best practices
July 2, 2012
When people ask me what I do, and I tell them, I always get an interesting response. After all, I suppose I am in kind of a unique situation – my primary responsibility is Spanish department head and Spanish teacher for advanced electives, but I do spend quite a few minutes a week teaching my […]
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October 10, 2011
Whoops! I completely forgot to post my Prezi from my second KWLA presentation! Here it is, Target Language: Expect More, Say Less. Target [Language]: Expect More, Say Less on Prezi
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August 12, 2010
My supply list
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I just made my supply list for this year. It’s been whittled down a lot this year. The actual one has a clip-art face on it but I don’t think that uploaded well to Google Docs. 🙂 (Disclaimer: I should add that I teach advanced electives at a private school that doesn’t have the faculty […]
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December 7, 2009
Switch to a communicative set-up
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How is your classroom laid out? Is it conducive to communicative teaching and acquisition? Recently my principal came back from a visit to another school and showed me a picture (on his iPhone of course) of a classroom that made him think of me. The teacher had put several tables together and then cut a […]
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September 24, 2009
I just made my first Yodio
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I love professional conferences, particularly KWLA! What could be better than a bunch of awesome teachers getting together and sharing their best practices? That’s how I found out about Yodio. My students in Spanish 3 today wandered the school taking pictures of teachers and staff “commanding” people to do things. They’ve written the commands and […]
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September 20, 2009
This is the presentation I did for the fall conference of the Kentucky World Language Association. And here is the handout.
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February 6, 2009
Relating everything to English
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Cross-linguistic transfer, the problem of a learner’s native language interfering with the one being learned, is a big enough issue without us as teachers compounding it by constantly relating things to English. For example, giving students ways to remember words by relating them to English is not always a smart idea, in my opinion. I […]
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February 3, 2009
A project based on motivation
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Here in Kentucky we’re still digging out from last week’s ice storm. Yesterday I was able to get online for the first time in a week, so today, it’s back to blogging! If you’ve taught from a textbook for very long, you’ve found that they’re just not motivating to students who aren’t already self-motivated, and […]
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November 3, 2008
El carro de sus sueños
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If you want to get teenage boys excited about talking about something en español (or any language), ask what their dream car is. Find a picture on Google images and put it in a powerpoint. Label the parts and ask how many there are, what kind, etc. Then brainstorm as a class in a Word […]
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October 7, 2008
Best practices
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At the KWLA conference, so many people mentioned cool things you can do with a computer… if you have a projector in your room, which I don’t. I’d asked for one before, but the tech guy told me that no one was checking out the one in the library, so he didn’t see a need […]
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