collaboration
January 3, 2014
After you’ve decided which research-based book to read, how about resolving to collaborate with another teacher on something? My second suggestion for a 2014 resolution is: 2. Collaborate with another teacher on a project. One of my mottos is that collaboration is the 21st-century skill. Wow, what a wide world is opened to us now! My […]
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December 28, 2012
You could probably guess what the most popular New Year’s resolutions are; you’ve probably made them yourself. Get in shape, eat better, save money, quit smoking, volunteer. You could probably also guess many of the popular resolutions for teachers: be more organized, have a positive attitude, involve students more, set goals. What about you? Are […]
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August 31, 2012
Screencast: Edmodo
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Have you heard about Edmodo? Not sure how it works or whether it’s worth exploring another social media platform? Give me five minutes to show you how I use Edmodo in my classroom. We now use Edmodo for blogging-type out-of-class social interaction in grades six through twelve at my school. A couple things I didn’t have […]
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October 26, 2011
Learning from #langchat
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If there’s one big principle I’ve learned over the past 10 years, 8 teaching and 2 in grad school, it’s that good teaching isn’t magic. Sometimes it looks like magic, but it’s not. Sure, some people just don’t have the personality or gift of explanation to be a teacher. But some very gifted people have […]
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June 10, 2011
Connecting your classroom
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photo by kmevansOften during #Langchat, a question will come up about how those of us who have collaborating schools in target-language countries found these schools. I found two of ours through Twitter and the other through my school’s accrediting agency’s website. This week on #Langchat, we devoted the entire hour to discussing how we can […]
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June 8, 2011
For my original post about the myths, look here. Textbook companies make a lot of money off of telling us that they’ve done all the work and they’re all we need. Audio? They’ve got it. Video? That too. Activities? Structure? Assessments? It’s an all-in-one package, for a price. And out-of-date as soon as it’s printed. […]
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April 21, 2011
Have you used PhotoPeach?
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I have to thank @vivianagabi for giving me the idea to use PhotoPeach to do a project called “25 things about me.” Her (Brazilian) students are at lower levels than mine, and take Spanish for less time per week, but it was a brilliant way for her students to connect with my students (by posting […]
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February 23, 2011
photo by Jorge Mejía Peralta Sra. Birch commented on this post adding my lyrics file to Google docs, offering a link to her awesome wiki that has a link to her spreadsheet of music. It’s an amazing store of music categorized by singer, title, grammar focus, and other info, including YouTube links. It’s cool enough […]
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February 14, 2011
#Charlando para aprender
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¡Hola! Soy profesora de español en el estado de Kentucky en los Estados Unidos. Unos cuantos otros profesores y yo hemos decidido pedirles a nuestros estudiantes que se involucren en Twitter – twitteando en español, con otros hispanohablantes, para que aprendan comunicarse mejor en la comunicación interpersonal. ¿Es usted un hispanohablante que quiera twittear con […]
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February 4, 2011
I wrote here about what I’ve done with the book Ciudad de las bestias by Isabel Allende in my AP class. I recently put all of the chapter guides with their “palabras claves” in one streamlined document, public on the web. They’re not perfect -my students and I often find mistakes (like incorrect page numbers)- […]
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January 13, 2011
A group of language teachers on Twitter has gotten together to start a weekly chat on issues related to world language teaching. We’re going to do this on Thursday evenings at 8 Eastern/7 Central (NOTE: this is a correction from the earlier posted incorrect time). The hashtag is #langchat. So add a #langchat column to […]
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December 27, 2010
I love collaboration
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Ever since someone said something about not reinventing the wheel it seems we’ve all been in a search to see how much of our work other people have already done. Right? Not really. Actually we still have a tendency to shut ourselves in our classrooms and overwork ourselves and burn out doing things that hundreds […]
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