Spanish NewsBites: Teachable, Catchy Current Events

I love this website! Produced by a couple of teachers in Madrid, Spanish NewsBites is a blog of current events and topics designed for self-study and perfectly applicable to classroom use.

It can be hard to find authentic, current news stories that are a) interesting and b) graded, and the stories here are both. Plus they are really well-selected, truly covering "hot topics" in the Spanish-speaking world (Vargas Llosa's Nobel prize, a new film about the Spanish Civil War, Ferrán Adriá's food experimentation, etc.).

The articles/blog posts are organized by both level (Inicial-Superior) and topic on a bar to the right, and there are accompanying exercises and PDFs for printing with each. If students use the website for self-study, they can listen to an audio recording of the text while reading it, which I love.

A great resource for increasing motivation and enjoyment with real current events, culture, and technology. Nicely graded reading activities for increasing reading skills as well. Quite a find!

Make a website for your students

When I was teaching in Spain, we divided the 6th grade class into small groups to create Power Point Presentations about English-speaking countries. To guide the students during their group work time in the computer lab, I made a website for each group to use as a "base of operations" in their research and work. Here's an example of what we did.

I created the website on Web Poster Wizard. I think this website could be a great tool for teachers. It's free to use and quite simple. You can easily create your own websites complete with links and pictures. Then students can upload their work to the website to share with you and the class.

This would work well as a guide for group or individual projects that need to be done outside of class time. For teachers working in schools where Blackboard or other web-based class communication systems are not available, this website is also a great way for teachers to make a list of web resources for practice and self-study available to students.

Don Quijote and a little bit of culture

I found this website for Don Quijote, a company that provides in-country Spanish courses in Spain and Latin America. Their website has lots of resources for teachers and for student self-study.

On this page, the website has links to many different activities: games, verb conjugations, idiomatic phrases, words of the day, song lyrics and more. The games would be fun for student self-study, though they are more "fun" than "serious." What I like most here are the Popular Sayings and Jokes. I think these would be a great addition to any Spanish class. Imagine having a "joke of the day" or "idiom of the day"- what a fun extra to increase your student interest and enjoyment!

One interesting part of the website are the Profiles of Spanish Speaking Countries. At the click of a button, students have access to maps, history, practical travel information and cultural information for any Spanish speaking country. Disappointingly, the information is in English, but for lower level students it could be a nice resource for preparing a cultural presentation.

Though a bit simple, this website has some unique resources to offer, especially the jokes and idioms.

Making Movies

I found this movie-making website referenced on various blogs and teaching resource pages. Students can make an animated movie, choosing the characters, plot and, most importantly, supplying the dialogue.

I think this is a great way to get students motivated to use the language, as well as a nice group project idea. The fact that the characters in the "movies" have conversations gives students a nice chance to practice Q & A forms and conversational, authentic language, as opposed to more "presentational" oral expression. Students can think creatively, and the movie assignment can be as free or controlled as the teacher wishes. It would be great to incorporate movie-making as a homework assignment after spending the class brainstorming plot lines, or learning about expressions or vocabulary to use in writing your scripts. Script-writing could even be a multiple-step process, with the teacher proofreading a first draft and correcting or encouraging elaboration where needed.

I've used similar technology in classes with young learners, and they loved it. I think it would work extremely well for high school students, and could be adapted to any level. This website produces extremely professional looking short movies, much higher quality than other similar websites I've used.

Pop Culture and Creativity

I love finding passionate, inspirational teachers! Zachary Jones is a Spanish teacher in Georgia (the state, not the country) who started Actualidades: Learning Spanish Through Pop Culture. Besides its extremely hip design, this blog offers lots of great resources that really grab student attention.

There's a lot to look at here. Click on the extremely authentic and contemporary "Carteles de cine" on the right for a series of pelipareja activities in which students pair a short movie synopsis with its poster. These are printer-friendly and updated frequently. The activity seems like a pre-reading exercise more than a complete activity in itself, but would be a great jumping off point to set a context or build further activities.

I love using pop music to introduce students to a culture, and the ClozeLine section of the blog has songs from Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Puerto Rico and more. Each song has an accompanying sheet with a cloze exercise, highlighted vocabulary words, grammar points, cultural focus and comprehension questions. Wonderful and very fun!

There's LOTS to explore on this website- have fun! The site's creator is obviously enjoying himself as he blogs.

Tips from Texas

I thought I'd look to my own university and see what online resources are provided by the University of Texas Spanish department. Spanish Proficiency Exercises is an interesting website project in which collections of brief video clips show native speakers discussing specific topics. These topics are grouped together under themes like "What and where you study" (beginner), "Describe an ailment to doctor" (intermediate) and "Feelings about a current event" (advanced).

These video segments are designed to prepare students to discuss similar topics themselves, to increase their oral proficiency. Under each topic heading there are simplified, scripted videos in which the subjects speak slowly as well as unscripted, normal rate videos that include slang. During the videos, you can see the text in English, Spanish or not at all.

The site provides key vocabulary and phrases for each topic, both to accompany the videos and help learners to discuss the topic themselves.

I love having a series of videos about each topic. While the language and delivery can be challenging for students, having multiple videos about same topic allows students to approach the material with activated expectations and background knowledge. They can understand the gist quite easily and then focus attention on the more challenging aspects of the language. The mix of graded and unscripted language provides a nice challenge within a comprehensible framework.

These videos are best for accomplishing proficiency-oriented, communicative goals. They have the added bonus of including many regional Spanish accents.

BBC Languages

BBC puts together great resources for many languages, Spanish included. This website is for learners, and this website is for tutors and teachers.

The websites offer resources to be used online. Many of the activities for students are fill-in-the blank exercises with on-the-spot answer checking. Some of the activities have keyword or grammar boxes that you can print out and give to students to accompany the lesson, and some of the articles can be printed out.

Here are a few highlights:

• El Mensual is a feature with Spanish language news stories from around the world. You can browse by topic or by grammar point, and find articles with graded but fairly authentic language, mainly for intermediate level. For articles with a grammar focus, there are blanks to fill in and a mini-grammar guide. For those with a vocabulary focus, there is a thematically-linked word list to accompany the article.

• Episodes of Sueños, a simple Spanish TV series for learners, are available on the website, with video or audio-only available. Printable transcripts, word lists and phrase lists to accompany the short episodes are all available as well. These are simple, short, beginner-level, and focused around themes like "Buying things," "Healthy living," and "I like it."

Some of the resources aren't too exciting. For example, Mi Vida Loca, BBC's introductory Spanish video series, is extremely inauthentic and translation-based.

But on the whole it's a good resource for both beginners and intermediates, especially for supplementary videos and articles.