Amy's Spanish Teaching Portfolio

Teacher Work Sample

Lesson Plans

Activity Ideas

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use, downloadable audio recording software program. Once downloaded, you simply open the application, hit record, and start talking. This program has so many great possibilities for use in a foreign language classroom. One possibility would be to have students record a weekly message, in Spanish, to be turned in to me on a specific day. The students could be assigned to talk about something specific, or whatever is going on in their lives at the time. This type of assignment would be especially effective in a school participating in a one-to-one laptop initiative, in which case the students would be assured to have the appropriate technology at home, and would be able to take their time and record their message as many times as they wanted until they had it at the quality they desired in order to be turned in for points. The students could then simply email me the wav file when they completed the assignment. However, this activity could still definitely be done without laptops, in a school computer lab. As a class, we could schedule a certain amount of time in a lab every so often to do this sort of activity, or to use the audacity program in another fun activity!

You can use PowerPoint, with or without the addition of recorded audio for just about anything; from flash cards to research projects. However, one specific idea that I think would be fun to try with an intermediate to advanced Spanish class would be to have each student in the class pick a Spanish artist, or a specific event or person in Spain or Mexico's history, and then research that subject. Once the research was collected, the students could each create a PowerPoint that would simulate a virtual museum tour. They would need to find images related to their subject that could be "put on display" in their museum. To guide the rest of the class through the tour, the students would need to record a brief audio description of each object shown, and its relationship or significance to the subject. Once the entire class had their presentations complete, they could be set up at the same time in a computer lab, and the class could then stroll around the lab and view the individual presentations as if they were actually at a museum and were observing its various collections. In order to boost motivation, the class could vote on various awards, such as "most thorough research,"  "most creative presentation," or "most interesting audio." The winners could win some sort of prize, like a free homework pass or something along those lines. With a project like this, the students would be able to visually and audibly share their research and work with the entire class, rather than simply typing a paper and having me be the only one to ever see all of their work. I think the oral aspect of this project is especially important as well, because even though students would be able to use a script they created, they would still be getting a lot of practice speaking, as they practiced and prepared for their final recording.