Technology..."Gold & Glitches"

Welcome back to another great year of preparing students to be international citizens! I'm still working on writing my professional goals for the year. Some of these are being directed by the District, and others are left up to us to set. I feel driven to create more technological outlets for our students, as I continue to run into dead-ends on my PC. For example, our District spent huge sums of money a couple of years ago to update our PC labs, and now the few approved & installed Spanish programs that we did have are no longer compatible with the updated computers. Also, in order to protect our students from inappropriate viewings on youtube, we cannot access anything from this site on the student computers. The recommendation was to go to the teachertube, but when I did it wouldn't accept Spanish words for searches. So many of the songs & lessons I found on youtube are unavailable for my students to access during their computer lab time. And I am left with only English pre-approved programs on the computers.

Last year the parents of my class saw my interest in providing more technology learning activities for my students, and bought me an IPAD to use in the classroom. How exciting! I spent some exciting summer vacation days searching for Spanish learning activity apps. SUCCESS!! I will be able to use these in a learning center in my room, with 1-2 students at a time; but since our District does not support Apple products, I cannot use it for the entire classroom at one time.

Something will need to change, though. The new Common Core Curriculum has as one of it's main thrusts the use of technology for students to research, take notes, write, take tests, etc. Some of our buildings are piloting the use of portable computer labs, but again with PC computers. I know that from about 3rd grade on, one of the student goals could be to be able to research in English, but write their papers in Spanish. My own children did that when we lived in Venezuela. It's a little extra work, but definitely the kind of extra work that raises their Reading and Writing skills to a higher level. There still remains, however, the need for more opportunities for our Immersion students (whatever their target language is) to experience authentic learning activities in the target language.

This October our district will be hosting the WMAIE (West Michigan Alliance of Immersion Educators), and our theme is "Technology in the Immersion Classroom". We will be presenting our limited experience with using the target language online, but I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to hear from others of you as to what you do and use to make these educational goal a success.

Allow me to start off by listing the programs I have used to date:
www.milcuentos.com
http://www.spanishspanish.com/alfabeto_ipower.html
http://www.spanishspanish.com/colors/colors_beetles.html
http://www.spanishspanish.com/colors/colors_simon.html
http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
http://www.ahisd.net/spanimm/espanolsi.htm
http://www.storyplace.org/
http://www.codyscuentos.com/
http://www.childtopia.com/index.php?newlang=spa
http://www.senoradalman.com/voicethread.html
www.linguascope.com
www.scholastic.com/classmags


IPAD apps:
Leer y jugar
Aprender a leer
Aprender los animales con puzzles
Spanish Word Wizard
Mágico 1, Mágico 2
Fetch Spanish
Lectura mágica
Flash Cards from www.FUNFUNSOFT.COM
My First Alphabet
Flash 2 Spanish
Dragon Dictation

Try them out! Have lots of fun! And please add to the list. Or better yet, start writing your own, and then let us all know about it!

~Sheryl René