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HOW Do You Learn Spanish Online?
I had good kids in my first online class, kids who are going to go on to do cool things. I just couldn't get the same vibe, the same relationships that "real" teaching, teaching in a classroom gets...
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Spinning Plates: 30 preguntas for planning
When I am planning my lessons for the week, there are several questions I try to ask myself--actually about 25. A part of me feels like I have to ask myself all of these questions every day to be...
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Not Another Icebreaker: Music & memory
My kids know everything they could ever want to know about each other walking into my Spanish 2 class. They've been playing human bingo and going on photo scavenger hunts with the exact same kids for 2...
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Inauguration Speech Rhetoric Lesson in Listening
I just read Trump's inauguration speech and had an idea for my English class next week. We're about to transition between units, so it's kind of timely in more than one way.I got a lot of hyperbole...
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My Top 10 Tech Tools of 2016
It's 2017, but these tools served me well through 2016. No, these are not the cool new tools that came out in 2016: these are the tools that I relied on to survive 2016. Maybe they can make 2017...
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Bellringer Toybox: 5 fun ways to start Spanish class
So my master plan to improve listening through music and the coros bellringer pretty much fizzled. Music is still THE number one way to hook students right off, but it kind of loses its magic if I do...
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Chill Pill: Things I've decided to relax about as a language teacher
This year has been a year of growth, without a doubt. After the single most successful semester of my teaching career, I decided to start from scratch on almost everything.I blame iFLT.Since I'm also...
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SEESAW INSIGHTS: Making Memes in Spanish
If there's one thing that catches my students' attention as surely as music, it is memes. Sure you can have studentsread memes for some authentic input. But how exciting is it to see what kind of jokes...
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Online Students: How do you know what they know?
You could just assign a writing task to see what they can do. And they could just run the whole thing with a translator.You could have them upload a video of themselves speaking. And they could script...
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Mexican Independence and the Imperfect Tense
History and grammar are not always the most obvious hook for capturing students' attention, but when it's history and grammar in a cartoon, who wouldn't be hooked?This year Spanish II and III decided...
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Pizza Faces - Maintaining conversation for intermediate performance
I think I should have been starting online classes with pizza faces from the beginning.I mean, sneaking in a few Spanish essentials and practicing with a useful tool early on--those are noble...
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10 Tips for Organizing Online Spanish
There is ZERO room for confusion in online courses. Even if I could answer every email immediately, their emails are the ONLY cue I have if they are confused. Forget about checking for...
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#SCOLT17 I Won!
I will never be the SCOLT Teacher of the Year, but I have to admit, I found success at SCOLT. No, not in a Moonlight kind of way, but more in a Ralph Waldo Emerson way. After all, I have always loved...
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The World Doesn't Need More Language Teachers
I said it before, and I'll say it again: I hope school subjects are abolished in my lifetime.The archaic notion that understanding can be split into neat categories and segregate "math people" and...
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#FLENJ17 PBL Building Blocks Workshop
I want to help people get started with their first PBL project, but I don't have any one set strategy that I, personally use to get started. Even if I did, the chances of everyone else's brains working...
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The Company You Keep: A love letter to #FLENJ17
Dear FLENJ,I'm not a girl who needs to be wined and dined to feel loved--elegant sushi certainly doesn't hurt, of course. Plush hotel toilets accommodations aren't what bring me back either.It is the...
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Small Group Speaking Assessment
The level of confidence I saw in the final round of assessments last semester--after the tearful season mid-semester--it completely convinced me that this is how I want to assess going forward:with...
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Everything Came Together Today!
So throwing a bunch of ideas into Common Curriculum and then sorting them out as I went, it worked super well today! I managed to connect grammar, music, andproject goals as if I weren't kind of...
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15 Facebook Pages for Spanish #AuthRes
OK, our kids are probably too cool for Facebook now. Moms--and grandmas (and dads and grandpas)--and teachers have taken over.It's ours!!!OK, not totally. But there are so many resources for us there,...
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#SCOLT17 CI Struggles and Solutions
I've been on a bit of a CI roller coaster since iFLT last summer. I kicked off the year with some kickin' PQA that kids really seemed to get into, a little of the ol'"persona especial"--which they got...
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