Native speaker video resource: ¡GRACIAS Project Amigo!

Rabbit trails aren’t always a bad thing.  Sometimes they turn out to be the yellow brick road with the Emerald City at the end.

Here’s the one I hit today:

• I subscribe to Richard Byrne’s Practical Ed Tech blog’s Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week.  Weekly, I get Richard’s great tip of the week related to educational technology, along with links to several other ed-techy posts he’s made, should one of them strike my interest.  This week, the tip was about a site for “educational videos.”  So, I click.
• The educational video site Richard blogged about is Next Vista.  He says what makes this site unique is that it “has people who review the videos for accuracy before they appear on the web.”  I doubt it’s going to have much to do with world language, but I click on one of his examples, because it’s about onomatopoeia, and I want to share it with the upper level ELA facilitator at the homeschool co-op I work with.
• There are (only) eleven categories of videos listed on the right side of the site, but lo and behold, World Languages is one.  It’s going to be a bunch of dry grammar explanations, I know, but I click anyway.
• Hmm, one of the first videos is called El Robo del Gremlin.  That sounds rather storylike and devoid of dry grammar explanation.  I scroll.  I find a very odd, eclectic collection of titles related to something like how to use wifi, trackpads, webcams, and the like, but I keep scrolling anyway and find…
• A substantial collection of videos that seem to be organized by theme and then the name of the person who recorded them.  Like Metas-Ceci.  And Día Normal-Cande.  Going down, there are MORE! Deportes and pasatiempos! Each of these topics has six examples recorded by Mexican students! OZ!

Where did these videos come from?  I read this below the video:

These videos were made by talented Project Amigo becarios (scholarship students) in the state of Colima, Mexico, in July of 2013. It is their hope that the work they have done will be of value to those learning Spanish around the globe. To learn more about Project Amigo and the work they do to support the educational hopes of young people in impoverished areas of rural Mexico, click here. You can learn more about Next Vista’s 2012 work with Project Amigo on our Vista for Literacy page.