Welcome to the March 2006 electronic newsletter of the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center!

Anyone who has tried to bring some semblance of order to the chaos in someone else's world, whether a disorganized child, a messy student, or even perhaps a parent who no longer has the faculties to complete ordinary tasks, knows just what a difficult task that can be!

"It's here somewhere!" she shouted over her shoulder in her most encouraging voice as she flung various items of clothing aside, and then proceeded to dig through the layers of magazines, origami books, shoes, cosmetics, sketch pads, pet toys, craft projects, papers, and sports equipment that covered every flat surface in her room, including the floor.

Her mother stood a safe distance from the excavation, watching and waiting with resignation for the promised item. She couldn't help but smile when she realized that it was actually harder to locate something in her daughter's messy room than it was to find information in a constantly expanding digital universe!

She could remember when she used to think that the problem was that her daughter simply had no real system of organization. She had tried to impose several, but each one had been met with loud complaints and deep resistance. After witnessing this process multiple times, she finally realized that her daughter's confident insistence that the item existed indicated that she already had a reasonably functional system for cataloguing her ever-growing accumulations of treasures. It just wasn't very efficient . . . .

In this issue of the Alumni Connection, we invite you into the messy rooms of cyberspace to gain some new insights about your students and how new technologies can help them to find, navigate, comprehend, organize, evaluate, package, and communicate the information they encounter in a constantly expanding digital universe!

Cherice Montgomery, Newsletter Editor
Marcia Rosenbusch, Director, National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center
Sonmez Pamuk, Web Designer
Julio C. Rodriguez, Graphic Designer

Locating Information in the Constantly Expanding Digital Universe – How can I help students locate cognitively challenging, emotionally engaging materials that are of interest to them?

Now, although her senses were still assaulted by an overwhelming amount of information every time she entered her daughter's room, she had a different perspective on the experience. She understood that each item said something about her daughter—what captured her attention, how she spent her time, what (and who) she valued, and what she didn't. She had learned that the location of each item was important too. In her daughter's case, if it was somewhere on top, it had probably been used recently, and if so, it probably mattered! If only messy bedrooms were searchable so that an archaeological expedition wasn't required in order to find things she didn't realize were going to be so important at the time she buried them under layers of other stuff!

Unfortunately, many students are equally inefficient when it comes to locating information in the messy rooms of cyberspace! Even though technology hasn't yet progressed to the point of making their bookbags, lockers, and bedrooms searchable, there are a few tips and tricks that you can teach students to help them locate information in cyberspace!

For example, did you know that you can search for video clips, audio clips, MP3 files, and images using Altavista? Simply click on the tabs at the top of the page to tell the search engine what kind of media you are seeking, then type in your search terms. You can even specify particular file formats (such as MPEG, AVI, Quicktime, Real Player, etc.) by clicking on the little boxes under the search box! (Hint: If you want something in your target language, enter your search term in the target language.)

Google can be used to search a site that doesn't have its own search engine! Simply go to Google and type in your search term (Bookbag, for example), then type in Site: followed by the URL of the site (bookbag Site: www.mydaughtersroom.com). Poof! A list of all of the pages on that website that refer to bookbags would pop right up!

Google will also take care of those times when you need to search within specific categories, like blogs (Blog Search), the text of many books (Book Search), catalogs, discussion group postings (Google Groups), images (Google Images), news sites (Google News), scholarly articles (Google Scholar), shopping sites (Froogle), or TV programs. All you have to do is go to Google, click on the More link, then click the link with the right category in order to search only that kind of media. If you like this categorical approach, check out Yahoo Countries Directory. Click on a country to access a list of common topic areas related to that country, then click on a topic area to access individual websites related to it.

You can also use Google to search for specific kinds of documents. Go to Google and type in your search term followed by Filetype:extension (i.e., bookbags Filetype: ppt or bookbags Filetype: doc or bookbags Filetype:pdf or bookbags Filetype:wav) and a list of pages that refer to bookbags and have on them whatever type of file you searched for (a PowerPoint, a Word document, a PDF document, or an audio file) will appear!

You can teach students to use regular search engines more efficiently by encouraging them to explore Boolean Searching on the Internet: A Primer in Boolean Logic. It sounds scary, but it is full of easy-to-understand diagrams that will show them how to use tiny tools like quotation marks to search for items with more precision, and to refine their searches even further by using words like NOT (e.g., "socks and shoes" NOT galoshes).

