Northeast+Conference+on+the+Teaching+of+Foreign+Languages+(March+2010)

On March 25 and March 26, I attended the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in New York City. Having specific goals in mind related to book selection, incorporating culture into traditional language lessons, and learning more about technology definitely helped me navigate the conference better and choose workshops that were related to these goals. Overall I found the conference to be of great value and I look forward to sharing my notes and ideas with my colleagues at our next department meeting. Among some of the highlights were: 1. Workshop for Media in Foreign Language Teaching- I'm really glad I chose to do this additional 3-hour workshop on Thursday because we got to experience new tools for incorporating technology. The workshop was presented by faculty at George Washington University and included three components- audio, blogging/ networking, and video in the classroom. I really liked the first part of the presentation on Audio because there are many resources available to have students record their voices in another language and have the teacher evaluate it. I plan on looking more into this program once I speak more with IT on the compatibility with Edline. 2. Workshop on reading and story-telling in the World Languages Classroom I really liked this workshop presented by the Spanish Embassy as it provided many sites to use for story-telling and analysis, including [|www.leer.es], and [|www.elhuevodechocolate.com] (for younger students). 3. Workshop Presented by Vicki Mike, the Teacher of the Year in NYS. She talked a lot about the use of technology and making language lessons fun, active, and meaningful. I loved the website [] to talk about cultural differences (even though this is in English) and also using exercises from the Colby website and the BBC website (which I already do). She did talk a lot about standards in New York public education which help to incorporate various aspects of language learning. 4. Display of Publishers and books- I enjoyed browsing through all of the materials to see what new books were on display. I picked out a couple of possible new books for Spanish 2 and also had some materials sent to me for levels 4 and 5. A lof of these new materials incorporate culture and communication and include many good websites as well.

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