Speaking Practice, Less Fear

I found this sweet site called voki.com, which allows you to create an avatar and record a voice for it. You can record your voice using a microphone, type in the text that you would like to have spoken, or even record a voice by phone! I'm really excited to use this in my classes, and get my students to do some speaking!! I think this takes away some of the fear students face when speaking a foreign language because there is a little more anonymity in speaking through a character. Plus...it's fun!

Only problems I've found so far:
1) There's a 60 second limit on recordings, unless you upgrade to the paid version. But it's next to impossible to get my students speaking for anywhere close to a minute right now, so this is not such a big obstacle for the time being.
2)Sign-up seems to be a little touch and go. I signed up a few days ago, but never received a confirmation email to activate my account, so that I could save and publish my avatar. However, I tried again today with a different email address, and it worked just fine. Confirmation email arrived in seconds.

I had so much fun creating my avatar and playing around with the voice recording, that the technical issue is worth working past. This would be an excellent addition to my classes' webpage!

EtherPad gets 2 thumbs up

In searching through web 2.0 tools to feature in a webinar in ED504, I discovered a cool little tool called EtherPad. It's a web-based word-processor that allows several people to collaborate on a document, and changes show up INSTANTLY on everyone's screen, no lag time whatsoever. A pretty cool tool for any kind of collaborative work in or out of the classroom, it's recently been accquired by Google but is still up and running until its transition into Google Wave has been completed. Interested in checking it out? Go to etherpad.com or check out my quick-and-dirty how-to screencast. I'm definitely a fan.

It's been really great watching my cohort's webinars and getting a chance to learn about some new web-tools to use both inside the classroom and out. Check back soon for my newest discoveries!

One Potato Two Potato Hot Potato Four

Hot Potatoes is a freeware developed by the good folks at the University of Victoria, specifically for language instruction! The program allows you to create all kinds of nifty web-based activities, like crossword puzzles, matching, multiple choice jumble-sentences, and gap-fill exercises. It was a little tricky to use at first, but after a few minutes playing around with the program, I was able to create some pretty sweet interactive web-based activities. I think this is going to be a very handy tool for the classroom...I may have found a way to make even verb conjugation practice a little more fun!

Check out my latest projects!
Vocabulary matching
Gap-fill Goldilocks story
Past tense conjugation crossword

Do you Think You Can Dance??

Trying my hand at Liveblogging the So You Think You Can Dance results show tonight at 8pm. Join me!

You had a bad day....

Had a bad teaching day? As beginning teachers, it's sure to happen (more often than you want it to!) And while our teaching will get better with more experience, the bad days don't stop. Unfortunately. As a person who gets wrapped up in her emotions, it can be hard to shake these bad day feelings and get back in the saddle to try again. Since I can't flip a switch and become an awesome teacher who will never make another mistake, I had to find a way to deal with the bad day blues.

First things first, I have to give myself some time to acknowledge those feelings. They are valid, and it's ok to be upset and disappointed when you don't live up to your expectations. Last week I let myself have my half-hour drive home for sad time. But then I got out of the car, and my sad time followed me out. I couldn't make myself snap out of the funk, convinced that I would never be a good teacher and filled with doom and gloom (don't worry, my teaching that day was NOT as bad as I felt like it was). So now I have a great idea (in my humble opinion...) for beating the bad day blues:

Had a bad day?
Make a bad day box!
(or folder, or document, or journal, or whatever works for you!)
Fill it with positive feedback from a mentor teacher, compliments and comments from students (my favorite so far - "I definitely won't forget THAT now!"), funny things heard in high school, a lesson plan you're extra proud of, photos, inspirational quotes, anything that will put a smile on your face...the sky is the limit!

What a great way to bust out of that funk and remember why you wanted to become a teacher in the first place. Give it a try, it just might help!

And if that doesn't work, listen to Daniel Powter's 'Bad Day' (a favorite of mine!) The video never fails to make me smile!

Technology on a Friday Night

I spent my Friday night creating a ning site for my Spanish 2 classes. Exciting Friday night plans, huh? It was actually kind of fun though, I enjoyed changing the format and deciding what to put on, etc. I tend to get caught up in projects, and this one definitely kept me occupied!

I'm still very unsure whether I will actually put it into use or not. The collision of worlds - social networking meets school! - scares me a little (to a lot!). One think I really like about ning is that it can be specific to my class, and I have all the say over the content. And because it's academically focused (in my case) and not as well known (to my knowledge), it allows me to keep a boundary between my professional life and personal life.

I feel much safer using ning or some other site (as opposed to facebook) to incorporate social networking with my teaching...but I continue to weigh the awesomeness of my ning page versus my fear of social networking in schools. Most likely I will attempt to launch it in one (or all) of my Spanish 2 classes in the winter semester and see how it goes, and whether or not I want to use it in the future.

But for now...I'm the only participant on the site so I've opened it up for public viewing. Check it out: Señorita Aho's ning site! I would love feedback and am very interested to hear your ideas about social networking in education.

Crazy for Claymation!

We learned how to do claymation in class this week, and I have to say it was a ton of fun. I'm still struggling to figure out how I would like to use it in my classroom, if I can. My students really seem to enjoy art-y activities, and I think they would have a BLAST with this. However, it's also very time-consuming, and I'm afraid it may eat up too much class time. It's something I need to spend some time thinking about, because I would really like to find a way to incorporate this activity. I know when we were done, all I wanted to do was come home and make claymation videos all day!

So, without further ado:



Claymation by Tricia Hewitt, Ingrid Macon, and myself, with help from Tiffany Liu. Spanish storyline by me! :)

Poor little clay folks fell down at the end, which just added to the humor.
This is the rated G version for my class :)