I recently posted about using #BookSnaps (thanks again, Tara Martin sharing your idea). I had been using these ‘snap’ reflections and reactions to reading with my AP classes as we are reading our Friday Book Club selection ‘Ciudad de las Bestias’ by Isabel Allende. To change things up a bit, I decided to give a different assignment - a brief paragraph as a reaction to what they read for this week’s chapter. There were so many disappointed faces and I was asked if they could include a #BookSnap along with their paragraph (of course I said yes). I have had fun using #BookSnaps, but I didn’t realize that my students would miss them if we skipped them. Allowing students to use Snapchat might seem unconventional. And, while Snapchat is very popular among teenagers, not all students use it, so I needed some alternatives. My AP students had been creating their #BookSnaps via Snapchat at home. This worked well for my AP Book Club Friday's. After seeing how engaged they were and how seriously my students took creating their #BookSnaps, I looked for a way to bring it into the class novel I am reading with my ninth graders (Felipe Alou: Desde los valles a las montañas by Carol Gaab, published by Fluency Matters). I wanted to find a way to use #BookSnaps created in class, without my students being tempted/distracted by their cell phone. I had some reservations about allowing phones in class to use Snapchat. My thinking was that it could lead to some inappropriate use that would be difficult to monitor. We are fortunate to be in a 1:1 school where everyone has a MacBook Air and the full features of the G Suite for Education. I decided to use a Google Slideshow shared on Google Classroom for collaboration. Alice Keeler has some great explanations for how to do this - Google Slides: Collaborate in 40 seconds and Google Classroom: Submitting Collaborative Google Slides. I assign each student a slide to create their own #BookSnap. My students are very familiar with emojis and were able to add them to their slide. Several also added the Bitmoji Chrome Extension, giving them access to a range of expressive cartoon avatars that they could personalize. (One caveat to the Bitmojis - a few are a bit "colorful", so I suggest reminding your students to only use things that would be appropriate in a school setting). Their slide also includes a quote or passage from the chapter of the book we are working on. They could type out the quote or use the camera on their MacBook to take a picture of a part that grabbed their attention or surprised them. It turns out that they are quite competitive about their #BookSnaps. I have three classes currently reading the novel, so I made one Slideshow, separated by a slide designating each period. The day after reading chapter four and creating our #BookSnaps, we viewed the Slideshow as a class. To vote for their favorite in each class, I created a simple Google Form that I shared via Google Classroom. This saved me a lot of time, since I didn’t have to tally votes - Google Forms did the work. The Form was quick to prepare - just be sure adjust the settings so students can only submit the the form once. Google has some info on how to set up and use the results of Google Forms. The overall ‘winner’ was this slide, which we have unofficially named ‘Hombre salado’ (salty man).All of this #BookSnapping (I think I just made up that word and hashtag) has inspired me to share and I have decided to take the plunge and offer a virtual book club for other teachers in my district. The book we will be reading is ‘Start. Right. Now.: Teach and Lead for Excellence’ by Todd Whitaker , Jeff Zoul and Jimmy Casas published by Dave Burgess Consulting. The plan is to conduct the book club through Google Classroom and instead of weekly posted questions and answers, I am going to use collaborative Google Slides and hoping to get some #BookSnaps into our virtual discussion. This way, not only will we be sharing insights from the book, but participants will have a new tool to use when reading with their own classes. Hopefully, people sign up for the book club! #BookSnaps can be used in a variety of subject areas, with just a little creativity.
Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments!
2 Comments
Last year, I began to implement leveled readers and novels in some of my novice/intermediate low classes. I had always used stories in my classes, but I saved a lot of reading for upper level classes. One of my colleagues and I were able to get my supervisor to order some novels from Fluency Matters (which used to be called TPRStoryingtelling). We chose ‘Esperanza’ and 'Felipe Alou Desde las valles a las montañas’ by Carol Gaab and started out with a class set of books for each novel and shared them with each other (passing small plastic bins between classes). At that point we did not have the Teacher’s Resource Guide (which I highly recommend you buy before teaching one of these novels). We scoured the internet for some ideas. Some of our favorite blogs/sites for ideas are The Comprehensible Classroom, Mis Clases Locas and El mundo de Birch. Along with the ideas from those sites, we created some of our own resources, such as Kahoots, and really focused on getting the students to enjoy reading the novel. The fact that both of these novels tell the true stories of the struggles of different people who immigrated to the U.S. made them compelling reads. Since they were comprehensible, my students were able to get through the novels with relative ease. They were so proud to have read an ‘entire book’ in Spanish, something that they had never done before. I enjoyed having meaningful conversations with my students about topics that were relevant, including immigration and discrimination. I think they even surprised themselves with what they were able to talk about. The novel gave them the vocabulary to be able to talk about these issues. Because they were written with language acquisition in mind, they would see new vocabulary often enough to actually acquire it. The fact that they were able to use these words months after we finished reading proves that. Many times, long vocabulary lists are memorized for the 'quiz' and then quickly forgotten. We were so happy with using the novels, that we asked to buy more of them for the next school year. We chose novels for a variety of different courses that we offer and had our supervisor purchase the Teacher’s Guides. Upon some reflection, I think we went a bit too quickly finishing each novel in roughly two weeks the first time we taught them. This year, having the Teacher’s Guides (which are full of links to additional resources in addition to readings that are comprehensible for students), I am spending more time when reading a novel as a class. This year, rather than start the school year with a 'review' unit, my ninth graders began with 'Esperanza'. We worked with the novel (and it's resource rich Teacher's Guide) from mid-September through early November. My students are interested and more importantly, they are acquiring language without even realizing it. What is the most striking about this is that most students don’t even see it as ‘learning Spanish’. Yet, they are using structures and tenses that would not be used until much later in a traditional textbook curriculum. If they were used to just being taught about language, this is very different than what they were used to. But the gains, in terms of acquisition speak for themselves. I highly recommend trying these novels out. I feel like they have transformed my teaching. ***All images in this post used with permission from copyright holder, Fluency Matters.***
|
AuthorHigh school Spanish teacher in NJ. Proficiency-oriented teacher. Always looking to try new things in my classes. Foreign Language Educators of New Jersey 2019 Teacher of the Year. Archives
December 2019
Categories
All
|