If you find that your students are resistant to trying such strategies because they think they already know how to find what they need (remember that they think the same thing when they go digging for something in their messy rooms!) then send them to the IMSA 21st Century Information Fluency Project, where they can watch how what they type into Google changes the quality of the search results right before their eyes! Once they are convinced that there might be a better way, they'll also want to check out Google Guide—a place for both novice and experienced users to learn more about effective search strategies. Finally, don't forget to send them over to Noodle Tools: Information Literacy Search Strategies where they'll find a fantastic, annotated list of links to search tools and information portals that are organized by the kind of task a student may wish to accomplish. (This site is especially good for younger learners.)

Did you know that you can also make information come to you instead of having to go searching for it? Google Alerts is a free service that will alert you by e-mail every time new information is posted to the web about the topic of your choice! So, next time you want to add current information to a unit you plan to teach in the future, fill out the online form (only 3 boxes—very easy), then click submit! When a message about it appears in your e-mail account, simply confirm your request by clicking on the appropriate link. Once you have done so, you'll start receiving regular alerts about the latest information on the topic!

Navigating a Digital World – How can I help students to effectively navigate the abundance of information available to them?

Navigating through her daughter's messy room (either visually or physically) was almost as big of a challenge as finding things in it! She could remember dreading the impending visit of a guest because such an event typically required that she block out at least a day to help her daughter clean her room. Having to try to make sense of what was on the floor, on top of the furniture, on the walls, and coming out of the closets was, well, a thoroughly disagreeable task in a space where not one single object seemed to be inclined to follow the rules! She found herself wondering why her daughter didn't seem to experience the same frustration and that was when the insight suddenly struck! Her daughter's bedroom was the one space in her daughter's life in which there were no real rules. In a strange sort of way, the messiness was actually a form of control! She chuckled when she realized that messy rooms are also classic examples of hypertext! Everything in such a room is connected to everything else in some way, and teens are able to see the invisible links between the various items, focusing their attention on whatever matters at the moment without worrying about where all of the other links might lead. How ironic that many teens did not apply these same understandings of hypertext to the online environments in which they spent time while attempting to complete academic tasks!

To learn more about how you can help such students, visit Online Reading Strategies and take a look at a helpful, 29-slide PowerPoint that offers a very concise rationale for teaching online reading strategies, identifies student behaviors that are indicators of poor reading strategies, and offers multiple suggestions for things teachers can do to teach online reading strategies that will help students to become more successful readers of both print and online text.

If you would prefer to simply see some examples, explore Online Reading Strategies: A Think Aloud. This outstanding online presentation uses screen shots and pop-up, "think aloud" text to demonstrate some of the mistakes that students make when reading online text that cause comprehension to break down. Use the scroll bar and buttons at the bottom of the page to move through the presentation more quickly, then check out Thinking Thru Linking, a site that explains 6 different conceptual approaches teachers can use when designing lessons based on websites. When you're ready to apply what you've learned, scroll down through Six Paths to China, an easy-to-absorb page that will give you a quick sense of 6 different formats you can use to help learners navigate online content.

Comprehending – How can I scaffold students engagement with and comprehension of the texts they encounter?

Her new understandings about what mattered to her daughter gave her some ideas for alternative approaches that she could try. For example, instead of spending several days trying to help her daughter organize her books and CDs alphabetically, hang her clothes in the closet in color-coordinated sections, neatly line up her shoes by season on the shoe rack, or file papers in a notebook according to subject (all strategies that worked for HER), only to have the room look like a hurricane had come through it every time she opened the door, she decided to try to invent a system that matched her daughter's habits instead. Wide nets strung from corner to corner gave stuffed animals a place to live that didn't threaten the rest of the teenage ecosystem, while several large bookshelves with edges kept the books her daughter was likely to casually toss at them from falling like coconuts on the heads of unsuspecting visitors. Colorful milk crates in the bottom of the closet collected shoes like rainwater, and big, plastic bins that could be slid under the bed and out of sight gathered everything else. (She made sure they were see-through so that her daughter didn't have to completely empty them every time she was looking for something). Large, magnetic white boards provided space for artistic expression, eliminating the need for lots of loose paper, and kept the important papers from turning to mulch on the floor . . . .

