I think this year, I've come into the realization that I am a "veteran teacher." Thank you, thank you very much. So for me, as I help other teachers improve in my role as a Learning Coach with the district, I'm finding it ever more important to reflect on my own practice. I'm at a place where I can really improve my craft--another important phrase from years ago.
Blogs, podcasts, and web-based presentations have been championed by world language teachers as a way to have access to authentic resources and have been utilized more in order to PROVIDE their students with all kinds of input, citing the need for students to have comprehensible input BEFORE they can provide the output. Yet, in students' other classes, they're utilizing blogs, podcasts and web-based presentations in order to PROCESS their hypotheses and results. What I'm finding myself thinking about now is how I can adapt new technologies to my teaching Spanish later today, tomorrow, by the end of the week. Instead of thinking about what I can do to show my students, I'm starting with what can my students do? What does it mean for my students to keep a blog? What does it mean to have my students record themselves and reflect about how they did? How can I get my students to create more in Spanish?
We language teachers have such a rich opportunity for our students to flesh things out while they're learning instead of waiting until they've absorbed as much language as we've given them for them to produce.
How have you progressed over your years as a teacher? What tech are you using in your classrooms?