February 2024 – Zach Nenson's ePortfolio

What Can’t YouTube Do?

Welcome back from break everyone!

This week in my quest to learn Spanish, I turned to YouTube as an online resource. YouTube has everything, right?

After doing some research on Google, I stubbled upon a YouTube page called, Butterfly Spanish. On this page, the lady named Ana has many different videos starting from a beginner level all the way to an advanced level. In addition, she also has specific videos such as vocabulary, conjugating verbs, adjectives, everyday sentences and phrases, comprehension and much more. Honestly, this has been my favourite online resource thus far. Let’s get into the pros and cons.

Pros:

First and foremost, I must talk about the accessibility of using YouTube. As many of you probably know, YouTube is an extremely user-friendly resource. On top of that, you can use it on any computer, tablet, or smartphone. Unless you annoyed over a 15 second add, you are not even required to pay for a subscription like many other online tools I have reviewed.

The second thing I want to talk about is the variety of content. This has been by far the most beneficial resource I used while learning Spanish. I can look up specific topics I want to learn. More specifically, I wanted to learn more real-life conversational phrases. This was perfect for that. It helped me expand my vocabulary and helped me with forming complete sentences.

YouTube is also great for the flexibility it gave me while watching videos. I was easily able to pause and rewind the video as well as add subtitles and slow down the video. This gave me time to improve pronunciation with ease. After a few hours of watching a variety of videos, I can happily say that this avenue has had the most progress throughout my learning journey.

Learn Spanish in 35 minutes: The 100+ everyday Spanish sentences you need to know! (youtube.com)

The link above is one of Ana’s videos from her channel “Butterfly Spanish “.

Cons:

Now time for the negatives. While I had a good idea of what I was wanting to learn, there was a lack of structured curriculum. With this sense of structure missing, it makes it challenging for learners to progress systematically from beginner to advanced levels. This would make the user have to plan and organize the route they are wanting to take in advance.

Overall, I would recommend YouTube to anyone who wants to learn a new language. The wide variety of videos combined with the accessibility is unmatched to YouTube’s competitors. I’m excited to continue to learn more of the Spanish language through YouTube!

Progress of Learning Spanish, With a Sprinkle of Canva.

Learning about The SAMR for Technology Integration has really made me ponder on the idea on how I can enhance my teaching practices through technology. I decided to focus on the resources Canva to capture my progress through this semester. More specifically, I decided to create a timeline to show my progress in my quest in learning Spanish.

While this may seem elementary to some, I have never used Canva to create anything. I thought this would be a good way to visually show you all my progress of what I have been learning. After watching a few short YouTube videos, I learned the basics of using Canva. To my surprise, this was much easier than what I was thinking. This was such a user-friendly application for people of all skill levels and has many premade templates to choose from.

Canva within the classroom is a great way to introduce the SAMR Technology Integration. The options for this application are endless. While I decided to create a timeline, students can show their learning in a variety of ways. Students can create videos, brochures, pictures, posters, infographics, and much more. For students who prefer to not write essay to portray their learnings, Canva can redefine how students express what they have learned.

For all the people who struggle using technology, try it out and tell me what you think!

Take a look my the timeline I created using Canva.

Zach

Exploring FluentU

I want to begin this blog by saying, learning a new language is extremely hard and frustrating at times. But I am trying my best to stick with it! I have recently semi given up on Duolingo. As mentioned in previous posts, outside of some vocabulary, I’m not learning a whole lot. I have also fully given up on Babbel, as my free trial ran out and was too cheap to pay for a subscription.

Logo for FluentU

This week I experimented with the app called FluentU. I am going to begin with the aspects a liked about FluentU. The first thing that stood out to me was their interactive approach to the learning of language. They use authentic Spanish videos, from movie clips to music videos and everything in between. It gets the learning away from the traditional “textbook” style of learning as the past two were mostly based around. This approach gave me a realistic picture of how people speak in everyday context. I found this helped me learn how words and phrases are used in real-life scenarios. These short video clips were also tailored to what videos I liked or disliked making FluentU more personalized to me. This was an underrated aspect that I did not think I was going to appreciate as much as I did. In addition to this personalized approach, FluentU also provides interactive quizzes and exercises to help with my understanding of vocabulary and grammar while keeping me engaged.

Now time to look at the negative FluentU has to offer. First and foremost, another paid subscription is needed! While it does offer a free 14-day trial, access to its full library of content requires a subscription. Not only is a paid subscription needed, but it is also a bit pricier than its competitors, Duolingo and Babbel. Outside of the price, one of the biggest things I noticed is that there is no real structure or progression path that the app follows. This almost makes me feel like I need to be using a different app to assist with this one which kind of defeats the purpose. Last thing, I find that the FluentU still has a few bugs to workout when it comes to technical glitches. In some cases, when rewinding certain video clips, the app would glitch, forcing me to shutdown the app and reopen it.

money

Overall, I found while using FluentU I learned more of real-life phrases and how to speak in proper slang while talking informally. However, once again I did not learn much sentence structure or grammar. Out of the three apps I have used so far, this would probably be my last choice.

Does anyone have anymore suggestions other than Duolingo, Babbel, or FluentU? If so, let me know!

Zach

Technology in the Classroom?

As we move forward in the rapidly changing world of technology, as educators, we must ask ourselves; should we utilize the new tool of technology with our students? Or is technology dumbing down our students?

Computer lab from the late 90's — What my computer lab looked like as a grade 8 student.

Going through elementary in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, in some form I heard these famous words from every teacher I had, “You need to know your multiplication facts! You’re not going to walk around with a calculator in your pocket all day now are you!?”

Oh, the irony that statement holds today. It’s just that, we have a whole computer with access to anything we could ever think of that fits into our pockets. So, what is the perfect balance with or without technology?

In my opinion, I do believe as educators we need to keep up with technology. Both teachers and students should know how to use technology efficiently. While some may view this as lazy, I believe if taught correctly, this can be very effective. For example, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic within the education system these days, both in grade school and university. Some look at it as a form of plagiarism while some look at it as another online resource or search engine such as Google. If students learn how to properly utilize this resource in a way to assist in efficiency that stills holds the individual’s own thoughts and voice, then we should be teaching students how to prompt AI correctly to portray their own thoughts, voice, and beliefs.

Picture of Artificial Intelligence.

On the contrary, teaching students the foundations of subject areas are still essential. Students need to still be taught how to critically think for themselves while challenging what they have learned. This is where it gets tricky. With the use of technologies such as AI, this can very easily eliminate that critical thinking aspect that we strive for. So, if a teacher decides to use the tools in their classroom, we need to ensure we are not losing our voices while doing so.

What do you guys think, is using AI a form of cheating? Should we decrease the amount of technology that is being used in the classroom? Interested in hearing what you think!

See you next week!

Zach