Today was the second day of class for my first two groups of students. (We're on block schedule.) On today's agenda was setting up students' notebooks and signing up to access the online textbook.
I was expecting to get lots of messages saying that students were having trouble connecting or the access code didn't work. Nope. Not one of those.
I did have 2 students try to join the wrong section, but 2 out of 63 is not bad. (Not everyone has signed up yet, so there's still time...)
What I did start getting was some variation on the theme of "Help! My German textbook is in German!"
Well, yes it is. This is pretty standard for textbooks from German publishers, as their books are designed to be used in many different countries, not all of which are English-speaking. I'm not opposed to a textbook by an American or British publisher, but there just aren't many to choose from out there.
I've blogged previously about our struggles to find a good textbook. We adopted this book in the spring, and it's the third textbook I've used at Bloomington North. I think it's the best one we've had yet, but of course it isn't perfect.
This time I focused in more detail on the first 10 minutes. Students need to write complete sentences describing the different school uniforms worn by the children in different countries. My students worked on it yesterday, and the level seemed good for them. This is such a great video! There are so many things you can pull out of it - clothing, languages, weather, transportation to school - and it's really accessible even at the beginning levels. And, readers, now a request from you: Could you please leave a note in the comments about which German textbook you use in your school? We are entering textbook adoption season and embarking on the eternal quest for the perfect German textbook. What do you recommend or not recommend? Danke im Voraus!
When I first started teaching German at Bloomington North 6 year ago (wow - time flies!), all of my assignments for my students were paper worksheets that I made myself. We weren't 1 to 1 yet with hp laptops, and our textbook was awful and the worksheets that came with it even worse.
Homework assignments are 25% of students' grades, and I graded the worksheets on completion. At the beginning of class, I walked around the room and spot-checked the assignment while students were doing their bell work. If they had attempted the entire assignment, they got 10 of 10. Otherwise it was a 0 out of 10. After bell work, we went over the assignment in class, and students corrected their own work. Students who hadn't finished the assignment filled it in as we went over it and received 5 out of 10 when they had done so. It was a pretty good system - students got a review of what we did 2 days ago (Ach, block scheduling, I am not a fan of you for language learning!), students who hadn't done the work were motivated to at least fill in the worksheet as we went over it, and I got a quick snapshot of students' understanding. Sometimes, though, going over the homework was a bit boring for students who had mastered it easily. And it takes time in class to go over the assignment.
Fast forward to today: Our district is starting its 4th year with 1 to 1 laptops for the high schools, we've adopted a better (though not perfect) textbook, and I have several more years of experience under my belt.
I'm slowly changing over most of my worksheets to online assignments, which are automatically graded by our LMS, Canvas. (Our new textbook has online assignments too, but our book is designed to be used in college or high school, so the level of the assignments is quite high. I've tried them in German 1 and 2 but find that students get frustrated pretty quickly. I do use them in German 4, with students who are more mature and headed for college the following year.)
Students get immediate feedback and can re-do the assignment as many times as they need to. I set Canvas to keep their highest score. They can even re-do assignments later when reviewing for a test or the final. I choose not to have Canvas give students the correct answers because I want them to think about and figure out their own mistakes. They don't really like this, but I think it is good for them.
Like any teaching strategy, there are pluses and minuses. One of my students lamented, "I miss paper!" Sometimes I do too. And for assignments that are really challenging or more open-ended and not easily graded by a computer, I do still use paper worksheets.
I like that students get immediate feedback and that we don't need to spend as much class time going over assignments. But I don't get that quick sense of how they are doing as automatically - I have to take the time to click on the assignment in Canvas and look over the analysis. But when I do, I can get an item by item analysis of what they are understanding and what is still unclear. Data, lots of data! On the downside, assignments are more anonymous. When I walk around and check worksheets, I can have a brief conversation with a student whose work isn't done. Is it a one-time thing due to a late sporting event or play rehearsal the night before or is it becoming a pattern? I lose this with the online assignments. Canvas is a computer, so it counts students' answers wrong if they misspell a word or forget punctuation. My students really don't like this, but I like that it forces them to pay attention to details.
