On the second day, I started off bright and early listening to Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell, Paul Jennerman and Lori Langer De Ramirez. They talked about what started them on the path to proficiency and what kept them going. Each talk was phenomenal! Also, you can see Paul and Lori’s talks on Facebook Live at the Musicuentos Facebook. Sara-Elizabeth talked about how at times we look at how to keep kids in a language class until the higher levels in foreign language, but how do we keep them wanting to learning and practicing the foreign language? It is inspiring me to connect students with more Spanish-speakers. Paul talked about how to help kids along their journey as well. His favorite quote was that we need to allow students to show what they can do while still allowing them to steer back to what is comfortable for them. Lori reinforced that we need to find the hook and joy for our students. Here is my storify tweets from this session.
After this, I met up with the #langchat live tweet up! As I said in the last post, it is so helpful to see everyone face to face and take some time to talk. It was interesting to hear different class set ups, and Laura diligently tweeted out some of our live side notes!
My next session was Kicking Back with a Cool IPA. This was an amazing session, and all of the girls who presented it were so much fun. Some of my takeaways were to make sure that my IPA isn’t too narrow so students can excel. I need to think of ways to allow students to go beyond my prompt. Also they talked about how the IPA should let each kid shine. Finally, they said that you cannot “cannonball” into an IPA- you cannot teach traditionally and assess with an IPA. Some of their suggestions include using a daily reading. Again, I really liked using the idea of asking shorter questions each day and stretching out the authentic resource. They also suggested using two questions of the day. I like that this shortens some of my speaking activities to make sure that students are speaking each day. Here is my storify from this session with some slides, too!
At the end of the day, I hung out at an uncon! I met a ton of great people, and finally got to see Kara Jacobs in person. We explored how Noah Geisel uses Snapchat. He does not actually interact with kids on Snapchat, but he has them use it as a quick photo editor. He will have kids take a picture on it and write a caption in Spanish. He will also have students use it as a video editor because they can only record 10 seconds. If you have kids create a 3 snaps it is a 30 second video and, they will be limited to what you can create, and you don’t have to sit through edits and outtakes at the end of the video. They can also download the snaps, so they do not have to send it to their friends. You do not have to interact with your students at all via Snapchat to have them use it in class! (Side note: My colleague also told me that Snapchat has a QR reader, so you could use it that way too!)
Thank you, thank you to everyone that I got to meet, listen to and be inspired by! It was by far my favorite ACTFL that I attended! (Also, I am so happy that it is only a two day work week… that was exhausting!)
Here I have created a list of all of the other blog posts about ACTFL, and I will update them as I see more!
- Kara Jacobs’ takeaways from ACTFL
- Sara-Elizabeth’s Textbook session
- Colleen wasn’t at ACTFL but was inspired by all of the ACTFL tweets!
- For those of you in Megan and Kara’s session where they discussed using the Latin Grammy Awards, Bryan shared these resources.
- What to do after a great conference post
- Laura Sexton shares her ACTFL tidbits
- How to continue your conference path
- Meredith’s reflection on the conference
- John’s ACTFL highlights
- More suggestions on what to do post conference
- Rebecca’s thoughts and questions post ACTFL
- Carrie reflects on the power of a national conference
- Kara discusses her ideas after ACTFL about stereotypes and names
- Also Megan shares her takeaways as well
- Wyatt Crane‘s reflections on the Desk Free blog
Maris Hawkins 
Hola,
I just had a quick question. I was unable to attend ACTFL because I am in Spain with a group of students. I was reading the Storify you created on the IPA session you attended. The last part where you stated that students need to actively act for clarification to exceed expectations – what exactly does that mean. Do they simply have to say, “Repite, por favor” or does it mean that they ask a question within restating what was said by their partner. Thanks so much for all your reporting back! I don’t feel so bad about having to miss the conference! Thanks again,
Abby Theberge
Hello! So glad I could share what I learned! With an interpretive, students can also ask what something means instead of just trying to respond or freeze. Also they can try to rephrase the question. Does this make more sense?