Getting Off to a Healthy Start For School (and for me)

We just had our first week back to school! For me it's always a mixture of excitement and a little bit of nervousness getting back into the swing of things. It's a bit of a rush meeting new students and reconnecting with the older students. I particularly love the energy of my new students who come in ready to learn French and try out new things in their lives. Even though this is my fourth year teaching French (not including my student teaching), there's always enough things that are new and changing to keep things interesting and exciting for me.

One of the biggest challenges at the beginning of the year is simply getting back into the teaching mindset and juggling all of the things that we have on our plates at the beginning of the year. I'm meeting and getting to know new students, starting to memorize their names, making sure I have all the resources I need for each class, organizing all of it, planning using my Google Calendar and Moodle (an online content management system), putting all the resources on Moodle, thinking about how I can make my classes flexible and interesting for all sorts of learners (visual, kinesthetic, auditory, struggling/proficient/advanced, etc...), communicating with parents and other staff, etc... And that's not even counting all of the things that I'm doing during my actual classes!

As you might imagine, it takes a bit of time to get myself back into the rhythm of teaching, and finding a good pace for myself and my students. Don't get me wrong- I love my job, but it can certainly take a lot out of me! Even at the end of the first day (which was a short one) I could barely think about anything once I got home. I felt like a zombie.

It's for this reason that I'm committing myself to a nutritional cleansing and exercise program for 30 days(minimum). I have some friends who have been doing it for about three months or so and they've had impressive results, so I figure it is definitely worth trying. It's something that I've never done before (at least to this extent) and  I'm hoping that it will help me to shed some extra weight that has crept up on me over the past few years, give me more energy and mental clarity, and simply help me to be as healthy as I can be. If it even lives up to half of the hype I think it will be well worth the investment so that I can be more effective in caring for myself and others. Here we go!!!

My favorite education book of the year so far!

Teach Like a Pirate: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity, and Transform Your Life as an Educator, by Dave Burgess is my favorite education book of the year so far. It's one of those books that I can't help but think, "I wish I had written this one!" I'm actually reading it through for a second time for inspiration for the new school year. 

The first part of the book is primarily about how to get in touch with your passion for teaching (because of course, it's not like we're necessarily passionate about everything we teach), and Burgess gives some very inspirational and concrete ways of amping up your passion and enthusiasm for teaching. I believe that it is very important to rekindle our passion (or at least keep it burning) if we truly want our students to be engaged with what we have to teach. Let's also not forget that, yes, this is how we as teachers make a living, but you'd have to be crazy to do what we do if you're only doing it for a paycheck. I, for one, would much rather at least have the goal of doing what I do with passion than just trying to get by. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm always going to meet that goal, but it certainly seems more likely to happen if I'm doing everything I can to live my life with passion than if I'm just going along with the ups and downs of life in a more passive fashion.

The second part of the book is what really interested me the most. In this section Dave Burgess goes into how to make the presentational aspect of your teaching more dynamic, creative, and engaging for yourself and your students. Now, there are many ways of teaching, and presentations are only one way (often overused, by the way...) but, in a very real way we're on the stage quite a bit as a teacher, and if we don't pay attention to making our own style of presentation interesting for students we're not going to be able to connect with them very well. I don't think that we should necessarily feel like we need to be entertainers (and let's face it- with modern media we have quite a bit of competition in that arena), but I do believe that we should do whatever we can to make our  teaching as engaging for students as we can. If our way of presenting material is dry and boring it's going to be quite a battle to get students to invest their energy and concentration into what we have to teach.

I especially love how he gives examples of many questions to ask yourself in order to get your creative juices flowing for presentational hooks. By having these questions at hand you can go through them to help think of other ways to look at your lessons and get students more involved. For example, here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to include a kinesthetic aspect to your presentations:

• The Kinesthetic Hook (I like to move it, move it)
• How can I incorporate movement into this lesson?
• Can we throw, roll, or catch something inside or outside of class?
• Can we get up and act something out?
• gestures and motions?
• use room as opinion meter- students choose sides based on statement
• simulation to reenact part of lesson
• walk around activity?
• game that uses movement/action?
• How can I guarantee that every student is up and out of their desk at least once during this lesson?

