Using Google Wave in the Foreign Language Classroom

I'm not the one who thought to use Wave. That was a student's idea. 

I just came up with the task: for the kids to write their own epic poem in Latin. Google Wave for writing Latin Epics? Of course... I should've thought of that to begin with! 

It's actually a no brainer. (Or that's what I discovered over two days watching the kids work with it in class.)

Basically, creating the poem is a four step process: 

1) Collaborating on the writing of the poem in English. 

2) Editing the English version into a cohesive whole. 

3) Rendering the English into Latin. 

4) Making adjustments to fit the Latin version into epic meter.

We began by chunking up parts of the narrative -- beginning, rising action, climax, etc -- between the students. We were all sitting around a big table with our laptops, so it was easy both to chat between one another f2f and at the same time follow what was happening on the Wave (which I projected on the wall).

I find that this is often the key: hybridizing f2f and online experiences.

The students developed a humorous story about Greek heroes on a quest to save the last ice cream cone. (Okay, so it's no Homer... but it's a start!)

As students wrote their chunks, I flipped through the Wave commenting on each student's work -- it being a Wave, of course, I am able to comment as they are working rather than waiting for them to turn something in. This is a great way both to gauge formative learning as well as nipping problems in the bud before they blossom into full-blown misconceptions -- it's so often those ingrained misconceptions that we spend so much time trying to help kids unlearn.

Once the English versions were rendered and edited into five-line chunks, students began the process of morphing their poem into Latin. We started with the verbs.

As students suggested verbs and verb-forms, I was able to check through quickly and again figure out who needed extra help and who was ready for greater challenges (and as I've found over and over, it's not always the kids at one end of the 'grades' spectrum or the other that needs more of the former or more of the latter). Wave actually lets me gauge each student individually in real-time and cater my teaching to each individual student. 

I'm coming to think of Wave as a 'differentiation and formative assessment' device.

Tomorrow, we'll start on the process of rendering the rest of the Latin and fitting everything into the confines of the old ancient meter. I'll be sure to post my thoughts on the conclusion of the project and hopefully will have a nice bit of Latin Epic to offer you all -- courtesy of the kids -- in two days' time.

1:1 iPod Touches in the Spanish Classroom

@SenorG is doing great stuff with iPod Touches in his Spanish classroom! Here's a recent television report on what a social-tech-integrated learning experience can look like.

(And notice the use of TodaysMeet!)

Back to School: Ideas for Twitter in the Foreign Language Classroom

The first day back after break was tricky.

In addition to my Fine Arts classes, I'm teaching three Latin courses. They are whole-year courses and the Mid-Terms in each tend to be somewhat memorization-intensive.

I remember my own days of stultifying high school Spanish being led repetitively through endless vocab drills and suffering the wrath of a teacher who couldn't understand that every sentient being wasn't born with the ability to roll r's.

And so, I've tried to break things up a bit.

As all foreign language teachers know, rote memorization is just part of the game. You just can't learn a language without being immersed entirely in verb forms and noun declensions.

It's just the nature of the beast.

So, what I've been doing -- and what seems to be working pretty well -- is having students use Twitter for verb parsing review and translation practice. I first forayed into this pedagogical area maybe nine months ago and have since worked out a few 'tried and tested' techniques that I offer all language teachers. Here are the top three:

1. Twitter for verb parsing review: Have the students identify and parse verbs directly from a text into the hashtag of a Twitter feed. After ten or so minutes, stop and review the results in the feed. Incorrect parses are corrected and all correct and corrected items are saved to a second hashtag or to a wiki. In the future, I plan to make the second hashtag saved to FriendFeed for the archiving capabilities. Either way, this gives the students a collaboratively built verb study guide and is far more entertaining and engaging than sitting at a desk sounding out dozens of verb forms for what seems like hours on end.

2. Using Twitter as a 'lifeline' for translation exercises: Each student opens up the text, the Twitter feed, and a digital English/Latin dictionary in his or her browser. As each sentence is Tweeted, a virtual compendium of common mistakes inevitably is created. We then follow the system described in #1.

3. Twitter as formative assessment for foreign language translation: One of the nice things Twitter provides the foreign language teacher is a continuous, time-stamped record of posts searchable in real-time. I use this to gauge how individual students are progressing -- if I see students struggling in time or accuracy, it is a simple matter to gauge the problem and intervene as necessary.

These are just a few techniques that have worked well. I'd love to hear about things you all have worked out.

The Magic of "Correctly Enabled Web Tools"

Andrew B. Watt demonstrates the just plain usefulness of the Web.

In describing a recent experience with a student from China, he ruminates on the simple communicative effectiveness of a good online translator:

...she figured out in a few minutes how to make something useless to her — a 20-minute talk in English — into something useful, via correctly enabled Web tools. This is the kind of world we live in… and yet people still insist that we need to have paper books.

Translating the translatable. It's not rocket science. And yet for so long language has been the barrier.

But it's now on the way to becoming a pre-21st century excuse.

It's true: immediate accurate real-time translation is the next step. The folks making Google Wave sure think so. And true, there have been plenty of crappy online translators that have been ruining the nuance of a participial phrase for some time now, but the possibilities ahead -- especially in the context of a semantic web -- make the hairs on the back of my neck stick up.

Ah, the magic of the 'real' Babble Fish. One wonders where human history would be if we had had this stuff all along.

Math, meet Spanish; Spanish, meet Math...

A reader picks up on the recent math conversation with an interesting comment:

Just as math and science teachers need to incorporate the arts in their instruction, those of us in the humanities must support math and science learning. For example, do creative writing and word problems need to be mutually exclusive? (Maybe students would be more engaged with word problems that are personalized and not about two trains!) Another expample: my Spanish students learn numbers in my class but will do so by practicing greater than/less than and negative numbers, skills a math colleague said many lack.

Maybe part of the trick in using elements of Web 2.0 in the math classroom is to approach it from the cross-curricular perspective.

Architecture is the perfect example of a field that effortlessly blends art, history, and math. I'm sure you all can come up with many others.

I love the idea of using a foreign language to teach math. Back in college, my elementary Greek teacher was also my first statistics teacher. He approached teaching math as if he were teaching a foreign language.

Today, a math teacher using this approach could easily incorporate much of the paperless procedures and tech integrated pedagogies that foreign language teachers are already using.

Again, this isn't really about saving scratch paper in math class. It's about finding ways to make math class just as connected to digital technology and social media as the best tech integrated English class.

Keep coming with the ideas and comments, folks. This is quickly turning into Math Week at TeachPaperless!