AATSP+Annual+Conference,+July+2011


 * Event Title: AATSP 93rd Annual Conference - Spanish and Portuguese for a New Era**
 * Date: July 6-9 2011**
 * Location: Washington D.C.**
 * Name(s) of Attendees: Cristi Edmunds**

Description of Workshops, Classes, Institutes, Etc.:
I attended numerous sessions at this conference. There were a few that stood out. The first was titled "Using multimedia to develop listening skills in the classroom". Samantha Petree showed us three different activities incorporating music, webtools and videos that she uses to develop effective listening skills in her classroom. Another one was "Using authentic alternative activities and assessments for language acquistion". Deborah Gill gave us many examples of alternative assessments for beginning Spanish speakers such as clicker activities, pair and group activities which make the students use their Spanish more from the very beginning. A third one was "Proposed frequency-based vocabulary and grammar corpus as the scope for introductory Spanish courses". David Bedford showed us that the majority of words that are most commonly used in the Spanish language are not found in any beginner text book. He says that students do not learn the words that they need nor the syntax. They do not learn how to put a sentence in the proper order in today's textbook. When I asked him why he did not write the text book that he claims we need to use, he said that no one would buy it. Lastly, I went to see Lisa Lilley, the 2010 ACTFL National Language Teacher of the year and her session "Power tools for the teacher's toolbox". She gave us many ideas for different activities to improve the students' communicative competency. She showed us different cooperative learning strategies such as "blind pictures", "team poster" and "agreement circle." We saw activities that require little preparation, performance based assessment, project based learning and technological tools.

How I Hope to Apply What I Learned At Ransom, and/or, What My Colleagues Might Try at Ransom:
I plan to try to incorporate all the different activities that I saw at this conference. Most of the sessions that I attended were focused on technology in the classroom and engaging the students in more discussions in the target language. Below are the different links that we were shown where many of these activities can be found.

Important Links, Resources, or Contacts:
[|www.voki.com] [|www.polleverywhere.com] [] lisalilley.wikispaces.com

Cristi Edmunds