Like this mother, as educators learn to "read" their students and the worlds they inhabit, they will come to better understand what draws and drives them, what they will notice, and what they are likely to miss in a given piece of text. That information can guide the selection of tools that will better scaffold students' engagement and comprehension. Here are just a few. Think Literacy: Cross-Curricular Approaches to Support Learning in Grades 7-12 is a phenomenal handbook that can be downloaded as a PDF. It contains nicely organized information about the needs of struggling readers, ideas for supporting them, blank templates, sample activities, and instructional posters. Nearly all of these strategies are appropriate for second language learners. Elementary teachers may find Guided Reading more helpful. It contains links to numerous templates for during reading tasks to support students’ reading. If you still need more ideas, explore Reading: Teaching-Learning Reading Strategies, where you'll find loads of useful information and activity ideas for using a wide variety of reading strategies to accomplish specific purposes, such as activating what students know, building background knowledge, building vocabulary, determining purpose and strategy, understanding key vocabulary during reading, responding to reading, questioning text, and a host of others.

Did you know that you can upload Word documents or the URLs of webpages to Readability.info in order to get an instant, free analysis of the reading level required for students to comprehend that particular piece of text? You can even compare the text you have selected with the reading levels required to comprehend other forms of popular media! Meanwhile, at Voycabulary, students can type a URL into the search box, select a dictionary in the language of your choice, and watch this little tool make every word on the page a hotlink that they can click in order to get an instant definition!

If your students struggle with the comprehension of spoken texts, you'll love E-Nounce. It is a plug-in that allows you to slow down or speed up the rate of speech in digital audio recordings in any language without changing the pitch or intelligibility of the speaker. This is especially useful for allowing learners to control the rate of speech when listening to heritage speakers. A free, 30-day trial is available, after which you must purchase the software in order to continue using it.

If pronunciation is the problem, Rachel Klomp recommends that you send your students to Language Guide, where they can hear heritage speakers pronounce common vocabulary words in Spanish, can test their vocabulary skills with pop-up pictures, or can even brush up on grammatical structures with a basic grammar review of a variety of topics.

Evaluating - How can I prepare students to be critical consumers of information?

"But Moooom! I can't throw that away! It was my faaavorite! Don't you remember when I got it in the 7th grade? Besides, I might need it when I . . . !" whined her daughter in her most indignant voice—the one meant to convey, "How could you possibly even think to suggest such a thing?!" Her mother suppressed a sigh, put her skepticism on mute, and tried to validate her daughter's feelings. "I do remember when you got it and I know you really liked it, honey (even though you haven't given it a second thought until I discovered it under your bed). I can see how you might need it again someday (although I seriously doubt it). I promise that if you do, I'll get you another one (surely someone in the world will be selling one on E-bay). Helping her daughter to inventory and evaluate each of the items in her bedroom in order to determine what she needed, what was worth keeping, and what she could throw away had been no easy task!

Helping students to do the same thing with electronic information, especially information that is packaged in appealing ways, can be even more difficult! Screen It.com is a useful (albeit ad-heavy) site that provides detailed descriptions of potentially objectionable content in popular movies. It is organized by categories such as alcohol/drugs, gore, disrespectful/bad attitude, frightening/tense scenes, guns/weapons, music, profanity, sex, topics to talk about, etc., and is a useful tool for helping teachers pre-screen DVDs that they might be planning to show in class more critically. To encourage students to develop these same evaluative skills, visit QUICK: The Quality Information Checklist. It is a simply worded site with various activities designed to scaffold elementary students' evaluation of the information they find on the Internet. If you need something more appropriate for secondary students, try the 21st Century Literacy Information Fluency Project: Evaluation Wizard. It leads students, step-by-step, through a series of evaluation checklists to help them determine whether or not the information sources they are using are credible and of high quality. Explore the rest of the site for a wide variety of downloadable materials and quality resources, including a series of well-designed micromodules on a wide variety of tech-related subjects—everything from browsers and bias to "nyms." Each module includes great online pre- and post-tests. Check it out by trying this pretest on search engines and then test your own searching skills with these performance-based "search challenges." If you find that your students are not yet up to the challenge, The Center for Media Literacy's Media Literacy Kit offers free, helpful, high quality curricular materials, handouts, and color posters that you can download as PDFs in either English or Spanish for teaching students to be more critical of the information that constantly bombards them from different kinds of media. Some of the materials are specifically designed for elementary students, while others are targeted at secondary students.

