As a teacher of World Language (Spanish), I am hesitant to use Chromebooks for the bulk of my classwork, primarily due to two reasons.  Firstly, in the approaches that I use to teach language (Comprehensible Input and Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling), I rely heavily on listening and reading activities for students.  Listening activities are mostly accomplished by students acting out something in the classroom while I am describing the action in Spanish.  Seeing as I teach mostly Spanish 1 and 2 classes, my students' language proficiency levels are not very high, meaning they need a lot of input from me.  Even as a long-term goal, I can't see my classroom shifting from high person-to-person interaction to solely relying on Chromebooks for instruction.  Secondly,  due to the rampant use of translator devices by my students, I really have to monitor what I assign on the Chromebook to ensure that my students do not breach our academic integrity policy for completing their own work.  

     That being said, my long-term goal with the district's new 1:1 initiative is to use the Chromebooks to enhance my students' cultural awareness and competency.  As stated by Neebe and Roberts (2015), students are coming into a new workforce very ill-prepared for the tasks at hand.  In my opinion, the workforce is becoming ever-increasingly global and students need to develop an awareness for other people and cultural customs that can be developed through technologies such as Google Earth 360, Mystery Skype, WebQuests, FlipGrid and Google Expeditions.  

     Additionally, I would like to use technology to increase differentiation in the classroom.  Seeing as there are so many helpful programs and websites for language teachers (Conjuguemos, StudySpanish, Quia, Quizlet, and Garbanzo, just to name a few), it would be very helpful for me to give support and extra practice for my students who may be struggling to learn the language.  On the other hand, if I have learners who are really exceeding expectations, I can use technology to provide them with additional resources to take their learning to the next level.

     All-in-all, I believe that the use of technology in the classroom has many valuable uses.  As stated by Neebe and Roberts (2015), on average, it takes teachers three to five years to fully master using a new technological tool in the classroom.  This year, as my district moves to its new 1:1 initiative, with technology as my aid, I hope to begin to master the skills of imparting a new cultural understanding to my students, while using differentiation to address individual needs.

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power Up: Making the shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

Answer:
  This year, as our district embarks on a new 1:1 initiative, my experiences are changing in the classroom daily.  I am finding that I am more willing to try new methods using technology than I have been willing to before, and students are able to become more engaged in lessons on a daily basis.  This certainly is a shift that I am excited about.  However, in Chapter 2 of Diana Neebe and Jennifer Roberts' book Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning (2015), the authors state that with a 1:1 learning environment, the teacher transitions more into the role of a coach in the classroom, facilitating students' learning, rather than being the star of the show.  In my Spanish language classroom, I still believe that I have to give my students a lot of Spanish input, which results in quite a few teacher-centered lessons.  Seeing as I teach levels 1 and 2, students' language proficiency is fairly low.  My concern with taking on the role of a "coach" falls in the types of assignments that my students would be able to complete in the Spanish language at their level of language proficiency.  What kinds of collaborative assignments would I be able to have them work on that would be not only accomplishable, but allow them to be successful?  

     Although I have not adapted my teaching style too much with our shift to 1:1 due to the communicative nature of my course, I have begun experimenting with adding technologies where I see fit.  During this week, I used the program Nearpod for the first time.  Nearpod falls under the interactive feedback systems strategy for engagement and allows teachers to upload already existing PowerPoints or Google Slides presentations, adding open-ended or multiple choice questions, drawing options, and virtual field trips for students to interact with during the presentation (Neebe & Roberts, 2015).  Students are given a code to the presentation and teachers can control the pace of the presentation, with all students' devices following along.  This week, I used this program to review regular and stem-changing verbs with my Spanish 2 students.  During the presentation, the open-ended questions which asked them to conjugate verbs gave me a great gauge on comprehension.  I was able to push out answers to students' computers to discuss common errors and review why certain answers were correct.

     Nearpod may prove to be invaluable to me as a tool this school year, but as stated in Chapter 4 of our textbook, common planning time is few and far-between with my department-- 7 Spanish teachers and 1 French teacher (Neebe & Roberts, 2015).  As suggested, a common Google Drive folder would be so useful among my colleagues.  Instead of arranging a time for all of my colleagues to meet to tell them about Nearpod, or most likely what would happen, telling them all separately, I could create a link to Nearpod and an FAQ document to upload to our shared Google Drive folder.  If my colleagues had questions, they could post those questions in comments and I could answer them when I had free time to do so.  We have a department meeting at the end of the next week, and I may just suggest the need for a common Google Drive folder!  As our school embarks on this 1:1 initiative, I feel that it is not only important for the students to model good digital citizenship and collaborative capacity, but for their teachers to do so as well!  

