Happy St. Patrick's Day

Enjoy your festive day with a look at yours truly when I was as young as the kids I'm now teaching.

MACUL 2014

Wow! What a blast. My first professional conference, and I had an amazing time. I attended some FANTASTIC talks.

One was given by David Theune who hooked me immediately with the title of his talk "Friday Night Lights In The Classroom." He started out his talk with a toast, complete with flavored sparkling water, served in cute glasses for all of his guests. A toast to what? You might ask. A toast to failure. Progressive failure, that is. A toast to shooting so far in your aspirations, that you come up short. A toast to pushing yourself further than you can possibly accomplish, while knowing full well that you may never get there. A toast to failing, and continuing to take pride in your failure. Progressive failure. From that point on, I knew we'd have a great session. 

He followed this up by speaking about authentic assessment and performance. As a French teacher, I am extremely interested in this. Language is something that is always used on relation to others: Reading a book someone else wrote, speaking with another person, writing to another person. Language is all about communication, so why not communicate the language education we are giving to our students with the rest of the world? I feel that language SHOULD be one of the easiest topics to have authentic assessment and performance with, yet so often it occurs in a vacuum. I was excited for this talk to energize me and open my mind to the possibilities that I could take on in my classroom. 

David spoke about 6 specific audiences: parents, world, local non-profits, choice, younger students in the district, and peers. He has had his students present to each of these groups of people, and gave us a small view into his world of doing so.

 One of the ideas I took from this presentation that I could definitely use with my students is the idea of a digital narrative. Students write their own digital narrative, and put it on youtube. This is a method of sharing with the world. Some students only got about 35 views - from their grand-parents, parents, and let's face it - the student themselves. But some of his students really found an audience through this project. For instance, this student who was a quiet, removed student without many connections in her classroom really found community through her video. Take a look, it is extremely moving and I dare you to watch the first 30 seconds before making a decision about watching the rest. It will hook you!!

Another idea he talked about was reaching out to the community asking for donations. David Theune was able to raise $2000 in donations to give back to non-profit organizations. His students did research papers on non-profit organizations in their community, and read each others in class. The top papers were read by all students and the top 4 were selected. The $2000 was divided among those top four, and the students were able to meet with the head of the non-profit organization they wrote about and hand them the check and the paper. How cool is that! So inspiring.

One of the things I am struggling with as a beginning French teacher is how to do things like this in my classroom. The personal narrative seems feasible because students can do one without needing to know many words. Adjectives would work just fine. However, the other ideas we discussed in our talk this weekend, were much more detailed, such as the non-profit organization essay. My students don't have enough vocabulary to be able to execute something like this.

Do any World Language teachers have suggestions for me?
 What kinds of authentic assessments and performances do you do? 
I am willing to take any and all suggestions. Always looking for more! :) 

If you are interested in learning more about David Theune, check him out on twitter at @DavidTheune. 

If you are interested in some new reading material, he recommended two books I recently purchased on my kindle which will likely inspire later blog posts. 1) Drive - Daniel Pink 2) Sticks and Stones - Emily Bazelon. If you read them - let me know what you think!!

More posts about MACUL coming soon... :) 

Vicki Davis: A Woman of Many Talents

Vicki Davis, A teacher, Blogger, Radio Host, Author, Technological Innovator, Wife, Mother, Volunteer, Speaker, Award-Winning, self-proclaimed "Country Girl," and human being.  (Where I found out all these adjectives). She is also the Edublogger who I made two comments to recently. The reason why I picked her is because she is one of the high school teachers who leads a classroom of students in AIC, a simulation course run by U of M graduate students like myself (Read more about AIC here). I work with about 15 of her students, who do some of the best work of all of the students in my simulation. As a class, we skyped Vicki a couple weeks ago to hear more about how she runs her classroom in relation to AIC. She was so enthusiastic and friendly, I was delighted to find out she also blogs regularly!

The first blog post I commented on is titled "The Right Tough and F’s in school: are we failing kids?" She wrote about how many teachers brag about failing students, and questioned if it was something to really brag about. She discusses what failure in classrooms really means, and what is doesn't mean - i.e. failing to be an A+ human being. I really identified with this post. I told her that I completely agree with the point she makes - that an F is a bullseye to give a student more attention. I stated that I truly believe we should devote our time and energy to not only changing struggling students' grades, but also their perception of themselves! She also write about how students put up walls that stop them from achieving in school. I elaborated on her idea by sharing that there are so many kinds of walls. It is so hard to get in touch with every single student and help them make little doors in their walls to let certain people through, but we continue to try. Once the breakthrough is made - success happens!

The most important part of her post, for me, was when she wrote about the support of administration and how important that is. A segment of my comment to her is below: 

"You say that you are lucky your administration has always supported you in failing students when they earn the F, and the idea that some administrations don't makes me sick! I was just talking to my mentor teacher today who stated that she would get questioned, and reprimanded for not reaching her "goal" if she failed a student whose parent pulled them out of the school, but didn't "officially" disenroll the student, so they were being counted as "absent" and their assignments were "missing." She said that F would be looked at just as any other kid who is just skipping school, or coming and not paying attention. I can't imagine that a teacher would be in trouble for things like that. It makes me so sad!"