For something that 21st Century learners will find more compelling, try Games for Kids interactive, online games available in English or French that are designed to help upper elementary students learn to evaluate information (for bias, misinformation, privacy-related issues, propaganda, safety issues, stereotyping, etc.) and to explore a variety of other cyberissues. The games even come with downloadable teaching guides!

Organizing – How can I help students to organize the information they find and create so they can easily share it with others?

As she helped her daughter sort things in her room into various bins, the thought occurred to her that if each item in her daughter's room happened to have a corresponding entry somewhere within her mind, all of these objects they had spent the day sorting were mere shadows of the overwhelming number of electronic resources that must also be filling her life. She realized that her daughter might be applying similar organizational strategies to that space, and shuddered to think of the confusing and inefficient mental map of the world that must produce! Fortunately, her daughter's teachers seemed to understand this and frequently provided a variety of different kinds of tools to help her organize the electronic information she encountered.

If you'd like to try some of their tools on your students, visit the Graphic Organizer Generator, where you can enter text and the site will generate free, printable concept webs, KWL charts, Venn diagrams, timelines, and more for your learners who rely heavily on visual or spatial intelligence. (Scroll to the bottom of the page to get started.) To learn more about how graphic organizers can be used to scaffold students' thinking, research, and writing, spend some time at Graphic Organizers as Thinking Technology. To locate other sites that offer free graphic organizers and other materials to help scaffold students' learning, go to Scaffolds and Organizers where you'll find an extensive list. If you haven't visited 4teachers.org for awhile, you might want to take another look. It contains a variety of other useful tools to help teachers organize information for students, including rubric generators (Rubistar), online quiz generators, webquest organizers, worksheet generators, and much more!

If you would prefer to give your students more control over their own investigations of new information, then try these Webquest Design Patterns. You can use them to help you design webquests that will effectively organize your students' explorations of online content.

New technologies are making it possible to organize (and share) information in unprecedented ways that are more personalized, more convenient, more flexible, and easier to combine with the efforts of others. For example, have you noticed the little orange boxes that say RSS on them that seem to be appearing on webpages lately? They indicate that a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed is available. Such feeds “notice” when a user’s favorite blogs, online newspages, and webpages have been updated, and then funnel them all into one place for easy reading. To learn more about how this technology can help educators, visit the RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators and download the PDF containing a comprehensive guide with step-by-step explanations of RSS feeds for teachers. Once you've done that, a few simple clicks of your mouse will allow you to subscribe to Bloglines, a free online aggregator that will compile and organize your feeds from various websites and allow you to share them with others who have similar interests. If you're worried that using your free Bloglines account will be too technical for you, go to Bloglines Step-by-Step, where you'll find a short description of how to add feeds to your Bloglines aggregator. If you still want more information, stay tuned for our April 2006 newsletter, where you'll find everything you ever wanted to know about blogging, podcasting, and RSS feeds!

Your visual learners will love Flickr, a free, online service that allows you to store, edit, annotate, and share photos with family, friends, or the general public. You can make your collections public or private, and your family and friends can subscribe to an RSS feed that lets them know each time you update your collections.

Your auditory learners will appreciate Music Mobs, a site for music that is similar to Flickr. It allows you to search for your favorite artists, enter their names to generate playlists of artists who produce similar music, share your playlists with others, and/or download the links in XSPF (an open source, sharable playlist format based in XML).

Your intrapersonal learners will like the free software available for download at Madcow Webnotes that will allow them to annotate the text, images, and multimedia content on any webpage they browse by highlighting it and adding comments or attaching multimedia files to it for later retrieval. They can make your annotations available for public viewing and searching so that others can add annotations to your annotations. (Requires free registration.)

The interpersonal learners in your class have probably already discovered the social affordances of sites like iKeepBookmarks.com, a free service allows you to organize and store bookmarks to your favorite sites online in password protected or public collections. Such online bookmarking services are particularly useful for people who use multiple browsers, access the internet regularly from multiple computers, or who wish to share their bookmark collections with others.

