Foreign Language Dept

I finally had a meeting with the non CFF teachers today. I had been unsure if this was going to happen, but, as they are now allowed to use the laptop carts, I strongly felt it was needed.

I wasn't sure what to expect. I had a larger turnout than I'd anticipated. I was on my own--no one from admin or the tech department was able to make the meeting. Still, things went really well. I almost forgot to print a meeting agenda, but I managed to pull one together about fifteen minutes before the meeting, and I had a cart to demonstrate with. I didn't have access to the internet, which meant I wasn't able to show any of the image files I wanted (I couldn't log onto the computer because it was not connected to the network, and I don't have a local logon for the room I was using).

When I took questions at the end of the meeting, I got a lot from the two Foreign Language teachers. Since the work day was over, I eventually thanked everyone for coming and asked the FL teachers if they wanted to stick around and go over some things (I also wanted to lock the laptop cart up before its storage room was locked for the night).

They are very eager to use the laptops. Their first thought was using the laptops to access their online text books. Previously, they had had to have students do this as homework, and even that was not an ideal situation since some students did not have access to the internet. As we talked, we discussed using the laptops with headphones for listening activities. I mentioned the Audacity activity I had done for reading fluency, and they liked the idea of doing something similar. We also talked about having students make and record vokis and use muchobeets flashcards. I hope to also bring up the idea of collaborating or communicating with native speakers. This will be more difficult without student emails, but doable with tools such as blogs, wikis, nings, skype, etc.

One of the teachers I was talking to was the dept. chair. At one point, she said she wanted to share and talk about some of these ideas with other teachers in her department, and I told her that, if she wanted to have a dept. meeting, I would be more than happy to come and talk with them.

I'm glad that, even though foreign language wasn't included in CFF at my school at the beginning, I will have the chance to work with them now. I'm really looking forward to it.