Another story time! These story games are my favourite ways to learn Spanish as it teaches me real conversations rather than words or just sentences.
The Story: The Honeymoon
the translation:
Cab Driver: hello! good morning
lucia: hello, I need to go to the airport
CD: vacation?
lucia: no vacation, I have a ticket for Madrid, two tickets..
CD: Madrid is my favourite country! it is beautiful!
Wow! how exciting that maria is going to Madrid! but why does she have 2 tickets? we find out lucia is actually going to Madrid on her honeymoon, alone because her new wife doesn’t want to go with her. how rude
The translation:
Lucia: Maria?
Maria: Lucia! I’m so sorry! I love you
Lucia: I love you too.
Maria: lets go to Madrid!
CD: enjoy your honeymoon!
I love a happy ending! these activities are cute, easy and make me feel like I actually know Spanish!
Learning a new language is harder for adults and easier for children, this is a fact that is fairly well known. I was using it as an excuse to why im so bad at this, however that isn’t exactly true. I assumed the reason kids can learn languages so easily is because their brain still has a lot of plasticity and other science things but in actuality the reason behind this fast learning is very different.
Growing up I worked at a summer camp and the very last week was “deaf camp”. Yes, it was a camp for people who are deaf and their families. I learned sign language each year and by the end of the week I was fairly fluent and could communicate okay. so why can I learn sign language and not Spanish? The answer is immersion!
Kids learn languages so easily because they are usually immersed in it. for an example think about a child immigrating to panda, they are in school, reading, writing, playing and hearing this language all day. if they want to make friends they have to learn and so they do, very quickly. adults on the other hand like to stick to what they know. we will seek out the familiar, finding friends who speak our language, speaking to our kids in our language and ETC.
I know that duo lingo will never make me fluent but I now know that fluency is actually attainable if I try hard enough and immerse myself.
I was looking for some teaching videos to learn Spanish from after I lost all my lives in Duo Lingo and I came across this video.
This video blew my mind as I feel like I know what they are saying but at the same time its all nonsense. I always wondered what English sounds like but I didn’t expect this. It sounds horrible, English is not a beautiful language.
This week I was re-watching one of my favourite shows “Fear the Walking Dead” where the second season takes place in Mexico. I was proud of myself because I could understand some of the Spanish dialogue. by understand I really mean that I could only decipher what the topic of the conversation was about but none of the details. I know that hearing or seeing a language is much easier than speaking or writing it but I’m making progress!
This week I want to talk about something a little different. I was frustrated with my progress so I wanted to remind myself why I chose to do learn Spanish and why I went into education.
In grade 12 I went on a school trip to Guatemala. At first I didn’t even want to go to Guatemala and I planned on going to New York instead, I am so glad I changed my mind. ive been to 2 Hawaiian islands, travelled Europe and drove the coast of Australia and still Guatemala was the most incredible and life changing trip i’ve ever been on. Even now looking back 5 years after I miss it so badly and ilI talk about Guatemala to pretty much anybody who will listen.
On my trip we visited hospitals, schools, markets, historical buildings, climbed a mountain (could’ve been just a hill I’m from Sask) and went into homes of sponsor kids. I had a sponsor child that I got to meet. Her name was Lilliana Leolinda.
me and my bug!
Lilliana lived with her mom and 5 other siblings. She was super shy at first but was excited to see me again at her school. Her teacher told me that her nickname was “Ladybug” in Spanish so I called her Lily-Bug and she called me that too! I was hooked from this trip on, I knew I wanted to be a teacher.
I sponsored Lilianna for 2 years despite not having a job because I loved her so much and wanted to support her and her family the best I could. unfortunately a couple years ago I was notified that she left the school and I wasn’t able to sponsor her anymore. did I cry about it? yes. did I cry about it as I wrote this? also yes. I am so grateful for this little girl who pushed me down this path.
This week I remind myself that im learning Spanish in the hopes that one day I will go back to Guatemala.
ill also include a slideshow of picture of my trip and a video!
This week in my learning project I focussed on learning present tense!
As ive said in previous posts every time you answer a question wrong you lose a life and what im finding is im losing the most point of past and present tenses. Spanish is also a gendered language so the types of words change on what gender is speaking or in what “tense” they are speaking in. it is quite confusing! I screenshotted the post below as a cheat sheet for myself to refer back to so I don’t have to risk losing more lives
From this lesson inparticular I have attempted at least 3 times. As ive been on the duo lingo app I find that sometimes the tasks it gives you are either painfully easy or a level above your knowledge. This is the owl that taunts me as I again fail this level.
The key to being an educator is to be a life long learner. This blog post is an accumulation of what I have learned this semester in EDTC 300.
This semester I learned and thought a lot about being a teacher, my relationship with the online world and how to teach these ideas to my students.