Bookmark Tracker is another free, very flexible web-based bookmarking service without advertising and that offers the added advantage that it makes both public and private RSS feeds available (so that any time you update your bookmarks, others can be notified). It also has features that allow you to import existing bookmark collections from the web, to synchronize your web collection with the collections in your browsers, to feed your web collection into your blog, and to allow users to identify the ten most popular bookmarks from your collection.

Del.icio.us is one of the most well-known bookmarking services. Free registration allows you to participate in the process of social bookmarking—tagging your bookmarks with keywords that allow others with similar interests to access and explore them. To learn more about the whats, whys, and hows of social bookmarking, check out Social Bookmarking Tools: A General Review, a comprehensive article written in conversational language and illustrated with screenshots that offers simple explanations and extensive lists of links to resources. If you prefer something a little less wordy, you'll appreciate Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison, where after you scroll past the introductory material at the top, you'll find bulleted explanations of many of the concepts associated with social bookmarking, tagging, and RSS feeds. The page also includes a list of tools and lists points of comparison among them. Convinced? Then you'll love Technorati: Tag Search, a search engine that lets you expand your search by exploring tags that others have used in relation to your topic.

Designing – How can I help students to skillfully design, package, and communicate messages to communities that are of interest to them?

She left her daughter's room, exhausted, but satisfied. She loved watching her daughter construct her own understandings about the things that were meaningful to her in ways that aligned with who she was as a person and worked for who she was as a learner. What's more, it amused her to watch her daughter continue to fill every square inch of empty space she inhabited (and there was a lot more of it now!) with as much of her personality as she could! Sounds, images, movement, objects, and words all became containers for it, and she knew that her efforts to help her daughter design an environment that was more responsive to her needs had made that communication more manageable for everyone who knew her. In the days and weeks that followed, neither she nor her daughter really said much about the experience. That didn't really matter. They had worked through it together, and in the process, had discovered that they both knew what it meant.

New technologies have expanded the range of containers (such as milk crates and plastic bins) that students can use to store, package, or communicate things to an almost limitless number of possibilities. Skillful teachers who recognize the power of these new tools are looking for ways to use them to design more meaningful experiences for their students and in the process, are expanding their definition of what counts as acceptable evidence of students' understanding. If you are interested in the conceptual perspectives behind some of their efforts, check out Jeff Wilhelm's humorous and powerful article Literacy by Design: Why is all this technology so important? or John Seely Brown's Learning, Working, and Playing in the Digital Age in which he connects historical trends and recent technological developments with a number of concrete examples of how teachers are using the magic of new technologies to reinvent education in powerful ways. For some help with how-tos, experiment with the outstanding template at Digital Literacy: Rethinking Literacy and Evaluation in a Digital World for designing curriculum, lessons, and activities for your students. While you are there, you may want to explore the rest of this interesting site grounded in media studies that contains information on constructivism, curriculum development, information culture and politics, and tools and technology.

So just what new "containers" are available? Everything from cyberportfolios, digital scrapbooking, and digital storytelling, to machinima, shorts, simulations, and zines!

Cyberportfolio is a searchable site in French that allows you to access online portfolios of written work, artwork, and reflections done by elementary students from Canada. The portfolios can be accessed by grade level or students' last names, and you can also see teacher portfolios. If you are intrigued by what you see and are ready to experiment, visit Electronic Portfolios.org, where you'll find wonderful links to rubrics for evaluating multimedia portfolios, a series of portfolio development frameworks that would be helpful in structuring professional development on this topic, and a plethora of other practical information.

If you like the idea of electronic portfolios, but are interested in something a little less traditional, then consider E-scrapbooking. About E-scrapbooking provides a short paragraph explaining what it is with links to some helpful resources. E-scrapbooking is a phenomenal site with tons of practical links to information, resources, and articles for using it as a tool for learning. (Be sure to scroll all the way to the end of the page—the links are all well worth exploring.) Some examples that might be helpful to language teachers include: Anne Frank Center Scrapbook, Evacuation Scrapbook by Yoshiko Uchida (Japanese Internment, 1942), Exploring Cultural Rituals, Rainforest Scrapbook, Quebec, (a webquest that shows how a teacher might structure a scrapbooking project for students), Exploring China, and A Scrapbook on the Holocaust (two examples of how teachers might structure the resources students will explore in preparation for an e-scrapbooking project). If you liked that format, here is a template you can use to create a similar page of your own!

