GridPals for High School Interpersonal Communication and Digital Story-Telling

GridPals and FlipGrid

For years I have wanted to have "pen pals" or something similar. I can remember how exciting it was just to have one native speaker of Spanish at school, apart from my friend's family. And they were from another country: Chile. My friend's (Artie, Arturo) family is from Ciudad de México. It was exciting to hear from this native speaker Ramón, particularly, perhaps, because our program was a lot of direct translation. My Spanish teacher's best approaches, though, were geared toward opening up the world to us... so I am very thankful for that. My Spanish teacher's heart was very into igniting our love for the Spanish-speaking world. What was it about having an exchange student? Just knowing there was another world was enough for me to want to know more. And I desperately wanted to be able to know more, and try to communicate in Spanish. 

Yesterday I watched Florencia Henshaw's  Webinar: "Video chatting with Native Speakers: Why, What, and How". It reminded me of the intense desire that I had, and of the anxiety around speaking "correctly" around native speakers. Florencia presented a variety of platforms with their pros and cons. She also named why speaking to native learners is so valuable. I connected with her use of http://spanishlistening.org/ to get students ready to hear native speakers, to become accustomed to different dialects. A few years back I found this website by accident, and then listened to many and categorized them according to themes of Spanish III in my school: Spanish III Listening. I had a similar goal to that of Professor Henshaw: offer opportunities to students to hear different dialects. The website allows you to look at the transcript as you listen. That format allows visual learners to discern even as simply where words end! What a word looks like, and what a typical context for conversation may be. Taking advantage of listening to typical conversations of people using different dialects better prepares students for that moment when they realize, "Oh, that is not what I'm used to!"

Listening to the webinar I realized that I was still in the same space as before I listened: there did not seem to be free and safe programs. At a time when our community is considering $375,000 worth of PPE for our school community, free seems best. "Safe": never up for debate. So yesterday, I wrote to one of my best friends Jesús. He teaches English and French in Spain, and speaks Valenciano. I asked him to consider finally starting conversations. Now with the availability of asynchronous conversations, and having seen that FlipGrid has developed some "exhanges", I'm excited to see what we can do. And if Jesús is unable, there seem to be many other possibilities. 

https://blog.flipgrid.com/news/gridpals

I plan to create some initial activities on FlipGrid. For our CARLA class, I had to do a public "Grid" or class on FlipGrid for classmates to see my prompts or "topics". With GridPals, it is possible to, at the least, restrict people's access by requiring email addresses from certain organizations. For example, for my district, their address must end "@dist113.org" or "@student.dist113.org" or something similar. Otherwise they may not have access.

Now my questions are as follows:

What do we want our students to do? 

How will I assess students? Dr. Henshaw had at least two examples in the webinar. 

I'm excited for the possibilities.

Digital Story-Telling

It's funny how exploring one thing may bring you to another thought or idea to explore. Today I was thinking about my Sutori presentation for "Hora de geni@" and reading for that and in general. My department seems to always be looking for readings for "sustained" reading. We have made some choices here and there with which I have been completely unhappy. It felt like books to have just because the materials were already available in part, and also because they are books. The problem, though, has been that the books, in my view, are inaccessible because of the lack of comprehensible input, and because their themes have not been of interest to students. Furthermore, there are parts that I believe are a bit stereotypical or otherwise inappropriate. So, I've been thinking about books, which made me think about the local library. I know my community has started a lot more "contact-less" services, and I was wondering what was available to my students in Spanish after seeing examples of resources for an Heritage Language Learner class in Minnesota. When I went to the Deerfield website, I immediately saw that it is closed indefinitely. So, I looked at our sister school's local library in Highland Park. I was encouraged that it was "open", especially since there are many more Spanish-speakers in Highland Park and their neighbor Highwood. I didn't check, yet, Highwood's possibilities because I got distracted by another thought: stuck in my mind was also the idea that students often really enjoy children's books. They are often much more difficult to read because the word choices may be more complicated than not, but I STILL love to be read to. So, when I saw the following event, I had a thought about Presentational Mode: https://hplibrary.org/event/4393122 This event is a story-telling event. One of the ideas for the Heritage Learner class was the skill of finding, establishing, and "mejorando" one's "public voice." It would be so fun to create a unit where kids are reading real books and recording and sharing them, and writing their own books and recording and sharing them with our local libraries. You can't see the librarian in this picture. I need more practice fitting it in.