Using Digital Tools

Students use a wide range of digital tools to study, practice and explore different inputs. These tools allow for a truly blended course that affords endless opportunities for language acquisition.

The student laptop facilitates language learning in my classes without becoming a distraction. It creates the possibility of viewing film, listening to sound clips and recording audio from home. With the laptop students have more control of the input/output and, consequently, the language. In my film class students often take screen shots of movies in order to share thematic/technical interpretations and they also do scene analyses. These activities and more are made possible by the fact that they each have a version of the movie on their machine.

Collaborative writing exercises using Google Docs allow students to explore topics through reading and responding to peer input. Three different theses, critical questions, or excerpts from a story or clips from a movie are pasted on the document, with boxes below each for corresponding responses. Working together on the collaborative document, each student responds to one of the three prompts while his or her two partners work on the other two. After a delineated amount of time, the students switch. They now read the first student's reaction and take that into account in their own response-- referring to it, adding to it, contrasting with it. Next, they react to the final input, taking into account both of the reactions already written. At the end, there are three reactions for each topic and room for conclusions about each. This activity provides practice with spontaneous reading and writing and can be used to explore themes or as feedback for individual essay development. To the right are examples of this collaborative writing assignment.

The United Nations website in Spanish has sound clips (and accompanying transcripts) of different current events from all over the world. Students listen to one of them as homework, using the transcript only as a support as it is primarily a listening activity. The next day in class, they work in groups of three-- one student explains their article, another summarizes it, the third discusses opinions and reactions. Next, they switch roles and a new article is described, summarized and discussed. After the third round, each student has told, summarized and opined about an article. This activity lasts about 30-40 minutes. At the end, I play a new sound clip of an article. I play the clip three times and then the students are given 15 minutes to describe and summarize the article and to react with their opinions. The group discussions provide the framework for the aural comprehension and written evaluation at the end. Above are examples of these responses.