Jeanne Quinn
Foundations II Diversity, Learning, Technology
Project: Assitive Instructional Technology
Complete Spanish Learning Suite
I am a Spanish teacher and therefore I wanted to find a tool that would help me teach Spanish to students that have different types of minor disabilities. I have a CTT class without an added teacher or push-in and I needed a program that would hold the interest of my students who are easily bored and disruptive.
After looking at several programs, I am impressed with the Complete Spanish Learning Suite by Transparent Language ISBN 1-59251-033-7.
This audio CD has five separate programs and uses a variety of teaching tools that can teach, help and appeal those students that have minor challenges such as print disabilities and need audio assistance, fine and gross motor skill limitations and need a key board, or visual impairments and need to sit closely to screen or listen to text.
For visual learners and for those who have difficulty deciphering print there is LinguaMatch that offers many different types of interactive computer simulated environments such as airports, cities, restaurants, and cafes. These environments are populated with people and items that would typically be found in such places such as police officer, waiters, cars etc. To use this program you only need to pass the cursor over an item and you hear a voice name the item. Also you can also move from activity to activity as you learn and acquire new vocabulary words and phrases. This is a useful tool for those students who are visual learners. It offers slow sound that allows a student to slow down the word and thus hear how each syllable is pronounced.
Before You Know is a flashcard program that has many lists of vocabulary words. It also allows students to create their own vocabulary list that can be imported and exported. Learners can repeat the flashcard as much as they need to until they feel they have acquired the Spanish. This is a great program for those students who feel that the
teacher is moving too fast, and cannot decipher the information.
Learn Spanish Now! is a program that offers a video that uses real actors involved in real life situations participation in everyday conversations. The video has very high quality visuals and sound. It has many accessible learning activities and it is very visually appealing. These fun conversations with visuals and sound are an effective assistive technology because they help reinforce the language by adding interactive activities that appeal to different types of learners.
LinguaMatch is an interactive dictionary that has over 65,000 Spanish words. This tool can be used by students who need either visuals or audio to enhance their learning.
Everywhere Audio is an audio course can be used by students that are visual impaired and who have fine and gross motor limitations, and learn by hearing.
I found this program very interesting as an assistive technology because it uses so many different types of teaching tools that can help me teach many different types of students. In a regular classroom, I do not get to use so many different tools at once. I may show a video, or listen to a song, or have students act out a dialogue, but never in such an interactive format as this program offers. I found setting it up a little confusing, but I think that students have innate ability to set up programs. I’m always asking for their help, and they are wizards at figuring out what to do.
Resources:
http://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/foreign/1999/appxJ.html
http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/technlgy/te7wisdom.htm
http://www.miusa.org/ncde/tipsheets/foreignlang
5 comments:
This does look like a great tool. I like it for myself as well as for teaching a class. I really need to learn Spanish to support my ESL students and their parents, the majority of whom speak Spanish. I like that the "Learn Spanish Now!" contains a video using real actors in real life situations and everyday conversations. Learning language in context is very powerful and having all the associated visually appealing learning activities that would appeal to different types of learners is so important for differentiated instruction. Looks like a great find! Della
Jeane,
It looks like you've found a software that can be very useful for learning Spanish and helping those with difficulties as we talked about in class. Della has good points about using to support ELL as well as to support herself in learning too. Good find. I hope you found this quest useful.
After reading your blog I am tempted to buy myself the software since I no longer know anything in Spanish. All students will definitely benefit. I especially thought about our visual and auditory learners. We sometimes forget they need differentiation also.
Dear Jeanne:
I find your device LNGUAMATCH very interesting for students witm minor motor/learning disabilities that learn Spanish. I think that making students listen to dialogues WITHIN REAL CONTEXT (An airport,a street,etc)gives them the real cues about where,how some words,sentences should be used appropriately.It reminds me of the AUDIO-VISUAL classes I took years ago when learning French,that was very effective because the images used to recreate daily situations taking place in daily situations.
I am a bilingual special education teacher who is mandated to support the native language needs of my students, that being Spanish. I am always looking for interactive websites for my students to use during Spanish instruction. There are (2) features that I find most useful in the "Complete Spanish Learning Suite." One feature is the interactive computer simulated environments such as airports, cities, restaurants and cafes. Most of my learning disabled students are visual learners who need pictures when learning new vocabulary words and phrases. This program seems to make learning new words visually stimulating. The other feature is called "slow sound" which allows the student to hear how each syllable of a word is pronounced in Spanish. This would benefit the students who need to develop phonics skills in Spanish. I believe this program can support the native language needs of my diverse learners. However, before purchasing this computer program I would like to try it on a free-trial basis in order to see if my students find it easy to use.
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