Foreign Language Department Meeting

About an hour before the department meeting with Foreign Language, I was in a bit of a panic. The entire network was down. Suddenly, with no reason (and no later explanation since, and I'm writing this about three days after the fact) there was simply no internet.

That was problematic since I was intending to show the teachers some tools and then discuss how they might be used for instructions.

Fortunately, about fifteen minutes before the meeting, the network just as suddenly and mysteriously decided to function again.

The meeting went relatively well. In prep, I had added a page for foreign language to my wiki. I mostly used tools I was already aware of that I felt had foreign language applications. I showed the teachers my wiki, and the list of tools I thought would be of use.

I was hoping to discuss more curriculum and/or standards. But, as is often the case with tech enthused teachers, they were very focused on the tools. Even so, while looking at the various tools, they did talk about HOW they could use them. They talked about how they could replace something less functional that they already used. They talked about specific lessons where these tools would engage students. At first, I was starting these conversations, but by the end of the meeting, I was just sitting back and listening to them.

I think this meeting was a very good start. I showed them voice thread, voki, audacity, and wordle.

Audacity was probably the least favorite, because it looks intimidating. They liked voice thread, but are a little wary of having to pay for the edu version, or of risking students stumbling across inappropriate content or comments. Also, I think trying to use the mouse to annotate images was frustrating for them. Voki was by far the favorite. The teachers were able to quickly figure it out, and saw the potential for having students be very engaged by it. They liked audacity for the idea of having students listen to themselves speaking a foreign language, but liked voki better. Students could still listen to themselves, and re-record as many times as they like. And, students could still share work with one another. But, the interface is more engaging (a talking cat is just better to look at than a big grey box) and less intimidating. The time limit of 60 seconds is also not likely to be an issues. And, as time moves on and the teachers become more comfortable with some technologies, they might be more willing to give audacity another try. I'm of the opinion that in the meantime I should look for something similar that scares people less.

They also had a chance for a better intro to the student laptops. Because they do not have teacher laptops, I decided to bring student laptops to the meeting so that everyone could have a computer. It did make trying to keep everyone on the same page a challenge. One teacher had an exceptionally hard time with the red mouse button. and, the teacher whose room we used wanted to sit at her desk, so it was harder for me to notice if she had missed something.

This was an intro--to the computers, to using technology, and to working with me--and as an intro it went very well. I think that I will have opportunities to collaborate with the foreign language department in the future.

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.