Making Learning Spanish into a Multimedia Adventure

Technology is everywhere. You as a teacher may even be waging battle on a daily basis to keep iPods, BlackBerries, and other portable technology devices out of your classroom. Why not turn them into an asset instead of an annoyance?

While a multimedia homework assignment may not be suitable for every day’s lesson plan, it’s a sure fire way of getting your students interested and involved. Just think of how much time they spend, heads down, thumbs furiously tapping away as they text each other or browse the Internet. Wouldn’t you like to harness some of that energy and focus for your lesson plans?

Here are three quick ways that you can use audio and video technology to get your students involved in Spanish lessons.

Teaching Spanish isn’t just about making lists of vocabulary words. It’s also about imparting knowledge of the culture and how people in Spanish-speaking cultures make connections and relate to each other. Why not use the magic of video chat or messaging services to let your students connect with a pen pal class in a Spanish speaking country? You can set up a video-to-video chat from your classroom to the other classroom, then pick names out of a hat to pair students up for individual pen pal assignments---in Spanish, of course.

The assignment: Create a mini-documentary of your life in Spanish. Anyone who’s done public speaking knows that five minutes in front of a crowd can be a lifetime and ten minutes are an eternity, so go easy on your students. Assign them a manageable minimum amount of time for the documentary---say, two minutes---so that they can focus on filling up that time with Spanish. Having short documentaries will also make it easy to screen the videos in class, which is as much a part of the learning process as making them was.

While many students may have the necessary technology to take videos on their own, you’ll probably want to secure additional technology from the library for those without. Or, you can pair students up into teams, making sure that at least one student in each team has the necessary technology for this project.

You’re not going to actually make your students do a Powerpoint presentation, but a photo slideshow is the next best thing. Make sure that each student has access to a digital camera or is paired up with someone that does, then set them loose to create a photo slideshow about something---anything---they’re interested in. The twist that turns this into a Spanish lesson? They’ll have to narrate the slideshow in Spanish in front of the class.