Once you and your students have mastered e-scrapbooking, you're ready for digital storytelling. When Flowers Fall is an incredibly rich example of it that combines haiku poetry, kanji, and digital photography to present insights and issues related to aging in Japan. The primary text is in English, so teachers of any language could use this as a model for a project in which students investigate a social issue from the cultural perspective of a particular group in the target country and communicate their findings and opinions using multimedia tools. Obviously, students could be encouraged to produce the text for their projects in the target language. Paese Italiano is another example, in English and grounded in Italian culture, that may give you ideas for projects that you could ask your students to complete in the target language. For a slightly different format, try Italian Journal: Willie Osterman. This e-journal documents the changing culture of Bologna, Italy in the late 1990s, along with the personal thoughts of the photographer. Contrast that with Ghost Town & Land of the Wolves: Chernobyl, another e-journal that chronicles the explorations of the area around Chernobyl by a female motorcylist from Russia. Click on various links to explore the photos and the accompanying, well-written text (which includes snippets of historical information). Interviews—50 Cents is another beautiful example of what someone can do with a digital video camera, some interesting questions, and the web! If you'd like to try a similar project with your students, Oral Histories Harvest Family Heritage will take you to questions and links to additional resources that you can use to help guide students through the process of interviewing and writing their own family histories. To see a project that is more grounded in capturing an event as it occurs, watch the 2nd video on the site, Monarch Butterflies: From Egg to Adult. It is a neat example of how students, parents, and teachers can work together to use Inspiration software, video, music, and audio to capture the growth and development of understanding. You can make your own Digital Documentaries for your students and the information and examples on this site will get you started! To see even more examples, click through Tech Head Stories, a comprehensive list of links to numerous digital stories and related resources.

If these examples have convinced you of the power of combining storytelling, digital tools, and language learning, then you are ready to browse the Digital Storytelling Cookbook. Created by the Center for Digital Storytelling, it guides would-be film-makers through a "recipe" for creating their own digital stories. Be sure to check out the samples section for other great ideas you could use as the basis for projects in your classes. If you still aren't sure you can manage the process, skim Digital Storytelling Finds Its Place in the Classroom, where you'll get a brief overview of how an elementary teacher facilitated the written, visual, auditory, technological, and social aspects of digital storytelling projects in his elementary classroom. To see a simple, visual catalogue of project examples and a collection of ideas that would be very appropriate for language classrooms, visit Going Digital in the Classroom: Why should I use a camera in the classroom? (Be sure to scroll through the entire page.)

Do you find yourself saying, "Okay, I know what digital storytelling is, and I think I understand the process, but I'm not sure how to teach students to do the writing?" These Stories in These Pictures: An Easy Guide to Storytelling from the Images We Collect in our Lives offers step-by-step tips in very simple language that explain some of the key elements that contribute to telling a compelling story based on images. If you found that too conceptual and would like to see more illustrations, visit The Elements of Digital Storytelling for samples, research, and resources regarding five elements of digital storytelling—media, action, relationship, context, communication.

For those who need help with the technical side of the process, Digital Video Basics offers a simple, useful set of definitions, screenshots, and tutorials to help students and teachers learn to use i-Movie, while DigiTales provides a fantastic collection of web resources related to image and sound editing and other technical components of the art of digital storytelling. Be sure to wander through the Storykeeper's Gallery to see more examples of what is possible. To help students improve the quality of their photos, encourage them to explore Kodak: Taking Great Pictures. The outstanding set of tips sheets and tutorials provides information with visual examples to teach students to take excellent photos. You can get the pages in just about any language in the world by clicking on the "Change" link in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. When you do, a new screen will load with language choices, categorized by geographic regions (Americas, Asia/Pacific, Europe, and Middle East). For additional ways to integrate digital photography into your lessons, visit Using Digital Cameras in the Classroom and click on Lesson Ideas.

