Teaching Today . . .

Permission

I was somewhat surprised that there were so many kids who refused permission to be photographed for the donors choose project. The permission slip was overly vague so I am not surprised. Incidentaly many more 8th graders refused than 7th.

Reading and Quizzing

7th graders were assigned a reading and translating assignement while i was out on Friday, but it got a bit goofed up.  So tomorrow I have to backtrack with the other class to catch up.  With today’s long classes I whipped through the two reading pieces for Lektion 2.  Tomorrow we will be working on the grammar and culture points and moving on in the lesson.  Planning on Quizzing at the end of the week and starting Lektion 3 before the nine-weeks ends.

8th graders are working on verbs.  Pretty heavily.  I gave a pop quiz on the modal verb wollen.  I got mixed results.  Much success from the grammar powerpoint I used to introduce the unit.

Long weeks

I’ve been back at school, though I missed two days last week (Tuesday and Wednesday) and since I’ve been struggling to keep up with everything, i haven’t updated this journal. The biggest disappointment has been the way my students behaved on Friday with the substitute.  I go one of the worst sub reports that I have ever had when I returned to work on Monday.  The 7th graders, though a bit talkative, were not bad, and I reinforced my expectations, and some potential consequences (specifically losing rights to German Candy club as a class, and being written up individually)  The 8th graders were rude and disrespectful, which I won’t tolerate.  For the most part, individuals were named, with the exception of my 8-7s & 8-8s who were particularly bad.  These students were read the riot act.  I brought everything, disappointment, anger, embarrassment, you name it.  And it is true.  It is a slap in the face to me to return to this.  I won’t tolerate it.  I need to start making some calls, but am having trouble finding time before or after school  

On another note, I’m progressing with the 7th graders into Lektion 2 of the Schule unit,  this means that they will have a change to work with the vocabulary during their next class (long days with the sub) and can move onto a story on Friday. 

I’m still not where I would like to be with 8th grade  I had planned on writing some stories and developing the vocab lists, but right now I’m just plodding through the textbook chapters in 8th grade.  Though I’m not using the textbook itself very much.

Back at it …

I’ve been back for three days, and it has been pretty good so far.  On Wednesday, I focused on the German Candy that had come in, using an all German lesson to talk about the products, and intorduce some new language adn vocabulary.  Of course, as expected I piqued the interest of the students who didn’t participate, so I let them enroll at this point, and will purchase more candy before a general re-enrollment.

Thursday was short, so I did Kindergartentag with my 7th graders.  Die Kleine Raupe Nimmersatt.  All but first period were energetic and excited.  I think I need a bit of extra push for them.  8th graders all had 1/2 hour periods, so I worked on verb conjugations with them.

Friday — I reviewed the translation of the first story in class, then we sang a song.  8th graders practiced using the time in sentences (TIME - ACTION - PLACE) and we did mad-libs as a sponge for the end of class.

Two issues:

Got my voice recorders, though sadly they are not Mac compatible.  I think if I get parallels, it will work.  I need to do thank yous, and start using them in an activity.

My last period class is getting pretty bad.  I need to get them under control.  Perhaps it it time to talk to some teachers, and start working on a real solution.

Returning to work

Tomorrow (Wednesday) I return to work after a long hiatus during this family emergency.  I”m looking forward to getting into some routine, but am anxious about what returning to work will mean.  I’ve been having trouble focusing on anything for long periods of time, am easily distracted and generally not tolerating the normal background noises that are usually taken for granted.

My classes seem to have had work for the past seven days, but I’m not entirely sure what they did.  It seems like the 7th graders had some cultural things to work through, though the 8th graders may have just ended up with worksheets.

I’m worried about open house.  I don’y know if I can take a whole evening of people’s condolences.  It is something that I should do, but don’t really want to do. I’ll see what happens when I show up.

I’m not certain how to proceed with my classes, since I don’t know what they have done.  I guess tomorrow will be one of those days where I am scrambling to find out where they are, so I can figure out what to do next.I think it is  a day 3 meaning I will see all my 7th graders, and nearly all of the 8th graders.

Language Learning vs. Language Acquiring

8th grade today featured the lesson that I do on language learning vs. language acquisition.  I try to explain a fairly complex topic in the terms of that which one does without thinking (acquisition) and that which is done purposefully through grammar, vocabulary and language study.  (learning)  I try to use real world examples to tie together the ways that acquisition affects them in their native langauge as well as foreign language study.  It’s amazing how low the confidence level of my students is, even though I can draw so much acquired German out of them with little effort.  I finished with some examples of language acquisition from Nora.  It made it real (and cute.)

