So after students had a great day full of comprehensible input about my 3 favorite Hispanic athletes we were ready to begin part 2. Presentations! I don’t usually make students get up and speak in front of the whole group in level 1, but since I have resources (iPads) they had the option to make a video instead.
Day 2: Each group (2-3 students) were assigned a new athlete and we went to the lab to start research. It was neat to see them finding new information about Hispanic people and places outside the US. Believe me, if I let them, they would love to present about LeBron James or Tom Brady but then they miss out on learning something new!  If you’re curious, some of the people on the list were…
I gave them a few suggestions on how to do for their presentation. They needed a starting point.
1.) Google search the name. Try to find basic info like what sport they play, their team, position, age, nationality, accomplishments, ect.Â
2.) Go to www.es.wikipedia.org
3.) Print the article to bring back to class. (This should be in Spanish.) Â
4.) Find a good video clip of the athlete.Try searching on YouTube with “athlete’s name + anuncio”. Save your favorite 2 to your Edmodo page to use later. Â
5.) Find out something about where they live or where they are from. How could you include this in the presentation?
A wise leader once told me… “Teachers are doing all the learning for the students. They do the research, find the reading articles, search for listenings, ect.” It’s so important to let them learn by doing this on their own sometimes. I wasn’t directing their every move. I was just there as their coach. There were problems printing, 2 computers froze, some got a little distracted on YouTube. It was messy, but they were learning. This generation needs lots of opportunities to grow as independent learners.
Day 3:Â Suggestions (Not graded or required – just ideas to get them started)
Read over Wikipedia printouts from yesterday.
Decide as a group what kind of information to include in the presentation and who would talk about what.
Then start putting your video/presentation together.
Simple enough, right? This is where the disaster part comes in. It seemed like they have never done this before. There was a lot of sitting and talking. I started getting panicked. There was no way they would be ready! Time was running out! Yikes!
Needless to say, they weren’t ready to go the next day. There were technical difficulties with the iPads, YouTube videos crashing, and partners missing. This wasn’t part of the “plan.” Sometimes learning takes longer they we think. We as teachers present EVERY day. They don’t.
Day 4: Presentations… Ready or Not
In the end, about a 1/3 of the presentations were bad. 1/3 were good, and 1/3 really impressed me. However, I expected better results and was pretty bummed out. I thought they all could do this! I whined to a few great teachers and they helped me see the light.
Students aren’t great at presentations because they don’t do it often. They aren’t great at managing their time on projects either. That’s ok. Now I know how I can help them. They have lots of room to improve! The students were really impressed by some of the groups and loved watching each other’s videos. They easily pointed out where they needed to improve. We even talked about intro statements and conclusions. They were thinking!
They were really proud of it! It was good and I’m proud of them for learning new tech skills too!
So were they really, really learning???  I’ll show assessment results next post!
Great! What program did they use for their video?
I’d like to know, too. Is there something for those of us who live in a PC world?
That was iMovie. It wasn’t even created in my room. One of the kids has a tech class with iMacs and he asked if his group could work there (which freed up another iPad for the rest) so I let them. I have iMovie on the iPads too, but almost no one knew how to use it. I had them google how to do it. Most can figure these things out!
Kids are resourceful. Those with iPhones or Androids can download movie making apps like Animoto or iMotionHD or Motion Pictures. There are so many options!
Animoto is also a website – or you could use good old fashioned Movie Maker and a digital camera/flip camera.
I think you are a great teacher. I have used MANY of your ideas. Don’t give up–they learned something even despite all the unexpected!!! And, thanks for sharing!
THanks Mindy!
Stealing this idea. I don’t know any athletes, barely know the american ones! The soccer players are amazing. It didn’t surprise me to learn Chicharito is Mexican….as chicharĂłn are the fried pork rinds…jaja….remember eating those as a child!
This sounds like a fabulous project!! Question: do you teach them how to make YouTube videos or do they know how? I’d love my students to do YouTube videos for many different units but I don’t know how myself. Thanks!
Excellente! Gracias por compartir! I wish I had access to iPads. I did as a middle school teacher last year but now at the high school, we do not.
Great idea!!!! I’m doing this, but I have one question, you said this was your level 1 Spanish, how did they understand the articles in Spanish? I don’t think my level 1 students could understand an article written in Spanish.
They don’t have to understand all, but I love that they can see the vocab in context. We went though one together to see what they could understand first. Here’s some of what I found about Messi…
Lionel Andrés Messi Cuccittini (Rosario, Argentina, 24 de junio de 1987), conocido también como Leo Messi,10 es un futbolista argentino que también posee la nacionalidad española desde el año 2005. Juega como delantero en el F. C. Barcelona, de la Primera División de España, y en la selección de fútbol de Argentina, de la cual es también capitán.
Leo Messi comenzó a jugar al fútbol a una edad joven y su potencial fue rápidamente identificado por el FC Barcelona.