I ended with a few questions for her: How do you tell the difference between someone who won’t let you help and someone who just takes time? How long do you pursue them in this case? I asked because in my ideal future, I will never stop pursuing a student even if they act like help is the last thing I can give them. However, I know how frustrating and discouraging that must be. 

I love that she writes about things that are applicable to all teachers, regardless of the "content area." As Maria Coolican always says, "You don't teach French, Science, or Math. You teach kids." I can see that shining through in Vicki's blog.

The second post I commented on was one about enjoying the silence of the morning and being alone. This was so important to me because I am so caught up in all of the work I am doing in and outside of school. In undergrad, I often forgot to take time for myself. I have gotten much better at this during grad school (when I have less time to give up, of course), but now I often feel guilty about it. Vicki's post made me realize how important and essential this time is to leading a happy and (mentally) healthy life. 

I haven't heard back from her yet, but part of that is my fault. I didn't realize she moved her site to a new address, and I commented on the Failure post at the old address. I copied on to the same post at her new address so hopefully she will be able to find it and reply. I will comment back on this post when and if she does! 

I have subscribed to her blog in order to see when she updates it, and I plan on checking back on it regularly. She truly is an inspiration and I encourage you to check out her site. Let me know if you find any intriguing posts (how could you not?) and what your thoughts are! 

In case you're interested, her twitter handle is @coolcatteacher :) Have Fun and a Good Holiday Break, everyone!

FaKeBoOk

      In an age where students are excited by, and distracted by, any type of social media, it can seem hard to reach them. Teachers employ many strategies, including bad jokes and "cool" band t-shirts, in order to try and get in touch with their students. Much to their dismay, this doesn't always work. I had a student tell me he didn't like his math teacher because she didn't "GET him." Upon further investigation on that point, he said "She doesn't talk about anything besides the math. She doesn't connect to my life at all. I don't want help from her because she doesn't connect with me." While that made me sad, it also opened my eyes. These teachers, though they are failing, are at least TRYING to connect with their students, which is so important. Luckily, I was presented with an ingenious tool called Fakebook which would not only let teachers attempt to integrate course material with students lives, but help them succeed!
      Small anecdote....Senior year of college I took a French creative writing class. I loved everything about it because it allowed me to use my French in ways that allowed me to be crafty and allowed me to write about things that were interesting to ME! We turned in a writing piece every class period, three times per week, for the entire semester (that's a lot), and I can count on one hand the number of times a certain subject was required. The rest of the time, we wrote about whatever we wanted, as long as we implemented a certain grammatical structure we had just learned. Shoutout to Prof. George Hoffmann for making this class ROCK.
      Anyway, one of our assignments was that we had to make a Facebook page for a person of our choice - book character, celebrity, movie character, etc. They were all shared with the class on the big screen so the pressure was ON. The product of my efforts is below....
   

     You probably can't tell, but I slaved away on this piece of art. I couldn't make it in microsoft word because it was too hard to add all the little graphics. What graphics you see? Oh, well every little "like" thumb, relationship heart, location stamp, calendar date, or picture, was a screenshot taken from the one and only real facebook. I had to copy and paste them into whatever program I used so as you can imagine, formatting was a NIGHTMARE. I ended up doing it in Powerpoint and had to make three different slides because it wouldn't all fit on one. Oh yeah, and that blue and bold type-face? By hand. As you can imagine, I wasn't upset about all this work in the least since I loved the class so much. Additionally, when I finished, I was super excited to have my work and dislike of Taylor Swift's recycle-dating-program projected onto the big screen.

      HOWEVER. What if I didn't like the class this much? What if I didn't care about the teacher or the assignments and I didn't want to put that much effort in? Doing this and coming up with even a decent project would be beyond the scope of things.... Until FAKEBOOK. With fakebook, you can make a facebook account that is more complete and better looking than the one I created myself with less than half the time! I even went ahead and did it for you - go on - It's much better - just click it - Make sure you check out the L-side bar - 

CHECK IT OUT!

        In total, it took me 20 minutes to create that. Okay, maybe 25. That is nothing compared to how much time I spent on the first one - and it looks better!! 

     Obviously, my reactions to the presentation were many and they were all very excited and very happy. I think this is a fun thing to do which can be incorporated into many disciplines. Personally, I think I will definitely use this with my students in the future. Possibly in the way I learned it, to try out new grammatical structures. I like this idea because I can TAYLOR (Spelled wrong on purpose - get it? get it?) it to my students needs. For instance, first year French students would only write in present tense. Second year could do this switching between present and past tense based on when she posted the update. Third year can switch between the two different types of past tenses which often confuse students to no end. Fourth year and AP can use past, present, and future! It is a great way to assign the same assignment but change it based on skill. Another way to use this would be to document French culture or French history. For instance, Students could make a page for the European Union that goes through the timeline of history of when countries joined, when currency changed etc. Or, Students could make a facebook for a special French holiday - such as bastille day - that dictates what would happen in the preparation of and throughout that day. 

     Even though I had created my "fake" facebook before, I didn't think I would consider it for high school students simply because of the required workload. Now, however, it is much easier and  I will DEFINITELY let my students do this for homework - notice I said "let" not "make" because it really is that much of a treat. 

     Let me know your thoughts! Would you use it? For what discipline? How? What differences did you notice between my first and second fake facebooks?