7th graders had two long days — first period played catch up and jammed a TPRS mini-story in with the reading and transslation of the text story.  It was, all in all fairly successful.  In the next class I spent nearly the entire time on the reading of the story, embellishing the storyline, adding wierder and wierder contents to the girl’s backpack (17 million pens, 17,000 German books, a cat named fluffy who does Sabine’s homework in the backpack, a dog who wants to eat the cat.)  At the end of all of that, the translation of the story was a no-brainer.  The kids intuitively knew what the German text meant, including the ‘bizzare’ terms like denn, dadrin (Was hast du denn dadrin.  AND die ist aber schwer!)

Blended Schools sharing

Cross posted from mrplatts.com

Our BSN Coordinator asked for answers to these questions — I may have overdone my answer, but it was valuable reflection.

How are you using BlackBoard …

• … in the classroom?
• … for curriculum?
• … in elementary school?
• … the tools?

My response:

In 7th and 8th grade German I have faced two main issues, time and lack of current resources. Blackboard is a way to help me overcome these challenges.

I am using BB for the following:

1) Textbook replacement - Out textbook Komm Mit was published shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, during which time the German Currency has changed, the spelling rules of the language have been overhauled, and lastly fashion, activities and interests have developed and changed greatly. I am using BB to compile my own resources, as well as making use of the cream of the crop that I find online. The existing grammar, or vocabulary sections in the text are shallow and undeveloped, while simultaneously failing to explain anything clearly. I either create my own reference page in BB, which allows me to embed audio examples as well as text, or I make use of my new favorite source, a university beginners German course form the University of Portsmouth in England. I’ve been in touch with Paul Joyce, and he only asks for brief acknowledgment that the content from his Open Online German Textbook are his work. By including my own pictures from Germany, I can show real Germans, in a believable way, and can compare and contrast fashions with American students in a real way, rather than using the pictures taken in the 80’s as these kids entire representation of how Germans dress and act.

2) Assessment (for/of learning) — I’m not a huge fan of the test layout, and the labor-intensive question creation in BB, but I do like using the online tests for a few reasons. Instant feedback — unless it is something that requires later grading, the students get an instant report about how they did on a quiz, and while the experience if fresh in their minds they see the questions, their answers (right or wrong) and any other possible answers that could have fit. Some students are not good online test takers, but it is simple to identify those students and print out a paper copy for them to see. This allows me to spend a little extra time with those students (often special ed students) giving more personalize feedback.

The assessment statistics data lets me dig into my classes and see who is scoring what, how my grades were distributed and who I need to follow up with (retest, review, remediate) With over 230 students this has freed up time for actual teaching, planning, needs assessment, rather than mundane clerical work.

3) Grade book — after a little tweaking (assigning student IDs to Fort couch user accounts that indicate section number, followed by a number, their alphabetical order in the class) I have finally mastered the Blackboard gradebook, and like it better than Gradequick. (SmartViews are key) Since we don’t have EdLine, the students can now see both their on-line and offline grades in BB and then at the end of the 9-weeks I can export (or just copy) the final totals into a GQ book.
If we did (when we do) have edline this would (will) create an extra step, but I believe that I could still export and import back and forth even including the assignment headers.

4) Tools –> Currently my course is not as dynamic, or interactive as I would like. I am using the blog as a one-way communication tool by placing it as the entry point for the course. this way I can share with the students (comments are off, kids cannot post, so it is fairly controlled. I see this as a place to exhibit outstanding work, invite students to share and something to develop. The discussion board will be used eventually, though I haven’t implemented it yet.
Vocab Wiki — The class will shortly begin using the wiki tool as a vocabulary guide. Students will contribute vocabulary entries to the page, and can earn extra credit for excellent entries. I would like to let them include photo-entries, but am wrestling with a way to control this to prohibit abuse.

5) Classroom — I have called up the site frequently for two reasons. 1) to show students where to find material 2) Display some sort of content online — the current lesson’s vocabulary list for example.

6) Future — My supervision project for this year is to create a class podcast, and BB has an integrated podcasting feature that is more well-developed than Schoolwires (iTunes Feed creation to be specific) I plan on using this to implement the podcast.

I’m sure there is much more that I *could* be using BB for but I’m still in the process of figuring out the most effective way to organize my material, and use time effectively.