Day 14 - Using Buckets and Top Down Webs for Review - Senora Barkley - MSMS Foreign Language

This post first appeared on Mrs. Barkley's Blog 

I attended a workshop in August on using Keys to Literacy in my classroom, and I decided to put some of the techniques to work in my 8th-grade classes.

First, each student received 3 review vocabulary words to sort into topic "buckets:"

Then, we created this Top Down Web as a class using the words in each bucket:

Both activities went really well! Sorting and making the web got the kids out of their seats and helped them focus on each vocabulary topic. It also helped to identify some review words that students were having the most trouble remembering. I am looking forward to using this technique again in the future. 

Day 47 - Ms. De Sousa & Mrs. Dacey Present “iPads and the Foreign Language Classroom” - BHS Staff

This post originally appeared on the BHS World Languages Blog

Last month, BHS Spanish teachers, Ms. De Sousa and Mrs. Dacey, presented a four-hour workshop on “iPads and the Foreign Language classroom” at the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association’s annual conference.  Last year, they won “Best of MaFLA” and were invited to lead a workshop this year that focused on applications used in language classes that enhance listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills.

Check out this blog post created by Kevin Murphy, an instructional technology teacher at Frontier Regional High School in  Massachusetts.  Kevin attended Ms. De Sousa and Mrs. Dacey’s “iPad and the Foreign Language Classroom” presentation at the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association’s conference in October 2013.  His blog post explains the various applications that he learned at the presentation and how he implements them in his classes.