that we did not have to worry about practicing in front of others and it would have more of an individual focus. I think that EPals would be really interesting, also. All of the ideas seem really inspiring and would bring out a whole new sense of culture in the classroom!
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