The content that I would like to discuss that I have learned is that there are many complexities encapsulated in the terms “voice” and “silence”. At first glance, one might state that silence is the absence of voice, and that the two are opposites. What I have learned throughout the past four days in my class is that these two terms are complex, complicated terms which have different meanings and uses depending on the content. For instance, silence can be more powerful than using one’s voice. My classmates have helped to point out the fact that gestures and body language can far outweigh that which someone says aloud. In fact, many times people say one thing, but their body language suggests a completely different message. In addition, there are different types of silence and voice. Each of which is used for certain purposes. For example, during the Civil War in Spain, the government took many men captive who were against Franco. After capturing the men, the government utilized silence, and kept many people in suspense about the whereabouts and well-being of their male relatives and friends. Another use of silence, which is on the “other side of the coin”, would be the mothers of the men who have disappeared. Many of the women joined forces and utilized tools such as silent hunger strikes to direct attention to the atrocities that were being purported by their own government.
Discussion: Here, I will discuss the usefulness of the blog selection that I have chosen. I am discussing the first blog selection, which has the graphic of a fighter pilot and the word "victoria" in the background. This blog post was helpful in my pursuit of True North because I was stepping back from my Spanish learning, and was expanding on how I was able to learn the information that I had learned. I am expounding on two topics which I learned in Spanish, but I am discussing them in English. I believe that I am utilizing diglossia here, because I am going back and forth between two languages to mediate my thinking. I also find it useful to my kinesthetic nature that I was not forced to upload a graphic, but I chose to. I am representing my thinking through a visual, and I feel that this shows transformed practice. I transferred the meaning of what I was trying to show in my blog post to the picture. I found the image online, and now my classmates can look at the image and relate it to the ideas of silence and voice. In this way, I have utilized transformed practice with my blog entry.
Meg and Becca’s OI/CF
We only had a chance to look at Becca’s blog ENTRY because of time constraints, but these are some findings that we discovered from her activities: 1. Metalanguage was used in her activities because she not only had her students giving examples. She also had them give reasoning for understandings that they came to about the poem. By describing the reasoning for their feelings about the poem and Civil War, students use metalanguage. 2. There is a connection to Community of Thinkers because her students compile files to a google.doc, and they are to respond to one another’s posts. This would be a Community of Thinkers in the digital sense, and the kids end up having a class conversation and group conversation about their thoughts and their work. These would be a Community of Thinkers in the more “human sense”. 3. She provided OI in her activity by having students analyze the meaning of the poem, and what the woman reading it is trying to say. They have a conscious understanding because they are thinking, thinking about it, and then they are revising their thinking. 4. There is CF in her activity because students have to interpret the social and cultural context within which the poem was written. The students must realize that the poem was written from the perspective of women and children during the Civil War in Spain. Students must also explain how this context is related to the other classes that they are taking. For instance, they must relate the ideas presented to other times that they have heard about in other classes, i.e. how women felt during the Civil War in the United States. They must also go back to their first blog post, and describe how their views have changed. this is the “standing back” part of CF. Discussion: Here I will discuss the blog entry titled "Meg and Becca's OI/CF. In this blog entry, I bring to light the fact that she utilized metalanguage in her activities. It is useful that we looked through her activities together. By analyzing her work, I was able to suggest ideas to improve the wonderful activities which she already had in place. Although she was on the right track, as someone who had already completed a year of this program, I was able to suggest ideas that would clarify her activities, and help to align her lesson with the "Bennington Way". By looking for overt instruction within her lesson, I was able to come to a better understanding of what overt instruction is. Before this exercise, I thought that overt instruction was the same as direct instruction. These words are not mutually exclusive. I learned that overt instruction is an understanding, and not a boring way of lecturing/teaching. I found that it requires the introduction of different metalanguages. Becca had done this in her activity. The last important part of this excerpt was that we searched for critical framing in her lesson. Again, by looking for CF, I was able to better familiarize myself with the topic. We showed that Beccas activity was CF by having the kids look at the social and cultural context at the time that the poem was written.
This paper introduces readers to Wordle, a data visualization tool, and describes how word
clouds, or wordles generated by Wordle, were used in an action research project designed
to facilitate the teaching of foreign language (FL) writing within a dual coding theoretical
framework. Over the course of one semester, students in a third-semester university FL
Spanish course submitted drafts of their compositions electronically to create wordles
(word clouds). The wordles were then used as visual tools to discuss students’ writing
development, writing strategies, and lexical acquisition. Word frequency counts along
with wordles also contributed to student-centered discussions about writing. The paper
concludes with a discussion of ways in which instructors can incorporate wordles into
their FL classrooms to facilitate the teaching of L2 writing, as well as use them as tools to
promote vocabulary development and communicative task-based teaching and learning.