Dave Burgess includes many, many more hooks and questions that you can use to spice up your lessons. They are definitely something that I'll be using as a reference this year to keep my teaching interesting for both myself and my students. Long live creative and passionate teaching! ARRRRRR!!! (I couldn't resist...)

Youtube to the rescue!

Another great resource for education is of course Youtube. If you want to learn something you can find videos on almost any subject. Of course, the difficulty is in finding videos that are of high quality in their instruction and information. There's definitely a lot of junk out there.

One way that I like to use Youtube videos is to provide instruction from other teachers. That way students get another angle on the subject that might click with them a little better than the way that I teach. In fact, one teacher I know has made it her goal to provide instruction from at least three different teachers (including her own) through the use of videos so that students can get different perspectives and hopefully at least one of those will reach them.

One weakness that I often see in videos is that they often don't check for understanding. It would certainly be nice if we could just sit and absorb information (and we do to some extent), but it isn't the most effective way of learning. There has to be some sort of active element, even if it's only a short quiz or some guiding questions.

So, to practice this a little bit I created a lesson plan and assignment for French 2 students to review the passé composé with avoir and être (not including reflexive verbs). You can check these out for yourself at:

French 2 Passé Composé Review With Youtube Lesson Plan
French 2 Passé Composé Review With Youtube Worksheet

Keeping on track with Google Calendar!

As part of my Google Apps for Education class I've been learning about Google Calendar and all that you are able to do with it. It's quite timely particularly because we will be required to use it for all of our classes this coming school year at MCPS. 

One of the features that I love about the Google Apps in general is that they are made so you can very easily share your work with others, while also keeping everything in one place. For example, I created a Google Calendar for my French 1 class, which I then embedded on my French 1 website and in my French 1 Moodle. If I change something on the calendar it will automatically be updated whether a student or parent is looking at the French 1 website or the French 1 Moodle (or any other place that I happen to embed it for that matter).

I usually put the topic of the day, the homework, and due dates on a calendar on a whiteboard in my room anyway, but this way I can put all of the same information on my Google calendar so students and parents can keep updated on what's going on. Plus, there will be a permanent record of what we did last week and the weeks before that. I just don't have enough whiteboard space for all of that!

Another feature that I wasn't aware of before is that you can attach files from your Google Drive to any events that you create. For example, if the topic of the day is the numbers 0-20 I can easily attach a Google Presentation or video to the event that I created called "Topic: #0-20". I can also create an event entitled "Homework: #0-20, Due: Next Class" and attach the actual homework to the event for download or printing.

The beauty of it all is that as long as the file is in my Google Drive I can always edit the original file and I won't have to worry about uploading the newest version. It will already be updated. Plus, it gets rid of the headache of wondering which version was the new version and which was the old version. Love it!

If you would like to see an example, here is my French 1 Google Calendar:

Google Apps for Education, Reflection #1

I just started a three week class on using Google Apps for Education, and it's pretty amazing how much is available. I already use Google apps a little bit- I have this blog, a gmail account, and I really love Google Drive. Google provides at least 10 gigabytes of free space, and I found out I could get 100 gigabytes of space for only $1.99 a month- which is a steal considering I can make sure all of my school files are synced and I don't need to worry so much about losing my work. I've always found copying and pasting files from one computer to another can be quite a headache. With Google Drive you can download the Google Drive application onto your computer and then copy any files and/or folders that you want onto it and it will then save all of those files onto the cloud so you can access it anywhere you have internet access. This makes it so I won't have to worry about whether what I saved on my flash drive was newer than the file that I saved on my computer, and if I change it in one place it will automatically be changed in another place. Amazing!

I'm looking forward to learning more about how to connect with other teachers, and be able to share what me and my students are doing on a regular basis.

