Polyglot Press
Messages for the World Language Teacher
November 1, 2011
The Polyglot Press aims to inform the UCPS World Language teachers and keep them abreast of valuable links, news, professional developments, accomplishment, etc. This information is housed on www.polyglotpress.blogspot.com You can also add comments. Sharing ideas and resources is very appreciated.
BRAVO
Lindsey Gallagher is one of UCPS’ first “Global Teachers”, a cohort of teachers chosen exclusively to share their resources on how to bring that global perspective and resources into all UCPS classes. A reception was held to honor these new county leaders October 13.
Professional Organizations
FLANC Update - The 2011 FLANC Conference did not disappoint. There was excellent internet access throughout the conference. Most presentations were electronic and there were few handouts.
· More conference details will be shared in time.
ACTFL Update –
· The ACTFL Conference takes place in Denver, Colorado November 18, 19, 20. Nina Chen of WMS and CMS along with Xiaohong HuMueller of MRHS will attend with funds from the Confucius Classroom from the Asia Society where UCPS is in their first cohort from across the US.
· Marty Abbot has been chosen to be the new Marty spearheaded the creation of the holistic and analytic rubrics for speaking and writing that are used worldwide.
ADVOCATING FOR WORLD LANGUAGES
· People Magazine Interviews 10 Bilingual Celebrities: Colin Firth, Bradley Cooper, Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton, Charlese Theron, Ben Affleck, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, http://www.people.com/people/gallery/0,,20515236_20996748,00.html
TEACHING WORLD LANGUAGES
· World Language Assessment: Get in the Mode! supports and empowers world language educators to improve student proficiency through a variety of assessment strategies. Focusing on the three modes of communication (interpretive, presentational, and interpersonal), this resource from Wisconsin provides a framework of formative, interim, and summative assessments for use at any grade level
GRANTS
The Foreign Language Association of North Carolina is sponsoring Mini Grants for the purpose of promoting and encouraging K-Post-secondary educators in their endeavors to stimulate learning and awareness of languages other than English.
Application Guidelines
FLANC small grants support educational projects designed to promote foreign language teaching and learning in North Carolina. The grants are available on a competitive basis. Applicants are urged to use these grants to leverage additional funding from their schools or other sources for the development of their grant project.
Who is eligible to apply
Current FLANC members
K-12 teachers and administrators in North Carolina
University instructors in North Carolina
Representatives of local professional associations or non-profit organizations that promote foreign language teaching in North Carolina
Current FLANC Board members are ineligible.
What kinds of projects are funded?
The following projects that contribute to the promotion of foreign language education in North Carolina:
Advocacy for foreign language teaching and learning
Enhancement of students’ foreign language proficiency and cultural competency
Professional development for teachers
Enhancement of foreign language teacher education
Others projects that promote foreign language teaching and learning
How much money may I request?
The amount you can request is up to $500.
Is there any restriction for my application?
An applicant may request funding only once each school year.
Grant money may not be used for salaries or stipends.
Grant money may not be used for any purposes other than what you have proposed.
Amount requested is not guaranteed. The committee may recommend a reduced amount at their discretion.
What is the length of the project?
The project should be completed within one school year.
How do I apply?
Read the guidelines for the mini-grants.
If you are a K-12 or college instructor, obtain endorsement from your supervisor (principal, program chair, or dean). Have him or her send endorsement by email to the FLANC secretary (tamaradhugheswsnc@gmail.com) What is required upon the completion of the project?
Download the project evaluation form from the FLANC website and fill it out to report how the project was conducted and whether it met its objectives.
Submit a financial report to the FLANC treasurer that shows how much money was spent for what purpose. Attach all receipts.
All the reports and receipts should be submitted within one month from the completion of the project to the FLANC Small Grant Committee and Treasurer at the addresses printed on the evaluation form.
FLANC may ask you to give a presentation at the next fall conference.
When is the application deadline?
Application must be submitted electronically by November 15th.
When will I know whether or not my application is accepted?
By early January, following the deadline year.
Global Studies / Global Views
· The 2011 Global Education Conference will be held November 14 - 18, online and free. Please visit the new conference site at http://www.globaleducationconference.com. The 2010 Global Education conference had over 400 sessions, over 60 keynote speakers, and over 15,000 participant logins. The session recordings from the 2010 Global Education Conference can be accessed either at the individual session listings or on the "Recordings" page. The Global Education Wiki holds additional content and help, including the mentor program. The Global Education Ning Network is a good place to network with other global educators, as is Elluminate's LearnCentral network (where you also get a free Elluminate vRoom) and the Classroom 2.0 network. Spanish speakers can try Aula 2.0, and students can join Student 2.0. The Global Education Conference was nominated for three 2010 Edublog Awards: "Best Educational Webinar Series," "Best Use of a PLN," and Best Use of a Social Network (the Global Education Collaborative), and won in the first two categories. · Jessica Garner shared the following that was shared with her by Jonathan Charney of VIF.
Around the World in a Minute; “Move, Learn, Eat!”
