5:13 am Assignments
(Written on 2/3/08) I’ve been using computers since they were as big as a bus and we had to feed them punched cards. I started my work life as an Economist doing research on tariffs which required massive numbers of punched cards. It took me a couple of years to punch all the commas in the right place. I had to program all that in Fortran and I’m very glad that’s all over.
Over the years I kept up with the new technology introduced in the world of computers both at work and at home, including websites.
I have been teaching Spanish (a rather accidental transition) since the turn of the millennium and I am especially interested in using technology to help students with learning disabilities learn Spanish. I find that children, who have trouble paying attention to a lady speaking in a foreign language, love to sit for hours in front of a computer listening to the same language and playing language games. For those kids, developing reinforcement tools might be invaluable.
My immediate problem is that I have been laid low by a horrible cold for the last two weeks and I’m trying to conserve what little energy I have to teach class, etc. I haven’t been able to get to work with all these wonderful toys.
The one thing I did do was introduce Google Documents to the students and, having ironed out some initial problems; things are going swimmingly for us all.
For those who might be thinking of using Google Documents let me tell you that story. Since I had difficulty talking (and I talk a lot in language class since, at the moment, I am the only one in the room who knows the target language) I decided to move our Hispanic Country Project forward and started working on that.
The project consists of a Power Point presentation on a Hispanic country. The presentation is in English for SP 1 and in Spanish for SP 3. The first day we went to the language lab was almost a disaster. All of them knew enough about Power Point to start the presentation but some don’t have it at home, some don’t have a thumb drive, and thus couldn’t save what they had done. We scrambled and all was well in the end but I knew we had to find alternatives.
Enter Google Docs. They still need a thumb drive but only for a few minutes at a time (while they save pictures from the internet and then upload them to the presentation). This makes it easier to share a thumb drive. They can also work from home and from the library and don’t need to have Power Point at home.
Google is ten times better than I could possibly be in explaining how to set up a gmail account and the Google Documents account. I had to point them in the right direction when it came to uploading their presentations and making me a collaborator. My guess is that 75% of the kids have set everything up correctly and I told them they should all be set up by tomorrow (Monday). I will be able to help anyone who still has difficulty in the lab tomorrow.
As their collaborator I have been able to check their progress, their revisions, make suggestions and corrections. Up to now I am very impressed. It is easy to use and allows me to keep track of their work, which, I hope, will cut down on extensions and will improve the quality of the work. I want this to be quality work not just for the author’s sake but also because I hope the other children will learn something useful from each one of the presentations.
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