Despite conservative complaints of technology marring the academic environment, teachers like Spanish teacher Virginia Leskowski are pushing the use of the internet as a teaching tool. In her AP Spanish and Spanish 4 classes, she is beginning a website project in which students investigate an issue in Latin America and post their research on websites. The project will last until the end of the year, Senior Will McBain said.
Leskowski said that she developed this idea after attending the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages conference in Orlando in November, along with two other unspecified colleagues. She modified the ideas of the professor to create a project that interested her students.
“In level 4 particularly, I ask the question ‘What is it that you wish your teachers had taught you?’ or ‘What is it that you’d like to learn?’” Leskowski said.
She understands that the project will require time and effort to complete, but she believes that her students enjoy the process and will benefit from learning about current events.
“It’s work, and they have to do things and turn it in, so that’s something that students don’t always want to do,” Leskowski said. “However, they are deciding the topic, not me, so in a sense they’re zeroing in on an interest, and hopefully they will become experts on this particular topic and be able to demonstrate their expertise in this area to someone else besides just me.”
Leskowski said that she wants her students to use it as a demonstration of Spanish knowledge to potential employers and that it will prepare them for the AP Spanish Exams, which have a section on formal presentation. In addition, the project follows the Common Core standard of being aware of the audience of a given piece of writing, in this case future employers.
Students like McBain see the project as a break from an otherwise homework and activity heavy class.
“Lately the Spanish class has been really hard,” McBain said. “Now we have a new textbook, we have online homework; all of our activities now are graded. It’s kind of a lot of work, so it’s kind of cool that it’s a website and not some boring research paper, but it’s still a lot of work.”
Junior Joseph Chan said that the class was divided into groups of three to five students, and that she assigned the groups an issue which they would slowly investigate throughout the course of the year. Chan is investigating drug trafficking in Latin America.
Chan, who has his own YouTube channel, said that he is comfortable with posting information about himself online.
“It gives the class some diversity. I like it,” Chan said. “It’s kind of fun to be working with computers.”
McBain said that Leskowski had the ultimate decision on the subject of their websites, but each of the students had an influence. His subject is influential leaders in Latin America, from dictators to peace activists, and other people work on varying subjects like drug trade in the Mexico or race relations in the Caribbean.
“It’s all current, modern [issues], and what we’re going to do is research all about them,” said McBain.
McBain said that every few days they are going to go to the library, research, and organize the pages on their website. He said that they would use both English and Spanish resources, BBC Mundo being the most prominent Spanish source.
Everything that they do is put into turnitin.com to make sure it is not plagiarized.