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power Up: Making the shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

      In addition to having students create products in order to reach a wider audience, the 1:1 technology initiative allows me to differentiate and create assignments to reach a variety of learners in my classroom.  Neebe and Roberts describe several ways that differentiation becomes easier and more discrete than ever while using technology (2015).  Although it is very easy to describe students with different assignments and requirements discretely, differentiation also provides its challenges. As the authors note, even if you only send a group of students a specific assignment, they are sure to talk to each other about what their assignment is.  Discrepancies in level of difficulty of assignments is surely noticed by students, especially by those at the high school level, where I teach.  Another challenge, in my opinion, falls in the planning time that it takes to create various assignments for students in order to differentiate.  The authors suggest differentiation strategies, such as RAFT, to differentiate for students.  Currently, I am teaching an extra class on my prep period for my colleague who is on maternity leave.  I barely have time to think about creating one assignment for students, let alone several different options or variations at this point.  When I have more planning time at the end of November, I would be happy to start considering creating various options for projects and assignments.

      Lastly, on the topic of having enough time, the authors suggest that technology tools can help to ease the burden of feedback on teachers (Neebe & Roberts, 2015).  This week, my College Prep Spanish 2 students will be handing in a 15-sentence assignment.  Many of them will probably make the same errors.  As the authors suggest, I can use the "frequent feedback" feature on comments on Google Docs to provide students not only with a key such as, "subject/verb agreement," but also an explanation to what that is, and even a link for a video explaining it (Neebe & Roberts, 2015)!  I can see this becoming a very useful tool in my feedback this year, not only to ease my own time burden of giving feedback, but also to help my students make informed corrections and revisions on their assignments.  

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power Up: Making the shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

    If time weren't a concern or constraint on my teaching, I would definitely try to incorporate more of a flipped classroom approach.  Today, I was teaching students about how to write sentences about what they are going to do in the future in Spanish.  We spent about 15 minutes on a Bell Ringer mini-conversation, 30 minutes going over a Google Slides using Nearpod, and for the last ten minutes, students began working on an assignment to put all of the grammar concepts taught in this section of the chapter together.  In an ideal world, we would have still had the Bell Ringer conversation, but students would have gone over the information for the grammatical concept on Nearpod at home, allowing me time to coach students through the application assignment.  Hopefully, as our district moves forward in its 1:1 initiative, my administrators and colleagues will be more accepting and understanding of a flipped classroom approach.   

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power up: making the shift to 1:1 teaching and learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power up: making the shift to 1:1 teaching and learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

      This summer, I joined a Facebook group for a World Language teaching method called CI (Comprehensible Input).  The Facebook group centers around Martina Bex's SOMOS curriculum.  Over the summer, Martina Bex and other contributors hosted live videos called "Summer SOMOS Fun Club" to answer teachers' questions about the curriculum and give ideas about how to best implement it into the classroom.  This was a hugely helpful resource for me, seeing as I used this curriculum last year without much guidance.  My department director, and many members of my department still see the use in a grammar-based approach to learning; whereas, I want to branch out and have students use more comprehension-based input strategies.  Joining this professional group on Facebook has given me many great ideas to use in my classroom and given me a forum to ask questions, if I so choose.

     One of my biggest reservations with using social media is the fear of being so public.  As I mentioned above, my colleagues may not really be on board with the type of teaching I am trying to move to.  I don't want to write something on social media about being alone in my line of thinking in school and have my colleagues see it.  Maybe this is being a little paranoid?  If I could pose any question to social media without this fear it would be about how to talk to my colleagues in a professional, non-pushy manner to see their opinion about moving to this style of teaching.  Also, how would I talk to my department director and present research that shows that  national standards and many teachers across the globe are making this shift toward this teaching method.  Hopefully, being a part of the Facebook community that I joined over the summer and participating in the World Language Twitter chat on Thursday can continue to give me ideas about the types of activities I would like to keep implementing in my classroom.  

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power up: making the shift to 1:1 teaching and learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

Reflection on this matrix included below

I participated in a Ditch the Textbook Twitter chat.  Included below is my reflection and screenshots from my participation in the Twitter chat.

Included below is my reflection on creating a digital story