Learning how to learn: "Foreign Languages for Everyone"

Lately I've been reading the book, "Foreign Languages for Everyone" (2011) by Irene Konyndyk, which is a great book about how to teach foreign languages to students with learning disabilities. This is an extremely important topic to me because I feel like students with learning disabilities are often discouraged from taking foreign language classes because they're deemed to be too difficult for certain types of students. Now, I certainly won't say that learning a language is always easy; it's definitely one of the most challenging things that I've ever done. But, that's one of the reasons I really love it. Because I've challenged myself I truly have something to be proud of. Likewise, students with learning disabilities may find certain aspects of foreign language learning more difficult than others, but there are ways for them to overcome these challenges, and for teachers to help them to do so in a more effective manner. That's what this book is all about. It starts with the premise that foreign languages are truly for everyone- not just for the "gifted and/or talented" students. It's easy to teach to the students that are probably going to get it no matter how bad of a teacher you are, but it's another thing entirely to effectively teach to the students that are often ignored (unless they're acting out, that is...). "Foreign Languages for Everyone" gives some solid techniques and pedagogy from a teacher who has focused on doing exactly that.
I have to admit that I'm certainly still figuring things out myself, but I've found some great ideas in this book. One of the things that I'm going to start doing in my classes is a short weekly journal that helps students to reflect upon how they're learning so that they become more aware of what works for them and what doesn't. I think that this is brilliant because not only does it give me feedback on how students are doing and what they think of the class, but more importantly it helps the students themselves to realize how they think and learn. In education circles this is known as metacognition- being aware of how you think. When students become more aware of their own thinking then they are able to be more active in their own learning instead of simply going with the flow. This brings to mind the growth mindset of Carol Dweck's book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which I also happen to love. When students focus on their own growth and what they can do to improve they are active instead of passive learners. They are also much more likely to be successful because they see mistakes as something to learn from, not just a sign that they're stupid.
So, I've begun working on an outline of topics to focus on next year so that each week we will look at a tool for becoming a successful student as well as using questions to reflect upon the learning process. To give my students a general set of tools I created a simply acronym to help give some structure to what I'll be teaching them about the learning process. This is what I came up with:

Reflection and Change

As the end of the year fast approaches I'm starting to find myself thinking about changes to make for my classes next year. One of the wonderful aspects of teaching is that we get the chance to bring each year to an end, reflect, and make changes for the coming year.

One big change for me this next year (aka this summer) is that I'm going to start experimenting with blended learning and/or flipped learning. I'm leaning more towards the blended learning model. Essentially, in blended learning the teacher makes learning resources such as video class lectures, presentations, online activities, texts, and worksheets available to students online and/or on a disk so that students can learn using digital resources both at home and in the classroom.

In the flipped learning model these resources are made available so that students do a lot of the one-direction, receptive learning on their own to make room for more interactive, hands-on activities in the classroom. I particularly like the flipped learning model because it doesn't make sense to me to spend our classroom time together on lots of one-way communication that can be done outside of the classroom with the aid of technology. I believe that face-to-face interactive learning as a community should be the focus of class time. This is also what most students truly desire, and can't truly be done on your own at home with a computer.

While I like the flipped learning model there are a few problems with fully implementing it at this time. The biggest challenge right now is that not all students have access to computers and the internet at home. One solution, at least as far as videos are concerned, is to burn copies of the videos onto DVDs so that students can view them at home. Of course, computer labs are usually available to students before school, at lunch, and after school, but with students' busy schedules, activities, and/or transportation to and from school this can still be problematic.

Some districts provide one-to-one computing in which every student is provided either a laptop or a tablet. I think that this would certainly be nice- especially when you consider that pretty much all university students are expected to have their own technology, but every district has to weigh the pros and cons. First of all, it's quite an expensive endeavor. Where will the funding come from? What can be cut, and/or where can new funding come from? Perhaps partnerships can be made with private companies, but what types of pressure would that put on public school systems? Moreover, while technology can be very interesting for kids (or even deadly boring, of course) is it really more effective than more traditional methods or even hands-on projects? Research doesn't seem to show great gains in learning because of technology, but I would argue that if it is used well it can help keep students engaged, and it can also allow for more flexibility in teaching and learning.

My greatest fear is that some people may believe that teachers can simply be replaced by technology. I believe that this is highly erroneous because it is the human connection and relationship that is the most effective in creating conscientious and caring citizens. Sure, motivated students can certainly learn a lot on their own (there are quite a few examples of some amazing autodidacts throughout history), and technology can help them do that. But, technology should be used to free up more time to create, sustain, and develop those relationships so that we and our students will learn to be better people and create better communities instead of just creating more and more "technological islands" and divisions. We are much more than simply numbers or cogs in the machine.