Learn Tech with Ruth

It's summer time. Wow. Hard to believe that we are really free for the summer. Two whole months. If only one did not have to worry what will happen in the upcoming school year. Will we will back in class with our students or will we be teaching hybrid classes? No one knows at this time. So I am keeping super busy creating little instructional videos for teachers who want to try new tech things. Check out the one on remove.bg. It's super easy to remove the background in any pictures and replace it with a new background. I love it. Subscribe to my YouTube Channel if you would like to get new videos in the future. 

We just about made it through the 2019/2020 school year. What a crazy one it was. Things just went down hill right after Christmas it seems. Who would have thought what would happen then? But we made it through, zooming, Google Meetings, online assignments almost no one did. I will prepare better for the next time this will happen. I even already made out a presentation I will share over the summer that will feature 15 practical online teaching tools for teachers. We can do this. Really.

I just realized I have not updated my blog since the beginning of the school year. Well, it's all coming along well actually. I now have German classes in the morning and French in the afternoon. This works out a whole lot better somehow. We are stressing can do statements this year. I am up to almost 30 in both French and German classes. Pretty good I may say. The students feel very confident that they actually can do all of those things which amazes me. I teach a lot more relaxed this year, having the students get out of their seats more. We do a lot of circle activities where I am a participating member in the activity, which is fun. This helps us bond nicely, too. ACT for seniors is over, meaning that the formal observation is next. Still have to work a bit on timing to get all of the hoopla for TEAM in within the time allowed. This week was Fall Break. I packed a lot of outdoor activities and exercise into the week off from school. The hike to Andrews Bald in the Smokies and t...

Last week was the first week of school for us. I finally met my new students and we have now spent two days together. I am happy to report that I am very pleased with them. It's great how new foreign language learners have a big smile on their faces and really try hard to pronounce correctly. So far we have done basic greetings, ask for your name and age as well as say goodbye. Next week we will do the numbers and the alphabet. French will get stated on the Voces Digital program. It seems very challanging but I am sure my students are up to it. We signed up on the Google Classroom, only to find out our tech person from central office reset the password over the weekend, freaking out my students who wanted to do their homework. We also created our characters on Classcraft, and French classes had their first boss battle. Unfortunately, the boss won all three times we played. "Better luck next time," it said. Hopefully, on Monday they will win. We also made a couple of simpl...

Where did the summer go? Two weeks and we are back hard at work with our students. What did I learn this summer? I would say my favorite is Soundtrap, a podcasting platform. I am difinitely going to use that with my French and German students. We are supposed to become a STEM school so I will be focusing on creating STEM type projects which should not be too hard. Creating podcasts does qualify for STEM. So what have I done in anticipation of the new school year? I have set up my new Google Classroom with lots of resources, updated the course syllabi, worked on understanding the Voces Digital French program, set up new Classcraft classes, set up new Duolingo classes, worked on a Summer teacher PD called #teachingwith2020vision, and went to the gym almost every day for a month now. Oh, I also am taking Tai Chi, which is so much fun. Unfortunately I did not get to go to a conference so my new ideas a somewhat scarce. But on the bright side I am going to LangFest19 in Montreal the last we...

It was hard. Switching from teaching nothing but Spanish for 28 years to French and German was a major challenge. Yes, German is my native language but that doesn't mean one can automatically explain the language to students. 16 ways to express "the" depending on its position in a sentence? I am amazed they were able to grasp 12 of those. Apparently the genitive case is not used much anymore so we only covered nominative, dative and accusative. Reading the classics such as Der Struwwelpeter and Max und Moritz was just too funny. Well, then there was Der Erlkönig, scary...And then there were my French classes. These were highly motivated for the most part and developed the most lovely accent. It made my heart jump from joy to hear my students speak French. We just loved The Little Prince. Acting out the scenes was so cool. I never got that with Spanish. I'm not sure why it didn't seem too important for my Spanish students to develop a good accent. If I ever teach h...