· Given one of the areas of focus on the new Teacher Evaluation Instrument is global and cultural awareness - teachers across North Carolina are increasingly looking for affordable and easy to access resources to help their students learn more about the world beyond our borders. One such resource Jonathan Charney, Director of Partnerships at VIF International Education based in Chapel Hill has been recommending is a set of brief but powerful one-minute videos that are sure to inspire students at all levels.
· “New teacher evaluation or not- we live in a globally integrated world- the more we can do to bring that world into our classrooms, get kids excited and curious about other people, places and cultures the more prepared they’ll be to excel in it”, said Charney. “Resources like these inspire great teaching.”
· “Three guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, two cameras and almost a terabyte of footage... all to turn three ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ....into three beautiful and hopefully compelling short films....”The videos entitled “Move”, “Learn” and “Eat” since posting to Vimeo a month ago are amazing viewers across the world. Directed by Rick Mereki, produced by Tim White, and staring Australian Actor Andrew Lees, the films showcase what’s being called “the trip of a lifetime”. If the link doesn’t work, please check it out at http://vimeo.com/27243869. · Intercultural Time Machine – How do different cultures organize their time? See how world cultures organize their time differently. This is an interactive site http://www.argonautonline.com/?pid=801 How late can you arrive to a minute? How long should you keep eye contact? How quickly should you respond to emails? · Culturosity Resources to learn about other cultures, grow from these experiences, and make global awareness a natural part of our daily lives. http://www.culturosity.com · New Global Citizens has impressed Lindsey Gallagher – Spanish teacher and Global Studies support teacher. http://www.newglobalcitizens.org/ Email Lindsey for ideas on how teachers are involved at Piedmont MS. · Faces of the World http://ncccglobal.com/ Find links to multiple groups like Heifer international, World Policy Institute, One World, Peace Corps – World Wise Schools; Peace Players, etc. · Museum of Anthropology - Wake Forest University http://www.wfu.edu/moa/exhibits/ use their online search feature to find objects you can show in class relevant to your world languages class. The Museum's permanent exhibits consist of objects from the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Two to three times a year the special exhibits gallery houses topical exhibitions reflecting University and community interests. Anthropology students as well as students from other disciplines assist staff with developing and installing exhibits, researching and caring for collections, or they produce special class project exhibits. A self-guided tour of the exhibits focuses on collecting and collectors. As the visitor explores the thematic exhibits, a printed gallery guide discusses how collections are made, who collects, and how exhibit objects became part of the Museum of Anthropology. There is a Saturday post-conference workshop at FLANC on this topic. Temporary Exhibits-
"Dias de los Muertos (Days of the Dead)"
September 13 – December 16, 2011
“Local Peace Corps Volunteers: Bringing Cultures Together for 50 Years”
September 20 – December 16, 2011 “Gazing at the Contemporary World: Japanese Photography from the 1970s to the Present”
January 24 – March 31, 2012
Recent Additions to the Collection April 17-August 25, 2012
"African Religion: Nothing Was or Will Be Except God"
"How Do They Know…? The Science of Archeology in the Yadkin River Valley"
“Art of Sky, Art of Earth: Maya Cosmic Imagery” Technology
· The Facebook application Hoot.me seeks to turn Facebook into a study tool for students. The app diverts students away from their wall and news feed and asks them, "What are you working on?" It then connects students with live group-study sessions on their chosen topic. The tool also could prove useful for educators, providing a way for them to hold "virtual office hours" for students, the tool's CEO and co-founder, Michael Koetting, says. http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/09/distractions-set-aside-facebook-as-a-study-tool/
21st Century Educators
· Partnership for 21st Century Skills - ACTFL was invited to represent world language teachers across the US to create a map of how world language students and teachers use 21st century skills. with 21st Century Partnerships to create a skills map for 21st century learning and world languages http://actfl21stcenturyskillsmap.wikispaces.com/ 1. Anticipates the future.
2. Is a lifelong learner.
3. Fosters peer relationships.
4. Can teach and assess all levels of learners.
5. Is able to discern effective vs. non-effective technology.
Research
· Visual Literacy - Visuals have changed the way that society ‘views’, plots and organizes information, cause and effect, relationships, time, social interactions, etc. Likewise, visuals have become commonplace in teaching and learning. Students use visuals for learning, organizing and remembering. There is an interactive “Periodic Table of Visualizations” used today at http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html - I have to critically think in college, but your tests don't teach me that.
- We learn in different ways at different rates.
- I can't learn from you if you are not willing to connect with me.
- Teaching by the book is not teaching. It's just talking.
- Caring about each student is more important than teaching the class.
- Every young person has a dream. Your job is to help bring us closer to our dreams.
- We need more than teachers. We need life coaches.
- The community should become more involved in schools.
- Even if you don't want to be a teacher, you can offer a student an apprenticeship.
- Us youth love all the new technologies that come out. When you acknowledge this and use technology in your teaching it makes learning much more interesting.
- You should be trained not just in teaching but also in counseling.
- Tell me something good that I'm doing so that I can keep growing in that.
- When you can feel like a family member it helps so much.
- We appreciate when you connect with us in our worlds such as the teacher who provided us with extra help using Xbox and Skype
- Our teachers have too many students to enable them to connect with us in they way we need them to.