The internet is a double bladed sword that we can take advantage of or let it take advantage of us and our students. It is an amazing tool to find lessons, connect and it has become vital to our students in this climate of Covid. 100 years ago in the last pandemic none of this would’ve been possible and everyone’s education would’ve been put on pause. I am so grateful that wasn’t the case for us.
Teaching our students to be good digital citizens was something I had previously never thought about but now understand the importance of. this course made me think critically of what I post online even more than before. I will now sadly be putting all my social medias on private haha.
in the future as an educator I will now be conscious of the benefits and pitfalls of the online world, pushing my students to explore the benefits and steering them away from preventable mistakes.
This is one of my last blog posts of this class and also of my Arts Education degree. This leaves me with mixed emotions, happy to be done but sad that it won’t start again. Thank you Katia and Amanda for such a great semester.
Stalking people on the internet is a hobby if not, a skill of mine. This week’s class we were put into groups and asked to stalk an individual. We found quite a bit of information about this person but nothing particularly exiting as they had a pristine “digital identity”. However i know the average person isn’t as conscious about how they appear online, especially at my age.
My task is to stalk my wonderful friend Van Gonzales. Here’s a link to his blog!
I logged out of all my social medias to see how a stranger would view Van and the fact is, they would not view van. unless you are friends on Facebook with him, he doesn’t come up in a search. The only 2 socials I found Van on were instagram and twitter, both of which are private accounts.
When I Googled Van the only link I could find to him an image used for his profile picture on twitter.
looking cute as always.
As this doesn’t make for a very interesting blog post it does mean that Van keeps his personal life private, personal and and off the internet. Good job Van!
The last time I tried my hand at coding it was an incredible fail. I took CTCH 111 in my first year of university and our prof asked us to code a simple moving graphic that I could not figure out for the life of me. after crying about my lack of tech savy, my wonderful boyfriend learned it in about 6 minutes and completed the project for me. I almost got down on one knee and purposed.
before I started this project I was nervous because the only thing I knew about code was that im clearly not very good at it, however I was surprised!
I chose to start the flappy bird code game! this activity was actually fun and easy to learn. the instructions were clear and helpful. for anyone who is wanting to get into coding but isn’t sure where to start I recommend to start here!
Ah fake news, the thing that almost every person’s grandparent talks too much about. Everyone is sick of hearing this phrase as its a silly term for a more serious topic, Clare Wardle says,
“By now we’ve all agreed the term “fake news” is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we’re left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase. The reason we’re struggling with a replacement is because this is about more than news, it’s about the entire information ecosystem. And the term fake doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of the different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false).”
(waddle, 2021)
In our EDTC300 class, we did an activity with Katia where we had to discern whether or not an account was a spam account. I thought that i would be able to tell easily but i was actually wrong on 2. I was surprised at this and thought are my students able too and how do I teach this?
Dr. Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt listed in their article the four strategies for, “How do we teach students to identify fake news?”
Extending our traditional checklists and techniques in determining fake news.
Teaching students how to develop the appropriate investigative skills and techniques in verifying information by utilizing fact-checking strategies.
Teach students how to identify bias by using tools and your knowledge of bias perspectives.
Bring into the classroom examples of fake news so that students can apply their skills and techniques.
Here is clare wardles tips
By using these tools and techniques students can learn to think critically of the information and media they are consuming online
The only good thing to come from the 2016-2020 presidency was the phrase/meme of “Fake News.” while fake news today may seem far-fetched, the old version of fake news looked like this;
In my humble opinion, this version was much better and far more interesting than the new news and we should go back.
Do you think before you post? When i was growing up on the internet my mom was to me “over protective”. I wasnt allowed to have a facebook until i was 13 which at the time felt very unfair, looking back i am grateful for it. My mom was looking over my social media posts, making sure they were appropriate and i was being safe. I was lucky to have someone helping me think before i posted and it probably kept me out of a lot of trouble.
With my students now the internet is more of a free for all. Parents now trust their kids a lot more to be responsible of themselves online. Students now have their phones pretty much glued to their hands with unlimited access. In my internship i asked my students “Is what you are posting something you are okay with the world seeing now and in the future? if not, then do not post it. I also encouraged my students to THINK before they post. Take a moment before you post or send anything and if that message is something you want the world to see.
This outcome and the indicators listed mention that students should be able to critically view multimedia messages, identify the overall organization of ideas in e-text, and evaluate the effectiveness of a variety of multimedia texts.
CR7.5 – d, e, f, g, h, I, j, kThis outcome and the indicators mentioned teaching students how to decode oral messages presented in the media. This includes things such as determining the literal and implied meanings, the structure of the presentation, and deducing which perspectives are not included.
The internet is an incredible tool that teachers should be using to their advantage and creating great digital citizenship in their students!