They just learned names, ages, dates, numbers, hispanic countries this year so they could put together that right away. I wrote the words “player” “sport” and “team” on the board in Spanish and English. They figured out “captain”, “Selection”, “nationality”, “joven” and “rapidly identified”.
Novices can understand so much more than they can produce! Not all used and retained everything they read, but they all picked up something. The key is that they see it in context. Not just a list of words to look up. Some might only get 5 words – others could understand almost all of it!
This is a timely post for me and my French colleagues at my school. We’ve been working on ways to teach/guide students to give oral presentations that are more interesting and better prepared. A colleague found a website that models a timed Powerpoint presentation (http://www.pechakucha.org/), so we are in the middle of working on projects where students present information to 5-6 timed slides (30 seconds each). It takes time, but we hope it pays off with better presentations all year!
Kara, Rachel, and I will be participating in our first pechakucha presentation in a few weeks at ACTFL! Cool idea for classes!
Success! We began our presentations today and we are happy with the results and already planning for future presentations!
I’m wondering if there are other sites besides wikepedia. I try to stay away from that one as much as possible. What are your thoughts on that?
Love the blog. Thanks for all that you do!
I was wondering if you ever use sites other than wikepedia? I try to stay away from that one as much as possible.
Love the blog. Thanks for all of the great ideas!
Why do you stay away from it? I will say that I love wikipedia for quick information in English and Spanish because it has everything in one spot and it uses lots of cognates. I wouldn’t use it as a source for a research paper though. There are lots of other options too! For this topic: espndeportes, univision, personal blogs, etc.
How do your students react to classmates’ presentations? I feel like my students need to be held accountable for paying attention to other people’s presentations. I would love for them just to watch/listen and absorb whatever is most intriguing to them from each presentation, but if they aren’t required to do something with the other groups’ info, they are daydreaming or rehearsing their own presentation for their turn, etc. So my question is, what kinds of activities do you do to keep your students paying attention to everyone’s presentations? Do you include info from student presentations on assessments? Have them summarize each presentation? Have them critique classmates’ work? Or…?
BTW, I have been reading this site for about a year… LOVE your ideas & suggestions. So many of these are abstract ideas I had, but didn’t have the time or resources to actually make them happen. It was really exciting to find someone with so many of my ideas but more time than me! Your posts have helped me sooo much in my classroom. ¡Muchas gracias!
I just had my students do “quien soy yo” oral presentations. I made a table with each student’s name, a column that said 2 adjetivos fisicos (where they were instructed to write 2 adjectivea that the person used to describe their looks), a column that said 2 adjetivos de la personalidad (they wrote 2 personality adjectives the person used), and a column that said por centaje (%) de comprension (they wrote how much of the presentation they felt they understood). I allowed them to write the adjectives in English or Spanish. If they wrote in English, it showed me that they probably understood more than those that just picked out what they were hearing.
While this is by no means a perfect solution to the question of what to do to make the students listen to the presentations of their peers, I found that my students liked to see what percentage they could understand. I heard them bragging about it to their friends on the way out the door!
I never include info from student presentations on assessments because it isn’t fair to those students that were absent during the presentation. I also
Sorry, my computer glitched and cut off the end of my comment. I meant to write: I also believe that holding students accountable for other students’ work isn’t worth the parent complaints and headache.
I love the idea of adding the % understood! Stealing it! So maybe the question should be: What will they do with the information from the presentations? If they are truly LEARNING from each other, then that puts even more emphasis on making the presentations unique like Megan did.
Thank you so much for sharing! And not just the wonderful project idea, but also the challenges. You’re right on that we need to help students learn what goes into an effective presentation. This is just as valuable as all the language & culture that we want them to learn.
Hi. Could you share your complete list that the students had to choose from? That would be really helpful. Thanks!
I didn’t really even give a list. I just scribbled names of athletes that I’m familiar with and gave them one. Some groups even found their own which is fine by me. Some of the other ones were…
Liliana Fernandez
Miguel Cabrera
Lionel Messi
Victor Cruz
Pau Gasol
Oscar de la Hoya
Johan Santana
Hope that helps!
How could you forget Cristiano Ronaldo? My students get palpitations when they see him!
How could you forget Cristiano Ronaldo? My students get palpitations when they see him!
Guess Ronaldo could get in there on a technicality… a Portuguese playing for a Spanish team.
Do you follow any of the Selecciones on Twitter? I follow a lot…think of what you can do with this idea come Mundial time! 🙂
Just heard about Videolicious https://videolicious.com/ Anyone ever try that yet?
Students with no youtube could put stills with voice.
If you use Edmodo, it is easy to post a movie where everyone can view and comment. I require each student to leave a single full sentence of feedback (in Spanish–lots of them are translator-ized) on at least 3 videos. It only takes about 5 minutes to scroll through a class period and count and even absent students can review.
Hi there! I would love to use the example posted here to share with my students before they get started on this project. Any way you could make the video available once again?
Thanks!
Working on it Amanda… trying to find them again.
Thanks! I’ll check back again later on.