All in all, I think it's working well so far for my students and me. I make my Canvas assignments publicly available, so if your school uses Canvas, you should be able to see them in Commons. On an unrelated but fun note - my German teaching colleague at South high school celebrated her 50th birthday this month. I made her a crochet jellyfish in German flag colors as a gift:
Here she is, showing it off in front of her classrooom:
My colleague Frau Nessi and I are incredibly proud of our German 2 classes! This is the first group that she and I have both worked with using our new textbook series since German 1, and their progress is impressive!
We're already approaching the last quarter of the year, which means we're looking ahead to next year when they will be in Deutsch 3. Our goal is for German 3 to be almost exclusively in German, with the exception of some explanations of more complicated grammar concepts.
I try to make a natural, organic progression over the course of my German instruction to more and more German and less and less English. I have some of the most commonly used expressions on the wall in my room and expect students to use and understand them from early on in German 1.
I then progress from giving new instructions in English to giving them in German followed by English and then German without the English.
To get our current German 2 students ready for German 3 and using German (almost) exclusively, I'm introducing circumlocution and German-German vocabulary in small, non-threatening ways now.
Our current topic is Auto und Rad fahren (Car and bike riding). We read a short article in German from our textbook about bike paths in Germany. Students answered comprehension questions about it in German, which they've been doing since German 1, but I added in another question:
(What is a one-way street?) Most students wanted to translate it into English, but I pushed them to think about how to explain it in German using other words. We talked about how they might explain it in English to a small child without using the word one-way. Eventually most students were able to get to something along the lines of "Alle Autos fahren in nur eine Richtung. (All cars drive in only one direction.) Success!
On the last day of school before Spring Break, we played Kahoot with their current vocabulary. Students may not have noticed but there wasn't any English in the Kahoot.
It started out with identifying pictures:
Then it got a little tougher with Where is this vehicle going? and 4 possible complete sentence answers.
And What does one do here?
Finally, they were ready for questions without pictures:
They did very well, especially considering that it was the day before Spring Break. We also watched a video from Easy German, which I love because it is in German with German and English subtitles: (But I recommend you preview all videos completely before showing them in class as there is occasionally some mild profanity which may or may not be tolerated at your school.)
We'll continue on after break with German-German vocabulary crossword puzzles and word association games for vocabulary.
One of the things I'm doing this summer is taking a beginning college Spanish class online. I just decided it would be a fun thing to do with some of my free time. My older son has taken 2 years of Spanish in middle school and plans to continue in high school, and there are lots of opportunities to practice it, so I thought why not? My class started on Monday. It's through Ivy Tech, our community college, and is all online. I've never taken an online class, so that in itself is a new experience. It's definitely more convenient than having to go to class - I can do my work in my pajamas! The other really neat thing about it is that the textbook is from the same publisher as the German textbook we use at my school. So, I get a chance to try out the Spanish version of our online German textbook from a student perspective.
I guess once you're a teacher, you can't really stop yourself from looking at things from a teacher perspective. As I'm working on my assignments, I find myself analyzing them: are they helpful or frustrating, are there things I could use in my German classroom, what would my students think of this? I'm also a bit jealous because there are a lot more resources and practice activities in the Spanish book than in the German book. I guess that's just how it is when you teach a language that is more commonly taught. One cool resource I found today is ToonDoo. I was actually looking for Toonlet, which is a web site suggested in my class for creating cartoon dialogs, but the web site hasn't been responding the past two days. As I was trying to connect to it, I found a list of other cartoon creation websites and went to ToonDoo. Here's what I've created so far
It's fun and pretty intuitive to use. The one negative is that you can't type foreign characters or accents within the program, even if you have those symbols installed on your computer. However, you can copy and paste from a Word document and the special symbols will appear.
I think my students would have a lot of fun with this, though they would probably spend quite a bit of time playing with all of its features before they got down to using it to practice German. I think if I created a Word document for them to copy and past from, that would make the special symbols easier to access.
