Aimed application - thoughts from week 6

There are several applicable components from this course that I could see myself incorporating into my classroom. First of all, this class has opened my eyes to a number of new tools, and really the idea that I need to stay current with tools. I am going to take the challenge of learning and incorporating at least one new applicable tool into my classroom per semester and repeating this each year. Starting with VoiceThread (truthfully, I am enamored with it) I will seek out ways to connect my students more socially to the language. I think that the tools section of this course really did give me a lot of new, good ideas. As an educator, I need to stay current with technology…I don’t know why I wasn’t really doing this before. I guess I just wasn’t challenging myself in this way. There are so many things that we as teachers need to accomplish on a day-to-day basis that by the end of the year we almost have no room to breathe. I will need to force effort to accomplish this, but I know that I can do it. Really, I just needed to be introduced to these tools.

This week, the focus on authentic assessment has also touched me. I know that I have a very enjoyable course that produces well-prepared students, but I don’t know if I would call all my assessments authentic. As we start our book adoption process, I am going to keep this in mind. The more authentic and real life I can find, the better. Essentially we will be rewriting the curriculum soon, so now is a perfect time to make sure that I structure my assessments and projects to be less traditional overall and more authentic.

Some concepts would be harder for me to incorporate. Mostly, I am hindered by many of the educational tools being blocked at the high school where I teach. Pretty much anything social related is blocked including forums. We do have some ways to use forums but they aren’t as appealing as blogger for example. I also still cannot see myself teaching an online course in a foreign language. The oral communication is such an important component, and I know that perhaps Skype could be utilized for this, but I am still not completely sold. I would be really interested in seeing what universities that teach online language courses do to address this component. I feel like leaving it out would not do the language (or the student) justice. Overall though I do have a lot of good ideas that I can take away from this course and apply to the classroom.