Social Networking for Spanish

I continue to experiment in other areas of teaching Spanish online. This includes social networking, primarily through Facebook.

This has evolved somewhat. When I taught my first online courses just a year ago, I made it a requirement for all of my students to keep up a Facebook page in Spanish. They received a grade for updating their profile, status and comments in Spanish. Great idea in theory, but very hard to put into practice and keep up with it while still having a personal life. There were two main problems with this: (1) the upkeep on my end and (2) many students not favoring such an assignment.

1. As I was designing the courses, I was also creating the assignments for what I expected of them on Facebook. When students learned to say their names and where they are from, I had them linked to their classmates so they could post introductions to each other. Likewise, when students learned how to express a few likes and dislikes, I would then have them post this on their profile. What I didn't consider at the time, was, how am I going to monitor all of this? Since the assignments are intermingling work between their own wall, my wall and those of their students, how was I supposed to track everything, for all 30 students per class? Nightmare! I came up with a Facebook Tracking page, where they would just copy and paste everything they posted. They submitted that, and I graded their work from this. This freed up more time for me to actually spend time on their pages networking with them. It still was a lot of work, though.

2. Since the majority of my students are non-traditional learners (i.e. adults), several of them were not familiar at all with Facebook, and there was a high learning curve just in that regard. Even though I tried to assure students that I would help them through it, there was a lot of anxiety, which became frustration because they were spending a lot of time trying to learn Facebook instead of Spanish. I did not want this. I did a survey at mid-term and found there was a lot of resentment about the Facebook requirement. One student stated that social networking should not be a requirement for the course, that this is what discussion boards were for. Another student claimed it was a privacy issue. I had told students that they create a virtual reality if they prefered, and didn't have to share any facts with people that they didn't want known. However, this bothered the student that she either had to give up her privacy or become a liar.

Even though there were a number of students who enjoyed the Facebook component, the overall attitude about it was not positive. I was a little saddened, because I love Facebook and I think it's fun and is a beneficial way to learn. But just because I love it doesn't mean I can expect all of my students to love it.

I have since found a compromise that I am content with and students don't feel uncomfortable with. I now make that a voluntary portion of the course. It is solely used as a vehicle for me to relay course reminders, post sites that I would call course "teasers," communicate with students who want to communicate with me there (through chat or private message), and then social networking. I have found that a good number of my students took me up on it, and some remain quiet, but others take full advantage of the offering. I also linked this Facebook account to my Twitter account, and made my Twitter account available to students as well. So, for the course reminders I would tweet those, and they are then available in my Twitter, but they are also copied to my Facebook wall to reach a larger number of students.

I still want more of my students to participate in social networking with me. I considered making it extra credit, but I am concerned with the amount of time I would be spending on that again. To make it extra credit, I would expect them to do more than just become one of my Facebook friends. But I am content with the way I am currently offering it, and am excited to brainstorm other ways I can use it to help my students learn.

Kagan meets Web 2.0

I have been busy, busy, busy getting everything prepared, updated, ready etc. for my fall courses. I am just beginning my second year teaching 100% online courses, and I can honestly say that it's become a professional obsession. I am feeling guilty when my husband "catches me" on the computer, trying to get all of my assignments and directions loaded into ecollege or D2L. It's strange to feel that way about something you get paid for, but there certainly are lines to be crossed between work and home life, even when those take place in the same house.

In addition to my online teaching assignments, I will be teaching one face to face Spanish course at a local community college. I am excited about adding a little more variety to the fall. I am excited to pull out some of my Kagan tricks (Spencer and Laurie Kagan, Kagan Cooperative Learning, 1994) again to get the students communicating and collaborating.

This method of learning came up in my mind again recently for a different reason. I am in the application/interview stage with another online school. This one will be quite a bit different, since I would meet my students once a week live through a web conference. This actually intrigues me to think of Web 2.0 tools and web-based learning with a bit of a new twist. Wow, I will actually have students online together! One of my first thoughts was... "what can I have them do so that they are interdependent and inter-accountable with peers? Cooperative learning! I began thinking of some of my old Kagan standbys in Spanish. Quiz-quiz-trade, where students quiz each other over given topics, then trade topics and move on to a new person to do the same thing. "Find someone who" is known as a great start of the year icebreaker, but in a language class I use it over and over again throughout the year, and just adapt it to the context I need. For example, when studying clothing... find someone who is wearing tennis shoes, find someone who doesn't like to wear skirts, find someone who is not wearing socks, find someone who owns more than 10 ball caps, etc. Of course, all of the language is in Spanish. These two Kagan structures are two of my favorites.

One of the steps in the interview process with this school is to teach a 7-10 minute realistic session of your content. I began thinking through some ideas, when it suddenly hit me that it may be possible to do cooperative learning in an online learning environment, even an asynchronous one. I began thinking about how discussion boards could be utilized as cooperative learning platforms, and how one could use a "Find someone who..." exercise in Spanish in a threaded discussion. I figured there must be more possibilities out there for other structures or cooperative learning techniques, and was interested in researching more. I did find one paper out on the internet that directly correlated specific Kagan structures to asynchronous learning. Absolutely applicable to what I was looking for! However, in searching for that resource again to reference it here, it is not loading for me. I will check back for it another time.

This was a bit of a revelation for me, and it turned into me thinking that if I were to ever pursue my Ph.D, that I would do so in instructional technology with my dissertation focus directly on cooperative learning possibilities in synchronous or asynchronous online learning environments. I almost feel that since I have my topic already chosen, that it is good motivation to one day pursue this further education. I am now extremely motivated to learn and study this, and perhaps synthesize something that can be used in my online Spanish courses. Even better, I would be greatly satisfied if my virtual colleagues out there could benefit from the ideas as well. I guess time will tell!