Various items

0.) I have not reflected, in public, at all about my job change or my shift to a younger grade.  I'm still surviving some parts of it, so I haven't really wanted to bare my soul too much.

1.) My principal sent us a PDF from the state talking about Michigan's new state exam.  Among other things, it's going to take pretty much all of the school year after Tax Day.  More importantly, though, they decided to use the bulk of their test questions from Smarter Balanced.  This is noteworthy because:

a.) The state Legislature adopted the Smarter Balanced assessment, until

b.) a bunch of anti-school activists (who don't care what the standards are, they don't like them) made it look like a federal power grab, which caused

c.) every Republican-run state legislature in the country take a "second look" at the standards.  In Michigan that meant

d.) delaying implementation of Smarter Balanced by a year,

i.)leaving schools and teachers who have been gearing up for this change for three years in the lurch,

ii.) with no information about how schools were going to be evaluated during the 2014-15 school year, 

iii.) while the State Board of Education solicited bids from competitors,

iv.) which we're all pretty certain is going to result in Michigan implementing the Smarter Balanced test.

So, in order to avoid implementing the Smarter Balanced test, the state has made an ad-hoc test which is almost entirely made up of the Smarter Balanced test.  Bravos, muchachos.  Muy bien hecho.

2.) On a lighter note, the moreTPRS listserv pointed me in the direction of "A Child's Guide to Language," a documentary about how kids learn languages.  It can be found in chapters on Youtube here.  This could be something I show to parents on Parent Teacher night.

Flipping Spanish class

My colleage Brendan and I frequently talk about flipping our classrooms--assigning initial instruction as homework, in the form of videos of us (or other teachers) delivering the content.  This would free up class time to answer questions or work on more intensive projects.  We look for Kahn Academy videos and other methods of providing content. Right now it's just talk, but I think we are (independently of one another) going to spend some time this summer trying to make it happen. 

Peter Pappas outlines how he started flipping his classroom, and how we might start even before the year is out.

As a bonus Peter Pappas blog entry, he answers the question, "What would schools look like if students designed the school?

Doodling in math class

This is from the Bloggess.  (I'm not going to link to her page because it's chock-full of language and themes I don't want to associate my mild-mannered and above all professional blog with.)


Any comment I could make would only ruin it.  View in good health.

Portuguese Friday

A student sent me this link.  Great song, cool video, tight execution.

Edited to add a link to the lyrics.

Useful videos

Now that Delicious is going the way of the dodo (everybody tells me so, that's how I know) there are two things I should really start doing here, in my own little space on the interWebs.  First, I should start cataloging serious alternatives: lots of people have them.  I followed someone's directions and imported all of my Delicious links into Google Bookmarks.  It seems a poor alternative thus far, largely because I can now not find my Google Bookmarks page.  Nor can I add bookmarks without going to Google Bookmarks.  For Delicious, I just pressed Command + D.  Viola, permanent record of link forever.  (I'm still doing it, and will up until the day they officially pull the plug.)  (Which, evidently, they might not.) 

Second, I should start using the space to keep track of links I want to keep track of.  Well, I've kind of been doing that already.  But I should probably, I don't know, do it better or have a better tagging system or something.  (An analysis of tags as the most insanely useful, or not, way of organizing information is forthcoming.  Some year.) 

For example, Nova has a bunch of videos online, like this about Machu Picchu.  There are others, I'm sure.

Free WL resources

These come courtesy of Carrie C. on the ACTFL listserv.  (Not that Carrie C.) 

Learner.org seems to have a variety of free video sources for different school subjects.  For Spanish, they have the video for the textbook series "Destinos."  They also have a college-themed version.  That, combined with some scaffolding, would go a long way to help a learner find comprehensible input.  (Ray, if you read this....) 

For the teacher, they also have a seminar on K-12 language teaching and some arts instruction methods courses that look really interesting.  

Also on the free video front, the BBC has a whole host of language tools.  The Spanish video was insufferably slow-going for my taste--it felt like "Dora the Explorer" for adults.  ("Can you say 'largo?' [pause] ¡Muy bien!)  But maybe it's just what some learners need.  And maybe later lessons focus on providing comprehensible input.