Señorita Murrell

In Spanish 1 we are practicing our oral Spanish, the verb ir, questioning, and location vocabulary.

1. Write two questions to find out where your classmates go to do something. Ejemplo: ¿Adónde vas para estudiar?
2. Question everyone in class in Spanish and write down their responses
3. Make a graph for each question (bar, pie or line) to represent your results
4. Lable your graph (sample)
5. Write our your results in Spanish in complete sentences.
6. Use color
7. Present your findings to the class.

I did this assignment with my students today. I had them begin with presenting to a small group and for time purposes I had them elect the most interesting member to present to the class. I really liked what they came up with.  If I had had access to computers I would have liked to adapt this activity to have the students create a google spreadsheet and graph and embed them into a wiki and have them talk about their findings.

Heidi and I decided that the Goomoodleikiog presentation would be stronger with a movie and we decided that using the “in plain english” style would be the most effective.

Heidi is the aritist, which left me with the task of writing the script. We started by watching different Common Craft ” In Plain English” videos. I wrote the script in a shared google doc and Heidi was able to make edits and comments inline with my ideas.

We met and worked out a basic storyboard from our process so Heidi could draw the pictures we would need for our shots. We worked with deadlines and mainly met online to work out story issues. As of Tuesday we have shot video two times. When we shot the first time we didn’t follow the script or story board as written and so when I recorded the voiceover from the script there are some inconsistencies. We will need to re-film a few scenes due to those inconsistencies and a few shots that didn’t turn out.

I recorded the voice before the film was edited. This is a challenge because I have never scored a film before. And we need to know how much time to leave on shots for narration and where to leave space in narration for shots.

Challenges:

• lighting – We are shooting in my classroom and I have a lot of windows, but no blinds. As we are getting further into winter the light is different even though we are meeting at the same time.
• time – We are doing this during my prep and free time. Who has unlimited free time??

Heidi and I decided that the best idea would be for us to each create a presentation and be co-presenters on eachothers presentation. This left me with the task of coming up with the outline for the Goomoodleikiog presentation.

I began by creating a spread sheet that addressed the features/educational uses of Google, Moodle, Wiki’s and Blogs, but I was at a loss at where to go from there. I wanted my presentation to be interesting and I kept thinking about all the good presentations I had been to and all the horrible, bad, boring presentations I had been to and I tried to think of what made the good presentations different from the bad. I looked at Heidi’s outline and she had a great beginning with a video clip from a mainstream movie and she had a them throughout that tied everthing together. And I had a revelation: I need a story to tell.

This was a huge revelation for me. I am working with video in my classroom. My students are creating standards based video to show their learning of Spanish. Aside from the Spanish, the main focus I work on with the students it telling a story. We are constantly talking about effective story telling. Now I had to work on that myself.

This summer Heidi and I decided that we wanted to try to present at CUE. We brainstormed ideas and came up with Goomoodle. A combination of Google and Moodle. We had both had teachers ask us which they should use.  Or they would ask if they needed one because they were already using the other. We wanted to create a presentation that helped teacher understand the ins and outs of each and understand how they complimented each other and became stronger when they were used together.

We set up a google aps site and began our brainstorming process. It was really powerful for me to see how we could make comments and organize our ideas, especially since we don’t work at the same site. Using the wiki and making arrangements to be online at the same time allowed us to have a dialogue as our ideas grew and focused on our topic.

We took advantage of the chat feature to make comments on each other’s ideas. And we went in many directions. We talked about creating our own project in Google and Moodle, we explored using lessons/products from my project based computer class and the project based work I do with my spanish classes.

As we refined our ideas and focus, we decided that we wanted to add blogs and wikis transforming our name to Goomoodleikiog.