Is there a way to post videos that ONLY the members of the blog can view?  I have no idea. But since the blog is private and we need that safety for professional reasons too well known, we would all feel much safer and more comfortable if ONLY blog members could view the clips. How can we do that? […]

The right mindset, the correct spirit, of the video work we are doing, that has been spearheaded in the past week by Angela and Drew, is letting go of the need to be perfect. We just go in and film and then maybe do some very minor editing (I don’t think Drew and Angela did

Hi Ben, I wanted to share something that I used successfully in my class today, and which I hope can be of use to other teachers. John Student Surveys as a TPRS strategy for “circling” words and phrases while maintaining student interest. by John Piazza Recently I have employed a few TPRS strategies outlined by

Drew sent this: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html

Buy them at pet stores in the Cats section for a fraction of what they cost at Staples.

I got these excellent observations from Naomi: Dear Ben, On the ACTFL listserv someone listed this today as an interesting article on the “little words” – pronouns, articles, etc. – which, it ends up, are first of all ignored by the brain in establishing meaning, and very revealing of the personality of the speaker …

I got this from Julie. I don’t really have an answer. Here it is: Hi Ben, I’m looking for some advice, probably from the whole group, (as subscribers we don’t post new topics, right?) so I’m hoping you could put this out there to everyone. [ed. note: if you want something to appear here as

On the topic of training kids about exactly what behaviors you expect in your classroom (i.e. your classroom rules/norms), I did something that was a first for me today. I didn’t just explain the rules, I modeled what I wanted from them. I am working this year in a school with kids whose family’s are

We have more video, the two clips below are from Angela, who says: Hey Ben! In looking at Drew’s video, I was inspired to send in my submission. This is my first year with TPRS and I really want as much feedback as possible. In the following clips which I believe are from the fourth or

To be clear, I did take some footage of my workshop today and will put some of that up here but it has to cook in iMovie for a few days – more like a week – and then be put into those little YouTube pieces.That takes time. I am really thinking that Brian has the

In a recent comment here Robert wrote: …while I find the changes to the AP test for German and French very positive, we still need to remember that AP is intended for a level of language acquisition that most of our students cannot reach in four years. (According to the State of California, students who

I have a colleague who has two middle school classes, one of 8 and one of 4 kids. I told him to just be careful with those small classes. They can get boring because of the lack of diverse energy in the room. Here is what I wrote in an email to him: You will