- Bring the electives that we are actually interested in back to school. Things like drama, art, cooking, music.
- Education leaders, teachers, funders, and policy makers need to start listening to student voice in all areas including teacher evaluations.
- You need to use tools in the classroom that we use in the real world like Facebook, email, and other tools we use to connect and communicate.
- You need to love a student before you can teach a student.
- We do tests to make teachers look good and the school look good, but we know they don't help us to learn what's important to us.
What type of homework is valuable? From a NY Times article on shared by Paula McGuire (MRMS): http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/opinion/sunday/quality-homework-a-smart-idea.html?_r=1&emc=eta1 “Spaced repetition” is one example of the kind of evidence-based techniques that researchers have found have a positive impact on learning. Here’s how it works: instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one evening and Reconstruction the next — learners encounter the same material in briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach, students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction throughout the semester.
It sounds unassuming, but spaced repetition produces impressive results. Eighth-grade history students who relied on a spaced approach to learning had nearly double the retention rate of students who studied the same material in a consolidated unit, reported researchers from the University of California-San Diego in 2007. The reason the method works so well goes back to the brain: when we first acquire memories, they are volatile, subject to change or likely to disappear. Exposing ourselves to information repeatedly over time fixes it more permanently in our minds, by strengthening the representation of the information that is embedded in our neural networks.
A second learning technique, known as “retrieval practice,” employs a familiar tool — the test — in a new way: not to assess what students know, but to reinforce it. We often conceive of memory as something like a storage tank and a test as a kind of dipstick that measures how much information we’ve put in there. But that’s not actually how the brain works. Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting, so that testing doesn’t just measure, it changes learning. Simply reading over material to be learned, or even taking notes and making outlines, as many homework assignments require, doesn’t have this effect.
Another common misconception about how we learn holds that if information feels easy to absorb, we’ve learned it well. In fact, the opposite is true. When we work hard to understand information, we recall it better; the extra effort signals the brain that this knowledge is worth keeping. This phenomenon, known as cognitive disfluency, promotes learning so effectively that psychologists have devised all manner of “desirable difficulties” to introduce into the learning process: for example, sprinkling a passage with punctuation mistakes, deliberately leaving out letters, shrinking font size until it’s tiny or wiggling a document while it’s being copied so that words come out blurry.
Teachers are unlikely to start sending students home with smudged or error-filled worksheets, but there is another kind of desirable difficulty — called interleaving — that can readily be applied to homework. An interleaved assignment mixes up different kinds of situations or problems to be practiced, instead of grouping them by type. When students can’t tell in advance what kind of knowledge or problem-solving strategy will be required to answer a question, their brains have to work harder to come up with the solution, and the result is that students learn the material more thoroughly.
Researchers at California Polytechnic State University conducted a study of interleaving in sports that illustrates why the tactic is so effective. When baseball players practiced hitting, interleaving different kinds of pitches improved their performance on a later test in which the batters did not know the type of pitch in advance (as would be the case, of course, in a real game).
Interleaving produces the same sort of improvement in academic learning. A study published last year in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology asked fourth-graders to work on solving four types of math problems and then to take a test evaluating how well they had learned. The scores of those whose practice problems were mixed up were more than double the scores of those students who had practiced one kind of problem at a time.
The application of such research-based strategies to homework is a yet-untapped opportunity to raise student achievement. Science has shown us how to turn homework into a potent catalyst for learning. Our assignment now is to make it happen.
Chinese Resources
German Resources
Spanish Resources
· Spanish 1 – Discovery Education has videoclips on the food pyramid from MyPyramid. Gov in Spanish. This would go with the Realidades materials quite easily.
· Vámonos - Hilarious VW ad. Two men travel using a Learn Spanish CD. They start out repeating after the tape with a horrid accent and 795 miles later on one tank of gas, get out of the car fluent. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsTqGa2gd0E · Speaking Latino – for levels 3 – AP and native speakers. “Jared” explores the many varieties of Spanish in different countries, focusing mostly on lexical items. http://www.speakinglatino.com His blog includes topics like Puerto Rican family tree and the variety of words used in Puerto Rico. One can click on the flags per Spanish-speaking countries to see what he has discovered or what others have sent him. He also has posts “quizzes” of written Spanish photographed somewhere. The goal is to spot the spelling error. Warning – some are not classroom vocabulary words. · US Census Data about Hispanics in the Us en español http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/cb11ff-18sp.html Familias, pobreza, educacion, apellidos, etc. Interesting fact: Cuatro apellidos hispanos se encontraban entre los 15 más comunes en el Censo 2000. Fue la primera vez que un apellido hispano lograba incorporarse a los 15 apellidos más comunes durante un censo. García fue el apellido hispano de uso más frecuente; éste se encontró 858,289 veces, y pasó a ser octavo en la lista en el 2000 de decimoctavo reportado en el Censo de 1990. Les seguían Rodríguez (noveno), Martínez (undécimo) y Hernández (decimoquinto) como los apellidos hispanos más comunes. 16 estados con al menos medio millón de hispanos: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, Nueva Jersey, Nuevo México, Nueva York, Carolina del Norte, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia y Washington.