There are many ways in which this article, and this journal relates to my Project for Understanding, and for our uses as FL educators. First of all, the journal itself relates to our courses at MATSL 2011 because it is on Language Learning and Technology. We are in Tech class to be able to better our students’ FL learning through the appropriate use of technology. I found something very useful about the article: it related directly to the theme of Action Research! In fact, it even stated “action research” in its subtitle. In my former research, I did not find many articles which cited action research. The article lays out one way to do action research, and this idea could help our first year girls. For this, I am glad.
I have a hunch: technology related foreign language journals will have very concrete and current evidence because in the world of technology, things change at lightening speed. Perhaps the reason for the ultimate relevance of this journal to our purpose (educating students through FL with technology as a tool, and AR as a practice) is that it relates to all of the aspects of our process.
One reason that this article is extremely useful for my personal purpose is that it purports the usage of Wordle as a helpful tool for enriching FL thinking. Students within the study credited the use of Wordle as the sole factor that kept their class interesting. Although this may not sound very scientific, student interest is very important while teaching. The use of Wordle helped students with vocabulary learning, task phase, pre-reading, brainstorm, reflection and assessment. Students became accustomed to the use of Wordle in their classroom, and began utilizing it on their own to help further their learning.
Conference: New Tools for Learning Language: Beyond the Basics. This conference is in Buffalo, NY from Sept. 31-Oct. 1. There are specific sessions which deal with items from utilizing websites through video usage. It seems to offer classes from the very basic through the quite advanced.
Discussion: I feel that this use of technology to support my project for understanding and rationale is a wonderful artifact to showcase what I have learned in this class. I am able to find a concept within data, or within technology that I would like to include with my students because I think it will work well, and I am able to utilize technology to discover useful and relevant journal articles on it. I found a journal article from this year which advocates the use of "word cloud" technologies such as Wordle. I utilized Wordle in my lesson to help students express their voices, and to express the voices of the deceased. I found this article to be extremely helpful and supportive of what I was doing in my lesson.
Blog selections:
The content that I would like to discuss that I have learned is that there are many complexities encapsulated in the terms “voice” and “silence”. At first glance, one might state that silence is the absence of voice, and that the two are opposites. What I have learned throughout the past four days in my class is that these two terms are complex, complicated terms which have different meanings and uses depending on the content. For instance, silence can be more powerful than using one’s voice. My classmates have helped to point out the fact that gestures and body language can far outweigh that which someone says aloud. In fact, many times people say one thing, but their body language suggests a completely different message. In addition, there are different types of silence and voice. Each of which is used for certain purposes. For example, during the Civil War in Spain, the government took many men captive who were against Franco. After capturing the men, the government utilized silence, and kept many people in suspense about the whereabouts and well-being of their male relatives and friends. Another use of silence, which is on the “other side of the coin”, would be the mothers of the men who have disappeared. Many of the women joined forces and utilized tools such as silent hunger strikes to direct attention to the atrocities that were being purported by their own government.
Discussion:
Here, I will discuss the usefulness of the blog selection that I have chosen. I am discussing the first blog selection, which has the graphic of a fighter pilot and the word "victoria" in the background. This blog post was helpful in my pursuit of True North because I was stepping back from my Spanish learning, and was expanding on how I was able to learn the information that I had learned. I am expounding on two topics which I learned in Spanish, but I am discussing them in English. I believe that I am utilizing diglossia here, because I am going back and forth between two languages to mediate my thinking. I also find it useful to my kinesthetic nature that I was not forced to upload a graphic, but I chose to. I am representing my thinking through a visual, and I feel that this shows transformed practice. I transferred the meaning of what I was trying to show in my blog post to the picture. I found the image online, and now my classmates can look at the image and relate it to the ideas of silence and voice. In this way, I have utilized transformed practice with my blog entry.
Meg and Becca’s OI/CF
We only had a chance to look at Becca’s blog ENTRY because of time constraints, but these are some findings that we discovered from her activities:
1. Metalanguage was used in her activities because she not only had her students giving examples. She also had them give reasoning for understandings that they came to about the poem. By describing the reasoning for their feelings about the poem and Civil War, students use metalanguage.
