The last two days I taught my Honors Spanish 2 class as an official laptop class. I used Dyknow both as the presentation software and as the monitoring software. Honestly, it was rough. We barely spoke any Spanish, and we were focused on the technology most of the time. I guess that is to be expected.
Things I learned:
1. I will have to make a conscious effort to keep the class communicative and interactive. I will also have to figure out how to stay in the target language as much as possible--which will be a challenge when we are using so much technology. As a department, we may have to work on developing a list of technology words that we will have to teach and use in the classroom.
2. It's not going to be perfect everytime, and I don't have to use the laptops 100% of the time.
3. I didn't do any partner work, and I did not do much communicative work. That is something I need to change.
4. Everything felt stilted and unnatural, but anything that you do for the first time is bound to feel that way.
5. I used the polling feature in Dyknow. It was very cool, and the students enjoyed it. The students had to read each question in Spanish, which was great, but they did not produce anything. In the future I would have them respond back with the correct answer or ask them a question that is slightly different from the polled question.
6. There is much to do and much to learn before using laptops full-time in the classroom.
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To introduce myself, I'm a developer for DyKnow. Now that that's out of the way, I think it's a great idea about creating a list of Spanish language technology words. Also, I sat in on a presentation at NECC a couple years ago where a Spanish teacher split students up into groups and had students practice conversational Spanish in chat. The plus side was she could see all their conversations and tell who was struggling or just regurgitating. I thought it was pretty interesting and worth sharing; however, that kind of works against the "we barely spoke any Spanish" problem.
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