Mid Year celebrations! Chinese New Year, Carnaval

February Department meeting 3:30- 4:30

US Latin room

Bring computers

share:
Emily- ACTFL conference sharing

Brigitte- Vocaroo

announcements- placements by Feb. 21st, Team meetings, Accommodations- add?, LS Buddies, February celebration, Trips Committee progress

Atlas Rubicon time by class partners:
 Share your stories and examples of collaborative development of units and curriculum. How do these documents guide teaching and consistency in programs? What do you look to units and curriculum to provide as you prepare to teach

Carnaval/Chinese New Year!

Last year we enjoyed a lunch in the US language office to celebrate various cultural holidays. We would like to continue the tradition.  The day we are looking at is Thursday, February 23rd.  We can hold the celebration in the US language office and begin at 11:15.  In this way, our IS and MS colleagues can join in on the lunch. The celebration and food can be out through US E and part of F blocks, so that we conclude and clean up around 1:00.  Look soon to your email for a sign up of what to bring.

Carnaval du Quebec

Chinese New Year 中国新年

Carnaval in Venice, Italy

                                          

Carnaval de Colombia

THANKS! It is always a pleasure and a privilege to visit classrooms.  I encourage us to visit each other's classrooms, especially if you teach the same class.  After seeing many classes, I'd like you to think about these two articles. How and how well do we do these? Please feel free to post comment about each in the blog below.

1.Teacher talk vs. student talk
In Language Classrooms, Students Should Be Talking
Language classes often don't focus on the aspect of learning a language that intrigues students most -- speaking it. We should get students talking more.

2. Wait time/cold calling
Cold Calling
Cold calling refers to a protocol used in classroom-style instruction settings (or other similar settings) where the instructor calls on individual students to answer questions posed by the instructor on a regular basis during lecture. The key feature of cold call is the unpredictability about who will get called for a particular question, or equivalently, the unpredictability for each individual about when he or she will get called.

Reveal point

The instructor can choose different possibilities in time for when to reveal who is being called to answer the question. Below are some possibilities:

Reveal point	Advantage	Disadvantage
Before stating the question to the class	The individual student can listen clearly to the question and need not ask the instructor to repeat	It forgoes one of the main benefits of cold calling: all students are trying to think of the answer to every question. Instead, since the name of the person answering is specified in advance, other students may reduce their level of attention.
Within a few seconds of stating the question to the class	All students have had time to hear and process the question	Individual students may not have been paying concentrated attention since they didn't know for sure that it's a question they might answer. Thus, the student who is asked the question may ask the instructor to repeat it.
Give a chunk of time to everybody to work out the answer (this may involve flipping through recent or earlier notes, or doing calculations, or taking time to formulate thoughts), and then reveal who'll be called	All students have had time to hear and process the question and attempt an answer. Thus, they can grade themselves by proxy upon hearing the correct answer. The technique can also be combined with in-class desk work either before or after the cold call.	This takes more time, and students may slack off in that timespan of a few seconds if the material seems too easy or too difficult.

Other interesting articles: 

If You Do Any of These 4 Activities in Your Classroom, You're Already Personalizing Learning

Personalized Learning- What does it look like?

As educators, we are tasked with the weighty responsibility of helping prepare students to be successful in life. And as wide a swath as life may cut, students must be prepared for whatever challenge it unfolds.

Despite many state standardized tests following the cookie-cutter approach of one-size-fits-all testing, educators every day are personalizing learning to meet the needs of individual students, meeting them at the intersection of their learning styles and the resources available to them. But the reality is, you may be personalizing learning, and not even realize it.

😜Click on the link and take a look at this month's         Online copy of ACTFL's Language Educator

8 Practical Skills Gained from Educational Travel

Educational Travel Practical Skills
Preaching to the choir- Here is the beginning of an article on the value of educational travel.
While I’ve spent a lot of my life becoming quite familiar with Amtrak, traveling to many places in the United States, my first travel abroad experience was actually only a few years ago. In the summer of 2011, I traveled to Greece with my college’s choir and immediately caught the “travel bug.” This past summer I traveled with my choir once again, this time to Ireland, and am now eagerly awaiting and fervently planning my next trip abroad. Though I’ve only been out of the country twice, those two experiences were significant enough to have taught me many important lessons: 

Trips Committee: We will have an update at our upcoming meeting but for those that are curious, here is the slide that was presented to us earlier in the school year.

Trips Committee Purpose: 

To ensure that Potomac teachers, coaches, and staff are following a set of best practices and guidelines for our students, families, and teachers when planning  trips and when traveling. We want to be sure that Potomac trips align with our mission, vision, core values, and school priorities (administrative and curricular).

Additionally, because there may be contracts associated with some travel plans, it is important to have a system by which we ensure that we are being mindful of any fiduciary commitment on the part of the school and/or our families.

Lastly, for the benefit of our students, families, faculty, and staff, we must be try to be vigilant of any conflicts or redundancies when scheduling trips  throughout the year.

ISTE Standards:Learning, teaching and leading in the digital age

Teachers have always held the key to student success. But their role is changing. The ISTE Standards define the new skills and pedagogical insights educators need to teach, work and learn in the digital age.

How well do we implement this Set of Standards ?

