SHS: Spanish -- Podcasting and Blackboard

Victoria Mazzarelli, World Language Department Chair and Spanish teacher, recently combined podcasting with Blackboard's Discussion Boards. Two of her 12th grade Spanish Honors classes participated in this activity. A Blackboard class was set up combining all students from Periods 2 and 3. Both classes were given the assignment to read and create an alternate ending to the story "Nosotros, no" ("Not us") .

Working in pairs students used the language lab to record their endings in Spanish. With the help of lab assistant, Laura Schwartz, the audio files were then attached to each group's Blackboard Discussion Group.

Next students from Period 2 were asked to listen to the podcasts in the Discussion Board of Period 3 and comment in Spanish on all of them. Students were given time to start this in class, but some of the work was done at home.

The project involved reading, writing, listening and speaking in Spanish as well as collaborating with students in another class.

This image shows the Blackboard Discussion Board groups with the uploaded .mp3 file. Click on image to see a larger view. To hear one of the Spanish podcasts, click here.

CMS: French Class in the LMC

John Horrigan, LMS and Sharon Gardner, French teacher, co-taught an 8th grade French class at CMS. During 6 sessions, students researched a province in France utilizing a variety of print and online resources following a project description and rubric. They synthesized the information to create a coherent, interesting and informative story, harvested images to support their narration, created a digital story in Photostory and created a written handout to explain the final presentation. All students used Noodletools to create Works Cited Pages, citing all sources used in the creation of the final projects.

The following is one student's final Photostory project: