technology
August 21, 2018
A while ago, I stumbled upon a site called Sugarcane. It was a game platform, and it was amazing. The platform was owned by IXL Learning, a company making headway in online learning. It was fantastic. And it was free. The games were mostly easily created, they offered a variety of game types, they let […]
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December 26, 2016
The title of Who Owns the Learning came up as a possibility for this past summer’s #langchat, and the title immediately caught my eye. It’s been a huge dilemma in my quest to figure out why students don’t continue in their language journey – if they don’t own the learning past my classroom, have we all wasted […]
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October 10, 2016
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 […]
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July 28, 2016
Do you remember Kodak and Blockbuster? I do. My students do not. Listen to the man in the NYT video about the death throes at Kodak: What if? What if somebody else would have been a little more innovative? What if the board would have thought, let’s think a little bit farther out? And Blockbuster? When baby […]
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January 29, 2016
What’s the technology that gets used the most in my classroom? Broadly, I suppose it’s YouTube. Outside the classroom, Edmodo and Google Docs for sure. But as far as a little tool, certainly the one I use the most is a timer. If you’ve been teaching any length of time you know that setting a […]
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January 26, 2016
I love networking with great people. Not only is it how I figure out answers to what I’m doing wrong, it’s also where I get the best tips on new tech tools that will simplify my life without further stressing me out. This tool is a great example. I was talking to Thomas Sauer at […]
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January 22, 2016
I may seem pretty techy to some, but let me tell you, technology overwhelms me quickly. It changes every half second, right? And with all the blogs I follow, some days it seems like I get several blog posts delivered at almost the same time referring to approximately 72 different technology options I must use […]
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October 13, 2015
Here begins a flurry of posts related to my presentations and workshops at the Texas Foreign Language Association’s conference this weekend. First, our workshop (by our I mean I’m doing this with Amy Lenord, John Cadena, Melissa Vargas) on Thursday night is called Twitter 101 and is about how and why to get involved with a professional […]
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February 3, 2015
Pronunciation gold: Forvo.com
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If you haven’t found this resource yet, let me introduce you to Forvo, where you and your students will find close to three million pronunciations of almost as many words in 324 languages. I’m a teacher of a language with very specific pronunciation rules (Spanish) and I have a pretty deep knowledge of how (and […]
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September 16, 2014
happy birthday, Musicuentos Whew, I’ve been blogging a long time. My blogging birthday passed unnoticed but Musicuentos turned SIX on the first of this month! A lot has changed in six years. My teaching scaled back. My blogging scaled up. A kid came… and another… and another. Whenever people talk about all that’s changed, the […]
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August 11, 2013
I certainly am not the only teacher blogging about going back to school! Check out these great posts from innovative colleagues: Browse Maris Hawkins’ category “beginning of the year” as she goes back with her middle school Spanish students. Meg Villanueva offers great advice on how to break the ice in a TPRS classroom. Garnet […]
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February 8, 2013
Tech tools gone wrong
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When I first became active on Twitter, I followed the general #edchat quite a bit and was stunned and fascinated by all the tech tools people were tweeting about. I read blog posts and reviews about the latest web 2.0 tool someone was using in X class and got excited. I tried many new tools […]
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