Hiaku Decks is a great tech tool that I use for creating visual representations of the story we are reading in my Spanish classes. The pictures are always high-def, and the text is kept to a minimum. I use the Haiku Decks to ask my students questions and recount the story for them in Spanish as the visual representations come up. I also allow my students to describe the story to each other in Spanish as they see the pictures. Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app Next week I am going to teach my students how to create their own Haiku Decks to create visual representations of the book. In order to do this, I registered a Haiku Deck account for each of my classes and created a blank Haiku Deck for every group. When my students sign into our class's respective Haiku Deck account, they will be able to collaboratively create their Haiku Decks from different computers, similar to Google Docs. Once students complete their Haiku Decks, they can click on the share button, which will provide a link that they can paste to our classroom Google Doc; this way my students can share and explore each other's work. I would also like to have my students record themselves giving a narration of their Haiku Decks that they could share with each other via QR Codes. This would be a great way to further share, explore, and interact with each other's work. Scan the above QR Code for a sample narration of the first few slides of the following Haiku Deck or use the following link: http://goo.gl/JH1Zqw Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app I also think it would be fun for my students to create a cover page for their respective Haiku Deck with two QR Codes pasted on it (one for the audio and one that will bring you to the digital Haiku Deck). We would hang their cover pages around the classroom and create a gallery, and then the students could walk around the room with their own devices to scan each other's work and explore each other's Haiku Decks and narrations. If students work in pairs, one student could scan the QR Code for the digital Haiku Deck, and the other could scan the code for the audio.
It would also be interesting to work with other teachers and open up the gallery to students from other classrooms to inspire the learning of language and culture. For our EDUC578 "Learning and Technology" class, we have been invited to take 20% of our time that we would otherwise spend on this class and teach ourselves something that we have been wanting to learn.
I would like to take my video- and teaching-skills to the next level and learn to create productive language-focused mini lessons similar to those of a high school Spanish teacher otherwise known as Señor Jordan. I must admit that I am feeling both overwhelmed and excited about the idea. Join me as I document my journey here--and perhaps learn a bit of Spanish and maybe even Chinese while you're at it :) |