Apple a Day MacBook Tip

Have you tried Airdropping to your MacBook? If you have an iPhone and/or iPad, you can quickly send photos from those devices to your MacBook. This method is helpful to get images on your laptop to then upload to Drive and Haiku. Also, if students are taking photos or video on iPads, those images can be airdropped to your MacBook and then uploaded to Drive to share with all interested parties.

For more details on AirDrop, go to the Airdrop Solution Sheet.

Also, feel free to drop by the IS Innovation Hub on Monday after school for tech help or brainstorming on how to integrate Chromebooks, iPads, and/or MacBooks into your curriculum. I am also available on Thursday in the Arundel library from 11:30-12:30. Thanks! Jenni Ashley

Know any alum who work with languages to come and talk with students?

While it is not always possible to arrange for field trips, many of us still have contact with alum who use their language skills in their work.  Arranging for a visitor in class may work better for everyone's schedules and students can see where their language studies will get them in real life.  Please consider bringing in someone to speak to your classes.  

News and Conferences

Summer Institute- Learning and the Brain Conference
Click on the link for more information.
Join this institute in Santa Barbara, California in July to engage in intensive training to understand the neuroscience underlying learning disabilities and interventions for these disabilities.

Global Language and Culture Conference at the Mohonk Mountain House in New York to take place Sunday, April 23 through Tuesday, April 25, 2017  "Equity and Social Justice in the World Language Classroom" 

Language Scholarship Applications Now Open

Further your language skills: Apply for one of these scholarships in 5 different languages (Arabic, Chinese-Mandarin, French, Italian, or Spanish). You must be an ACTFL member & be logged in to apply! The deadline is March 31. Apply for Teachers Crossing Borders Educator Trips ACTFL and Education First’s Teachers Crossing Borders programs focus on strengthening your language proficiency and cultural competence, and inspire you to foster your students’ curiosity to explore the world through language. The deadline to apply for the program in Cuba is March 1; the deadline for the two language immersion programs is March 15. Havana: Art, Education, and Daily Life, July 1-7, 2017 Language Immersion in Panama, June 26-July 3, 2017 Language Immersion in France, June 26-July 5, 2017 You must be an ACTFL member to apply.

ACTFL Seeks Proficiency Assessment Specialists

ACTFL invites qualified individuals to apply to become proficiency testers. Those selected to become testers will be asked to attend training. Attendees are paid an honorarium for their attendance and travel costs will be reimbursed. In your training, you will be learning to administer and rate Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) according to the ILR scale, which is typically used by the US government. Certified Testers conduct tests as independent contractors for the ACTFL Testing Office, and are paid on a per test basis. As a certified ILR OPI tester, you may be eligible for other freelance/consulting assignments with ACTFL. Who's eligible: Native speakers of the following languages (Bold indicates urgent need): Afrikaans, Arabic-Libyan, Arabic-Tunisian, Assyrian, Baluchi, Belarusian, Burmese, Chechen, Danish, Dhivehi, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Fon, Fula-Peul, Fula-Toucouleur, Icelandic, Javanese, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Kirundi, Kuwaiti, Lingala, Malayam, Mandingo-Bambara, Mossi, Norwegian, Pahari, Quechua, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Tamazight, Tibetan, Tigrinya, Uighur, and Zulu.

  

First OPI Summer Workshop Location Announced: ACTFL will partner with Glastonbury High School to offer the Modified Oral Proficiency Interview (MOPI) Workshop in Glastonbury, CT, July 17-18. Language sections will be announced when registration opens. More dates and locations coming soon.

Some of our Paw Prints News!

SPANISH STUDENTS DEVELOP LANGUAGE SKILLS WHILE CODING

To celebrate Computer Science Education Week and the Hour of Code, sixth grade students coded in Spanish. The Hour of Code is a worldwide initiative to promote problem solving, logic, and coding skills. 

MAPPING IN SPANISH CLASS  Students in Mrs. Kirsch's 8th grade Spanish class recently worked together to assemble and label a map of Central America. FRENCH STUDENTS COMBINE POETRY AND ART  Advanced French Studies students enriched their study of Québecois poetry by finger painting a response to a text. In the poem "Baigneuse" by Anne Hébert, the poet describes the act of creative writing as trying to seize sunlight in the water; the poet's hands are "wet" from her work. SERVICE LEARNING INTEGRATED INTO AP SPANISH LANGUAGE AND CULTURE  Potomac is participating in a national pilot led by the College Board's AP and WE Service Program. This initiative emphasizes how to apply classroom knowledge in one's local community and the world at large to foster students' growth. At Potomac, Tricia Crowley's AP Spanish Language and Culture class is integrating service learning into the AP curriculum to help students become mindful leaders and active citizens. Poverty and access to education are among the themes the students are exploring. In one recent activity, students analyzed data about the correlation between GDP, literacy rates, and levels of unemployment in Spanish-speaking countries. They then researched NGOs in some of those countries and compared them to NGOs with which they are familiar from their service learning work. This pilot program will be a great way to gauge how service learning initiatives can be effectively woven into our existing curriculum -- one of the strategic goals of Potomac's K-12 program. IS Chinese Students practice their calligraphy skills before sharing with 5th grade!