¿Qué pasa chivos?

I have been waiting for an opportunity like this to make my Spanish radio podcast a reality! So far we've created short podcasts to our partner school in Colombia and I was able to podcast interviews I conducted in Spanish with teenagers while on a month-long trip to Perú. My idea combines the work from my first master's degree in Language Learning (publishing a Spanish newspaper) and my second master's degree in Educational Technology.

This grant would give my upper level Spanish students the opportunity to indivudually create and record their own work in Spanish so we can edit it all together in a monthly radio broadcast. Every month students would have a different piece of the broadcast: native speaker interviews, cultural reviews, Spanish word of the month, Spanish events in our community, international news, music reviews, sing-a-long, poetry readings, short stories, dialogue skits, etc. This radio show is a great way to meet all of our 5 National Standards for Foreign Language. Communication: advanced level students will meet the presentational mode of communication while beginning students will use the interpretational mode while listeing. This project is a great way to practice process writing skills, peer editing and writing for an authentic audience. While recording their work students will be focused on their productive and receptive language skills as they listen to their speech and re-record it for form and fluency. Culture: reviews of the products and practices of the Hispanic culture will be recurring themes of the radio show. Connections: students will be learning journalism and technology skills while producing the radio show in the Spanish language. Furthermore, school events such including sports, band, and drama can be incorporated into the content of the reports. Comparisons: contrasting viewpoints from our culture amd the cultures of the Latin American communities will be discussed on the show. Community: this podcast will be used as a way to connect to other schools in other Spanish speaking countries and our local community as a means of sharing language and culture. We can invite our partner school in Colombia to help contribute to the content of the show with their own recordings sent to us via the internet. I hope you see that this grant will prepare my students for success in our global society by giving them positive experiences to make connections and work with people virtually around the world.

Furthermore, this podcast is a great way for parents to see how their students are progressing in their language proficiency. Also, it is a great way for us to motivate students beginning language study in the elementary and middle schools by including them in the content (interviews, student of the month, dialogue skits, vocabulary words, songs, etc.) and encouraging them to listen to the podcasts to further their knowledge in the language and culture. Our podcast has the ability to reach hundreds of Spanish students in our district.

If you grant me this opportunity, I would install the software on the computers in our HS language lab and work in partnership with my colleagues in the HS, middle school and elementaries to create podcasts that all levels could benefit from. I would also hope to share these podcasts and this opportunity with other language teachers in Oakland County and at our Michigan World Language Conference by giving professional development presentations and ecouraging them to start creating Podcasts in their language classrooms. My goal would be to find other teachers who create podcasts in language classes and create connections with them to find the best ways to use this technology.

I thank you for this opportunity and I ask that you seriously consider me for this grant. ¡GRACIAS!