2. There is a connection to Community of Thinkers because her students compile files to a google.doc, and they are to respond to one another’s posts. This would be a Community of Thinkers in the digital sense, and the kids end up having a class conversation and group conversation about their thoughts and their work. These would be a Community of Thinkers in the more “human sense”.
3. She provided OI in her activity by having students analyze the meaning of the poem, and what the woman reading it is trying to say. They have a conscious understanding because they are thinking, thinking about it, and then they are revising their thinking.
4. There is CF in her activity because students have to interpret the social and cultural context within which the poem was written. The students must realize that the poem was written from the perspective of women and children during the Civil War in Spain. Students must also explain how this context is related to the other classes that they are taking. For instance, they must relate the ideas presented to other times that they have heard about in other classes, i.e. how women felt during the Civil War in the United States. They must also go back to their first blog post, and describe how their views have changed. this is the “standing back” part of CF.
Discussion:
Here I will discuss the blog entry titled "Meg and Becca's OI/CF. In this blog entry, I bring to light the fact that she utilized metalanguage in her activities. It is useful that we looked through her activities together. By analyzing her work, I was able to suggest ideas to improve the wonderful activities which she already had in place. Although she was on the right track, as someone who had already completed a year of this program, I was able to suggest ideas that would clarify her activities, and help to align her lesson with the "Bennington Way". By looking for overt instruction within her lesson, I was able to come to a better understanding of what overt instruction is. Before this exercise, I thought that overt instruction was the same as direct instruction. These words are not mutually exclusive. I learned that overt instruction is an understanding, and not a boring way of lecturing/teaching. I found that it requires the introduction of different metalanguages. Becca had done this in her activity. The last important part of this excerpt was that we searched for critical framing in her lesson. Again, by looking for CF, I was able to better familiarize myself with the topic. We showed that Beccas activity was CF by having the kids look at the social and cultural context at the time that the poem was written.
Related article
This paper introduces readers to Wordle, a data visualization tool, and describes how word
clouds, or wordles generated by Wordle, were used in an action research project designed
to facilitate the teaching of foreign language (FL) writing within a dual coding theoretical
framework. Over the course of one semester, students in a third-semester university FL
Spanish course submitted drafts of their compositions electronically to create wordles
(word clouds). The wordles were then used as visual tools to discuss students’ writing
development, writing strategies, and lexical acquisition. Word frequency counts along
with wordles also contributed to student-centered discussions about writing. The paper
concludes with a discussion of ways in which instructors can incorporate wordles into
their FL classrooms to facilitate the teaching of L2 writing, as well as use them as tools to
promote vocabulary development and communicative task-based teaching and learning.
There are many ways in which this article, and this journal relates to my Project for Understanding, and for our uses as FL educators. First of all, the journal itself relates to our courses at MATSL 2011 because it is on Language Learning and Technology. We are in Tech class to be able to better our students’ FL learning through the appropriate use of technology. I found something very useful about the article: it related directly to the theme of Action Research! In fact, it even stated “action research” in its subtitle. In my former research, I did not find many articles which cited action research. The article lays out one way to do action research, and this idea could help our first year girls. For this, I am glad.
I have a hunch: technology related foreign language journals will have very concrete and current evidence because in the world of technology, things change at lightening speed. Perhaps the reason for the ultimate relevance of this journal to our purpose (educating students through FL with technology as a tool, and AR as a practice) is that it relates to all of the aspects of our process.
One reason that this article is extremely useful for my personal purpose is that it purports the usage of Wordle as a helpful tool for enriching FL thinking. Students within the study credited the use of Wordle as the sole factor that kept their class interesting. Although this may not sound very scientific, student interest is very important while teaching. The use of Wordle helped students with vocabulary learning, task phase, pre-reading, brainstorm, reflection and assessment. Students became accustomed to the use of Wordle in their classroom, and began utilizing it on their own to help further their learning.
Conference: New Tools for Learning Language: Beyond the Basics. This conference is in Buffalo, NY from Sept. 31-Oct. 1. There are specific sessions which deal with items from utilizing websites through video usage. It seems to offer classes from the very basic through the quite advanced.
Discussion: I feel that this use of technology to support my project for understanding and rationale is a wonderful artifact to showcase what I have learned in this class. I am able to find a concept within data, or within technology that I would like to include with my students because I think it will work well, and I am able to utilize technology to discover useful and relevant journal articles on it. I found a journal article from this year which advocates the use of "word cloud" technologies such as Wordle. I utilized Wordle in my lesson to help students express their voices, and to express the voices of the deceased. I found this article to be extremely helpful and supportive of what I was doing in my lesson.