Once you are comfortable with digital storytelling, the next step is to add movement! Foreign Film Festival is a simple lesson plan that describes how foreign language students can use their language skills to turn a culturally authentic short story into a foreign film. If you are working with beginners, you might find that these cute online video clips designed to give French language learners practice with basic topical vocabulary might give you some ideas for video projects or skits that your own students could write and produce! Imovie Examples will link you to imovie projects that are categorized by grade level and subject area that will spark your creativity while helping your students to meet the Connections standard! iMovie in Teacher Education is a nicely organized page that outlines numerous ways teacher educators can use digital video to support the learning of pre-service teachers and illustrates each suggestion with an I-movie from a science methods course.

When you are ready to try a little filmmaking with your students, Multimedia Seeds: Exploring Audio & Video Production in the Classroom is a phenomenally rich site with a wealth of ideas for creative warm-up activities that can be used to prepare students to create audio and video products, project ideas that would be appropriate for language classes, and links to all sorts of quality practical and technical resources (including thematic resources and information about how to insert video into PowerPoint, Word, and web-based documents).

Make a Short is a set of pages that leads readers through making a "short" (mini-video) by asking professionals to unpack their thinking as they engage in various steps of the process. Photos are explained by extremely concise text clips from interviews that can also be heard via audio. There is also a nice list of "guiding questions" that the "professionals" ask themselves when engaging in the particular step that is being depicted on that page. You could use this as the process sheet (like a series of online worksheets) to guide groups of students through this process. Of course, the "tour" ends with a demo of the finished product. Eejit’s Guide to Film-making is another fantastic site with simple, but comprehensive tips to help amateur movie makers with the pre-, during, and post-production process. The well-designed, nicely illustrated pre-production pages offer suggestions for generating ideas for a movie, laying out a script, structuring the action, and creating storyboards. The other pages include information on costuming, editing, lighting, shooting, and special effects. When you think your students are ready for the big time, visit The One Minutes Jr., where your students can browse a collection of one-minute videos in a variety of languages made by students in countries from around the world and then enter their own! The videos cycle randomly, therefore, be SURE to preview the ones you will show your students since the content of some is graphic and NOT appropriate for classroom use!

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more interesting, teenagers came up with Machinima (3-D filmmaking in virtual environments) by connecting their videogame consoles to their computers, extracting backgrounds and avatars (characters) from them, and combining the scenes with music, sound, recorded voices, and special effects to produce everything from commercials, to shorts, to full length feature films!

To see some great examples, visit April Hoffman's site, click on Movies, and look for Let's Get It Started or The Awakening. Scott Schopieray recommends Bells and Spurs, a beautiful example of how one might use an existing text as the basis for a Machinima project. (Click on the green Watch the Video link to see the movie.) Teachers don't necessarily have to know how to do this to offer it as a project option for their students! There are a variety of articles and tip sheets like Quick 10 Cinematic Errors that give students some interesting ideas as well as things to avoid when creating machinima.

If you (or your students) want more information about how machinima is being used around the world, Machinima.com will take you to articles in English, an online discussion forum, interviews, tutorials, and streaming video related to machinima. Machinima. Como Hacer Cine—Entrevista: Richard Gras contains a well-structured interview in Spanish with Richard Gras about his work with Machinima, Machinima Deutschland is a site in German devoted to all things Machinama, and TGO Team is the site of a French team of Machinima makers. Be sure you preview examples of machinima before using them with students as the content may not be appropriate for classroom use!

Common applications like PowerPoint can be used in rather uncommon ways. Scroll to the very bottom of PowerPoint Games to find links to phenomenal PowerPoint game templates for Jeopardy, Hollywood Squares, and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire—all complete with sound, graphics, and animation (be sure to click on the ones created by Mark Damon). All you have to do is save them to your computer, type in your own questions, and host your own show in your classroom tomorrow! If this has inspired you to have your students try to create their own PowerPoint presentations, this interactive presentation will help you to demonstrate the principles involved in creating effective PowerPoints to your students in concrete ways. PowerPoint isn't the only form of media that can inspire creativity. Visual Art Exemplars contains links to images of lots of different kinds of student art, multimedia, and writing projects inspired by popular songs and other famous texts. These projects could easily be adapted for use in foreign language classrooms. Still not satisfied? Spend some time searching the ThinkQuest Library for "foreign language," and then have fun exploring these interactive, technology-based projects created by students!

