Give & take #authres activities: Let’s collaborate!
October 21, 2015
Finding authentic resources can take FOREVER!
Does this sound familiar to you? Via Facebook, Twitter, Edmodo, Google search, or a two-hour plummet down the rabbit hole known as Pinterest, you found exactly the right authentic resource for your upcoming lesson on members of the family. You spent 72 minutes designing a scaffolding activity that would help make it comprehensible and focus your students’ attention on the portions that would engage their interest and foster their proficiency and acquisition. You printed/posted it, set up for class, and they were finished in three and a half minutes.
It’s happened to you, right? This is the scenario that teachers told me was all too common last week at the conference for the Texas Foreign Language Association, where I presented a session called Goldilocks and the Three Authentic Resources: Too Hard, Too Dull, Just Right. (I’ll be presenting this again with Meriwynn Mansori of VIF International next month at ACTFL ’15.) You can view my slides below, but what I really want to offer, and ask your help with, is a collaborative project I proposed through this session: a spreadsheet to curate those just-right authentic resources and the activities we work so hard designing to go along with them, so that we can share our hard work, benefit from the hard work of others, and mostly save those two-hour rabbit-hole trips on Pinterest for finding the most awesome tips for home-made Halloween costumes.
Just think: what if all of you added one resource and activity per month? How much time would you save not looking for resources and creating activities someone else has already done?
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Love, love. love the idea!!!!
It’s all I’ve ever wanted in life!
What a fantastic idea! Such a time sucker that now we can help one another and get the good out of the hours we spend on these activities! Thank you!
Love this! Thank you!
I’m finishing up a great activity related to Robo en la Noche by Kristy Placido. It examines slang in Costa Rica and how the characters from the book might use it. It is modeled off of a great slang lesson by Carrie Toth in the Brandon Brown Quiere un Perro teacher’s guide. The activity uses a video of a Costa Rican teenager explaining slang, which I found on YouTube. It seems that this forum would be a fine place to share this lesson, which is partly “begged, borrowed, and stolen”, but I don’t want to commit any major faux pas here re: intellectual property. Advice, please? Thank you! – Kathryn
That sounds awesome! I count myself blessed to consider Carrie and Kristy as friends- can you share the activity with me, and I’ll run it by them to see if they care if we make it publicly available? Thanks for being aware of intellectual property rights!
Love this idea!!!
Wondering if there is a way to reach out to German Teachers. In our district we are working on creating common assessments and the greatest issue is in Interpretive mode. We have to have the same questions but it is really hard to find #authres in French, Spanish AND German that are similar.
I would love to have German teachers collaborate here!
Thank you so much for providing this resource. I hope to provide a resource to share soon.
Could you please mention somewhere that some of these files cannot be accessed without permission of the author. I have asked for permission and not received it. The activities sound great, but cannot be accessed.
I will see if Drive will let me email all collaborators. Thanks for the heads-up!
[…] that I have found and published on my blog. Also, I have mentioned Sara-Elizabeth’s list before, but she has started a Google Doc where many teachers have added their ideas. Add one and take […]
[…] Wherever you are and whatever you’re teaching, I invite you to join me in August in a simple task: share the authentic resources that you and your students will (hopefully) love this year. What apps? What music? What websites? And if you create a simple activity to go with it, so much the better – there’s a place for that. […]
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[…] frequently. (Students always ask me how I find these great videos!) Sara-Elizabeth started an authentic resource database that I also check out when I need new authentic resources. I thought that currently, there […]