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"Learning a foreign language is much more than learning a number of sentences, a certain amount of
vocabulary or a number of grammatical rules. It means being able to interact in a new cultural context
that will enable us to function in a society different from our original one." from the Spanish ab initio Syllabus (IBO) This is why it is very important for my students to learn about Spanish and Latin American culture. Because they are learning how to describe people and about likes and dislikes, discovering the world of Mafalda, a comic strip written and drawn by the Argentine cartoonist Joaquín Salvador Lavado (pen name Quino) perfectly fitted into the unit.
At
my new school, technology is very scarce: there are no interactive whiteboards and only a few video projectors are available from the library. Then, because we don't have our own classrooms (German custom: students stay in a classroom, teachers move from class to class), this means we have to carry a laptop
and a video projector from class to class. So, I have become a bit lazy and decided to do without technology most of the time!
For the Mafalda's lesson, the easiest would have been to show my students a PowerPoint presentation about Mafalda and the main characters in the comics. Because of the technical issues I have mentioned above, I decided to print out each PowerPoint slide and to laminate them. When I started the lesson, I stuck each laminated slide on the wall in different parts of the classroom. I asked my students to go around the class and read each card, a bit like you would in a museum I guess :) As they were going around, I asked them to stop anytime they crossed another students and to explain to each other what they had read on the card. Because they are Spanish beginners, they could explain in English but most of my students tried in Spanish which was great. I then asked them to go back to their seats and we went through true and false statements about the cards. Students really enjoyed standing up and discovering each character at their own pace. I actually think this lesson was far more exciting than if I had gone through a boring PowerPoint and it was more focused on differentiation as each student could read at their own pace.
In a way, not having technology makes you think about more engaging and differentiated options! And by coincidence, I just happened to be reading Isabelle Jones' really interesting
post about Naked Teaching and reflecting on the use of technology in the classroom.
What about you? do you have any great ideas to teach without technology in the classroom?