Simulations are another way to involve students in exploring content in meaningful ways and packaging it to share with others. In Le Cirque: A Global Simulation, elementary students take on the identity of a circus performer as they visit ten French cities with their troupe of acrobats and animals.  Tasks include small group discussion, the creation of a poster, the use of online resources, graphic organizers, scenarios, and writing projects. For something more elaborate, "teleport" yourself into a variety of Active Worlds, game-like interactive environments, including some in Spanish.

Like many other traditional forms of media, magazines are migrating to cyberspace. Latinitas is an online magazine (also known as a "zine") that produces separate editions for elementary-aged girls and for teens. The zines contain short little articles in English and in Spanish of interest to Latinas, including features on entertainment, Latin culture, school, and technology. Just Salsa is a web magazine devoted to salsa dancing. Be sure to explore the Culture and Music sections, where you'll find links to the history of salsa dancing, dance steps, links to MP3 files of salsa music, links to the websites of famous salsa musicians, poetry about salsa, etc.

Developing Meaningful Materials Through Technology - What tools are available to help me take greater advantage of new technologies?

Ozline: The Idea Machine will generate questions to help you brainstorm ideas for student projects. Once you have an idea in mind, Making Good Lessons Quickly—Jamie McKenzie is an outstanding module that helps teachers to think through the process of designing a conceptually rich, motivating, standards-based lesson that takes advantage of technology in 30 minutes or less! Once you have created your lesson, Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that offers “flexible copyright for creative works.” Why bother? Because its terms also provide users with the ability to download and use audio, images, text, and video posted there in their own creative products under certain conditions.

Now that you've finished your spring cleaning, treat yourself to a spring break cruise! In our April 2006 issue, we will be Sailing the 5 Cs to a Paradise of Possibilities: Blogging, Podcasting, Vodcasting, & Vlogging. If you have suggestions for information on this topic to share with fellow alumni, send your ideas to Cherice Montgomery at chericem@msu.edu!

If you've been missing Iowa, think about applying to participate in an institute such as Mentoring, Leadership, & Change: Designing Compelling Experiences for 21st Century Learners this summer!

Brown, John Seely. (1999, December 6). Learning, working & playing in the digital age. Serendip. Retrieved January 4, 2006, from http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/seelybrown/seelybrown4.html

Burbules, Nicholas C., & Callister, Jr., Thomas A. (2000). Watch IT: The risks and promises of information technologies for education. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-9083-4.

Clear - AIGA Journal of Information Design. Retrieved February 2006, from http://designforum.aiga.org/content.cfm?Alias=clear

Leu, D.J., Jr., Kinzer, C.K., Coiro, J., & Cammack, D.W. (2004). Toward a theory of new literacies emerging from the Internet and other information and communication technologies. In R.B. Ruddell, & N. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (5th ed., pp. 1570-1613). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Retrieved October 2005, from http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=leu/

Postman, Neil, & Weingartner, Charles. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. New York: Delacorte Press, p. 23.

Spiro, Rand J., Feltovich, Paul J., Jacobson, Michael I., & Coulson, Richard L. (1991). Cognitive flexibility, constructivism, and hypertext: Random access instruction for advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains. Retrieved November 3, 2003, from http://phoenix.sce.fct.unl.pt/simposio/Rand_Spiro.htm

Tol, Brian. Wiremine information garden. Retrieved June 8, 2005, from http://wiremine.org/2005/05.

Whitman, Walt. (n.d.). In McComas, Karen. (2005). Karen McComas: Blog squatter: Quotes. Retrieved March 29, 2006, from http://www.muwp.org/mccomas/stories/storyReader$166

Wilhelm, Jeff. (2000, March). Literacy by design: Why is all this technology so important? Voices from the Middle, 7(3), pp. 4-14. Retrieved January 2, 2006 from http://www.aea11.k12.ia.us/Schrader/plugarticles.htm

Subscription Information

You received this electronic newsletter because you are an alumni of an activity associated with the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center. If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, email us at nflrc@iastate.edu with the subject line "remove alumni connection."

This Newsletter was prepared with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education under Title VI grant #P229A020023. The publication of products and website URLs in this newsletter is provided for informational purposes only and does not imply an endorsement by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center, Iowa State University, or the positions or policies of the U. S. Department of Education.