Exploring Standards-Based Lesson Plans

For a Spanish class of 11th graders, I found a great lesson plan and homework sheet to go along with it. The students will be given an email pal and a series of question to ask that pal. Before the class, the students will have already completed their questions with their email partner. During class, we will be able to have some guided discussion about their experience with the assignment and what their thoughts were about how they were able to communicate.



This lesson is designed to meet the requirements of the 'Presentational Communication' section of the Ohio's New Learning Standards: World Languages 9-12. The purpose of the assignment is to give the students the opportunity to communicate with someone who only speaks Spanish via technology. The students do this to
practice and refine their communication skills in a very straight forward and effective way.




This lesson and assignment will take place over several days and will end with a group discussion in the classroom about the students experience with communicating, what they learned, and what their thoughts were about the assignment. Some problems that could arise with this assignment would include: not being able to find enough people to be email pals and one of the pals not responding within the deadline. The students would be challenged by not being able to speak English and relying only on their knowledge of the language of Spanish.

Here is the link to the website with the lesson and the activity:
http://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Career-Tech/Career-Connections/Lesson-Plans?searchtext=Spanish&searchmode=anyword&subjectsearchfilter=7;&gradessearchfilter=0

Thanks for reading!
Emily Jo

Assistive Technology for students with Dyslexia

For my disability, I chose dyslexia which is a learning disability that is estimated to affect one in every ten people. Dyslexia is also the most common language-related disability. Dyslexia is referred to as a 'Invisible' disability because it is difficult to diagnose and many people are completely unaware that they are dyslexic. Some of the common complications for students with dyslexia include, "poor word reading, word decoding, oral reading fluency and spelling." 

One of the types of Assistive Technology created for students with dyslexia is a Livescribe Smart

Pen. The Smart Pen is able to record audio and it takes pictures of your notes while you are writing that can then be loaded straight onto your computer. One of the large challenges that students with dyslexia have is listening to lectures and understanding the information while taking notes. The Livescribe Smart Pen's purpose is to help with that common problem.

The recorder button on the Smart Pen can be easily pressed to turn the audio recorder on and off. So if the student is suddenly unable to keep up with taking notes, they can simply press the button to record that part of the lecture. By recording it, you can then download the audio onto the Livescribe Desktop Software and it will continue typing your notes for you as it is recorded. The Livescribe Smart Pen makes it significantly easier for students to pay more attention in class.

Beyond the capabilities that the Livescribe Smart Pen has now, I would say the next step for improving this Assistive Technology would be for the students to have the capability to record live video of what is being written on the board by the teacher. Such as: important ideas, examples, problems, and equations. This would be incredibly helpful in a math class where writing out equations can be time consuming.

References:
http://dyslexia.yale.edu/TECH_livescribe.html
http://www.austinlearningsolutions.com/blog/38-dyslexia-facts-and-statistics.html
http://dyslexia.yale.edu/WSJ_SchwabLetter.html
https://www.understood.org/en/learning-attention-issues/child-learning-disabilities/dyslexia/understanding-dyslexia

Ohio DL Schools

Between the five Distance Learning Ohio schools I was given, (Connections Academy, Virtual School House, ECOT,  Ohio Virtual Academy, and Virtual Community School of Ohio), I would choose ECOT for my child to attend for a few reasons. Before I explain, let me preface with the fact that I approached this assignment as if my child was a high school student.

Firstly, upon first impression, their site is very well organized, professional, and shows lots of time and effort into making it easy to navigate.

Secondly, ECOT has multiple programs inserted into their high school curriculum that are focused around college and career preparation, which is incredibly important to my future high school aged children. My child would have the option to participate in College Credit Plus (CCP), and would have great options for electives such as "Career Connections", and various other electives in Career Technical Education (CTE).

Thirdly, I like that even though the school is online and distance learning, they have the option to go on field trips and join clubs. This would give my child much needed time to interact with peers that are doing the same type of program as them. Becoming engaged with other students is something that is hard to achieve while doing DL, but is very important and I like that they have specific programs set up to help encourage students to participate.

While all of the options were good schools, my least favorite was Virtual School of Ohio. VSoO was the hardest school website to find information such as curriculum and accreditation. Their facts page was not all that helpful because most of the questions asked pertained to students already attending the school. While they did have programs for college preparation, they did not have options for student engagement like a few of the other schools did. I was also unable to see a course list of any kind with options for class and curriculum.

When it comes down to it, my main issue with the Virtual School of Ohio was availability of information. While I know a lot of what I was searching for does exist, it was not easily accessible.

Thanks for reading!
Emily Jo

My Prezi

My Prezi presentation is designed for my students to understand a little bit about me, how my love of Spanish came to be, and how I decided I wanted to be a teacher. I personalized my Prezi with pictures and information about one of my favorite life experiences.

My experience with Prezi was rough at the start... but now that I am familiar with it and all of it's functions, I like it a lot and will surely be using it in my future endeavors. 

Thank for viewing!
Emily Jo

Three Great Teacher Blogs

I chose the blog titled The Organized Classroom Blog because I am a very organized person and I love the helpful tips and ideas for keeping for a classroom fun and functional. Charity does a great job of giving ideas and also sharing real talk about teaching. I give two thumbs up!
https://organizedclassroom.com/run-time-teaching/

The blog: FluentU Spanish Educators Blog has everything! They have resources, project ideas, classroom decoration ideas, and lots more. They get real about how to reach students who have no interest in learning a language. Fantastic blog!
http://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator-spanish/

Teaching Español is all about recommending great books and curriculum for teachers to use while teaching Spanish. They also recommend great music and CD's to use for class. This is an incredibly helpful resource for Spanish teachers. Great blog!
http://teachingespanol.blogspot.com/

Thanks for reading!
Emily

Welcome To My Blog!

Hello! My name is Emily. I am a freshman majoring in Spanish Education. In my free time, I enjoy reading and listening to music. My passion in life is helping and serving people. This year, I am able to use that passion as a Peer Mentor at the Columbus State Delaware Campus. (I'm super excited!) I became interested in Spanish because of my Spanish teacher and a trip that my class took to Ecuador during my Junior year of High School. During that trip, I was able to be immersed into the Spanish culture and see practical uses for the language of Spanish.

My goal as an educator is to impact the students that I'm teaching and be a positive influence in a very negative world. I plan on teaching High School level Spanish and would love to one day be involved in an ESL program.

Thanks for reading!
Emily