Always fun to find another resource to try! Hasta luego!
There are lots of changes at school this year. One of the changes is that all of our students now have HP laptops.
Another change is that we're required to give all of our students a pre- and post-test every semester.
The pre- and post-tests are part of a new law in Indiana which requires that part of teachers' evaluations be based on a measurement of students' learning. Since elective subjects like German are not a part of state standardized tests, our students are now given a test at the beginning and end of the semester to measure their growth over the course of the semester.
Students take the pre-tests on their laptops, and today was my first day administering them. Students have only had their laptops for about a week, and the testing platform is new to all of us, so I was a bit nervous about how it would go.
But amazingly, it went very smoothly! No one was absent, everyone remembered their computers, and everyone was able to take the pre-test. Wow!
After that, students logged on to their digital textbooks for the first time, and that went well too. More wow! Tomorrow I will give pre-tests to my other 3 classes, and hopefully it will go just as well.
school starts again for me! Whoa! Summer has gone by really fast, but it's been a good one. I've gotten quite a bit of work done for school, and hopefully it will make the start of the year a little less hectic. And I'm looking forward to this new school year. There are several changes:
New books! After a long selection process, we have a new textbook with materials that I think will work well for our students and give me more resources for effective teaching.
New devices! My school is going 1-1 and all students will get an HP tablet computer at the beginning of the year. I'm sure it will take time to get everyone up and running on it, and there are pros and cons, but I am looking forward to my students having access to Quizlet and Duolingo every day, not just when it's our turn for the iPad cart.
New room! I'll be in my third classroom in three years, but it's a nice big room and has a window. Plus, moving has forced me to clean out and reorganize things, which is always a good thing.
New classes! Our German program is growing! There will be an additional section of German 1, German 2, and German 3 this year. And we will be offering German 4 (together with German 3) for the first time since I have been at BHSN.
I feel mostly ready, which is a good thing since Aug. 3 (first student day) is almost here!
Whoa, school starts three weeks from Monday! Time flies in the summer.
I've had a really nice and relaxing break so far. In mid-June we spent a week in San Francisco for a wedding in my husband's family and for some sight-seeing.
Next weekend we'll head up to Michigan to spend a week with both of our families, and after that, there are just 3 break days left before teacher work days.
In between, I've been enjoying the relaxed pace of summer and having a chance to do some big-picture unit planning with our new textbook. I updated this blog to indicate that next year will be my 5th year of teaching (3rd year in German at Bloomington North). Next year I will be five-sixths time and teach three sections of German 1 and two sections of German 3/4. I'll miss teaching German 2 - it has always been my favorite level to teach, but I'm looking forward to teaching German 1 again. And I'm excited that we will be able to offer German 4 for the first time since I have been at North. There are only 3 students, so they are combined in with the German 3 classes, but it's a start. And there are about 50 students enrolled in German 3, so hopefully we'll have more students continue on to German 4 the following year.
Our new books are here! I stopped by school yesterday after getting an email from our head custodian saying that the books had arrived and were in our classrooms. And there they were - a classroom set of shiny new textbooks in each German room! Yay! This is especially happy news for me because the book which we has been using (which was adopted several years before I started) really didn't work well for our students. It was designed (I think) to be used for German as a Second Language instruction in Germany, not for American high school students in a semi-rural public school.
It was all in German, so parents and resource teachers couldn't help students.
It didn't explain grammar structures in an organized way (which drove the math teacher in me crazy!).
And it didn't contain any cultural information (I think because it assumed students were living in Germany and were surrounded by the culture.)
Bottom line, it didn't meet our students' needs well at all, which meant that teachers had to supplement A LOT, so much that it was basically like writing a whole new textbook. Which is kind of fun, but also VERY time consuming.
After a two year process of discussing the various options, our district approved the adoption of Mosaik for German 1, 2, and 3. Since our students will each have their own tablet computer, they will have a digital textbook only, and we will have print copies in the classrooms.
It's not perfect, of course, but it's much better than what we had been working with, and I am very happy to start working with it!
