How do you say Collaborate in Spanish?
Jan 28th, 2010 by Scot Graden
Senora Washington’s 8th grade Spanish classes have just begun using the collaborative productivity tools offered to us through the Google Suite of products. Using Google Presentation and working in small groups, students are collaborating on a series of video postcard slides from 10 different destinations throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Students from the group are able to contribute to the postcard project simultaneously from their own computer, whether in school or at home. As students virtually “travel” to each location, they add “snapshots” of the sights they have seen and write about it in Spanish. As a culminating activity, the students will present to the whole class their project in Spanish. Students have also shared their projects online with their teacher, allowing her to view them at any time.
Senora Washington is also about to embark on using Web 2.0 tools to assess student fluency using cell phones. Senora will post a discussion topic on her cell phone’s voicemail. Students will call her cell phone from either their cell phone or landline phone and will be forwarded to a a voicemail storage site called Youmail.com The site will record their response to Senora’s discussion question, and allow her to listen to a student’s pronunciation online. The site keeps the student phone numbers private, and allows Senora to yet another way to authentically assess each student’s mastery of the Spanish language.
Wow, is that exciting! A long way from recording audio tapes at the Language Lab in college. Thank you, Senora Washington.
The use of technology in SAS is taking off at lightning speed. Another example of this is that my son’s teacher had to stay home with a sick child and he did the powerpoint presentation with audio from home to the class. He said it was really cool. It’s beyond my imagination, but glad it’s not beyond yours!
Oh ya, how do you say “collaborate” in Spanish anyway?