Overcoming depression

My sister is a licensed mental health practitioner, and she recently started a podcast on mental health.  After aggressive lobbying on my part, she interviewed me about my experience with depression. (It wasn't really aggressive lobbying; I had offered because I thought it might be useful, and despite the fact that we've known each other for almost 40 years, she thought I might be offering just to be nice. I reminded her that I never offer to do something just to be nice. 😂😂😂)

Anyway, here it is. I was about as low as you can go, and today I'm thriving. If you are dealing with depression, you can feel better. If you need to connect with someone, email me at aksaalfeld AT gmail.com. If you are suicidal, PLEASE call the Suicide Hotline 1-800-273-8255. Crisis textline-74174.

Resources for giving feedback on pronunciation online

During the COVID-19 closure, I'm still doing weekly questions to make sure students are getting a little practice speaking. I could use FlipGrid for this, but one thing I've learned in teaching with technology is that simpler is better than more complex, and every time we introduce a new tech tool into the classroom, it adds a layer of complexity. When I was on a tech committee, one of the tech people at my university reminded us that even if we're only asking students to learn 2-3 new tools, if every teacher is asking students to learn 2-3 new tools that are different, that adds a lot of extra work to their load. Since we're already using Google Classroom and Google Classroom allows students to upload video files, I've just been using that for the weekly question. The upside is that they're already used to submitting assignments via Google Classroom, so there's little to no learning curve. The downside is that Google Classroom doesn't currently have an efficient way to leave audio or video feedback. (You could make a video and post a link in a comment, but multiply that by 100 and you can kiss doing anything else goodbye.)

I can give feedback on comprehensibility, sentence structure, and vocabulary choice using the comment feature, but giving feedback on pronunciation without using audio or video files is harder (and this is where FlipGrid may yet convince me to use it, since this feature is already integrated). But for now, when I notice a pronunciation issue, I put Google Translate and Word Reference to good use. Both websites include the option to play audio of whatever word you put in. So I send a link for the word or words that students are having trouble with, and then they can listen to the Google Translate or Word Reference pronunciation. I prefer Word Reference because it appears to be a real human voice rather than a robot voice, and it also has options for a few different dialects of Spanish. But either one will give students the main idea of how a word is pronounced.

Customizing Google Slides masters to save time

A little while ago I read this post by Amy Lenord and realized that I wasn't using Google Slides to their fullest potential.

When I was making slides for my son's homework assignments, I realized that I could save time by customizing a master slide to fit my needs so that I could just click the slide type I wanted with the text already on it instead of retyping or copying and pasting.

I made custom master slides for words, sentences, and nonsense words for my son's homework so that I could just click the "add" button and my slide had everything except the homework word.

I use Google Slides to make my vocabulary lists for my Spanish classes, and then students go on gallery walks with a notes page to get their vocabulary for our unit (in normal times; not right now when we're not in school). I put the images in sheet protectors so I can re-use them, and put little sticky labels indicating whether they're for Spanish 1, 2, 3, or 4 since I frequently do our vocab days on the same day for all classes. I thought that was pretty clever, but then I realized that I could eliminate that step and save time by customizing my slide master.

I added a custom master slide layout with Spanish 1/Spanish 2/Spanish 3/Spanish 4 on the side.

My master slide layout menu.

The nice thing is that once you've used the slide layout, when you click the add button to add a new slide, Google Slides keeps using the last one you used until you tell it to use a layout. So I don't have to copy and paste to get the layout I want; I just click the add slide button and it gives me the layout I want.

Moving online for COVID-19

The nice thing about my school is that we're already 1:1 with Chromebooks, and pretty much everyone has internet access at home (I know I am extremely spoiled). So I've already been doing the kinds of activities that will work well online and just need to make a few modifications.

To keep things simple, I created a weekly activity list for each class in a Google Doc that I shared with students, and will stick to the same or similar activity types. During our normal class, I have a weekly question that I ask students every day Monday-Thursday. However, when I've been gone for illness or professional development, I've had students submit their answers as videos, and what I've learned is that it takes me a LOT longer to give feedback on 100 videos than it does to quickly move around the room and give feedback during class time. So I decided that instead of having students make a video every day, we'll do them on Monday and Thursday. I'll give feedback on Monday so that they can make adjustments, and then have them try to answer without notes on Thursday, just like we do during class. 

I'm using Google Meet to do a few games online. For the sake of simplicity and organization, I set one time for both sections of Spanish 1, one time for both sections of Spanish 2, and one time for Spanish 3 and 4. I posted the link to Meet in Google Classroom, and then I share my screen to do Quizlet live on Mondays, and I'll call bingo games on Wednesdays (all of my bingo games are online here, and my Quizlet sets are available here). 

I'll keep doing my listening and reading comprehension activities using a Google form, but I'll make a YouTube video for the listening activities and add it to my Google form so that students can do it on their own. Edited to add: I've created a public Google Drive folder where I'm putting copies of all my materials here. 

My other concern was trying to get information out to parents, and having everything in one place so parents could easily access it. I had already created a course website using Google Sites when I started teaching at my school, but I hadn't really used it for anything except posting pictures of Spanish Club activities. But it's really easy to edit Google Sites, so I embedded my weekly activity list document into each course page, and then as I edit my Google Doc, the edits will show on my course website. 

Then I thought that maybe other people would like to have a ready-to-go website that they could use to push information out to parents, so I made a copy of the site and turned it into a publicly available template here: https://sites.google.com/a/ftcpioneers.org/sample/. If you'd like to use it, just click the "Use this template" link on the top of the page and follow the instructions to make your site. You'll need to change your permissions to share when your site is ready, but you could have the site up and running in a matter of minutes. I hope it's helpful to you! 

Homework hack for parents of new readers

My son started kindergarten this year, and I'm thrilled that he's starting to sound out words he sees and words that he uses! I really get into asking him how he thinks words are spelled, and he does pretty well for about 5 minutes, and then he's over it and wants to do something else. He's starting to have short homework assignments every week (basically sounding out words and reviewing sight words that they've learned in class), but it takes longer than 5 minutes, so after the first 5 minutes, it's been painful trying to keep him on task long enough to finish the assignment. The assignment would take maybe 20 minutes if he just did it, but he starts saying random words when he gets tired of doing it, so it's been dragging on for around 3 hours every week and getting split into multiple days just to get through it.

A few weeks ago, it occurred to me that he might do better if he only saw one word at a time instead of the whole list of words, so I made a Google Slides presentation with his homework one week just to see if it would go better, and BOY was it SO. MUCH. FASTER! As an added bonus, having the homework in Google Slides means that it's always available on my phone, so if we have a few minutes here or there while we're out and about, we can go over some of the words.

It's not fancy, but it's been working really well for us. I made a few customizable templates that are available here: http://bit.ly/2QQPSKi.