• Digital Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless Hybridization Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel - God Comprehensive article with a lot of great ideas on how and what to remix.

• Construction and/or Creation of Online Content - Good explanation of what it means to really construct online content. A must read for teachers!

• 37 Tech Tools for every World Language Classroom - These are great tools to use in the classroom

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• THE BIG LIST OF TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES FOR SPANISH CLASS - This is a great list of resources, especially if you are looking for tools to use so students can create and remix!

In my classroom, I can say that for the most part, my students are engaged and using technology to create products. That is all good and well but I always want to push myself to make a more authentic language learning environment. I have no problem with TPACK. I think there are great ways to implement it into language learning. I did find a great lesson while researching around. Check it out if you need an idea. The same or similar idea can be used in different contexts. My issue is finding connected-learning for all Spanish 1 topics. This year I am trying out a curriculum that was made by teachers using relevant materials such as pop-culture, social media and youtube. There is not a lot of literature about connected learning in the language classroom so I am wondering if this is a good place to start. Will the students feel like they are connecting with the information because it is delivered in a way that is relevant to them? I am excited to find out and do hope they connect with it. 
    To add to the curriculum, I have found a couple of resources but the best one I found is an edutopia blogpost about ways to connect the language classroom. I do like the idea of connecting with native speakers but the problem I see is trying to find a safe way for students to connect with them. One of the safest ways that is mentioned in the blog is through pen-pals. And I think it is a great idea. Students can get excited about actually using the Spanish they know and practice with someone in a real life situation. If your school is big enough to have a large class size of ESOL students you could do pen pal letters to and from the Spanish to ESOL Classroom. 
    Students don’t only have to interact with people, they can interact with published materials. The internet is great for finding these if the students are trained to do so. For example, I taught my students how to find McDondald's website from different countries so they could compare the menus to their favorite items here. Here is a great video on different digital authentic materials that can be used in the language classroom. ​

With these resources language teachers can create inquisitive units that can inspire ownership of the material in students. When the students collaborate with each other on creating materials or solving problems they also get the real-life experience that many work environments require nowadays. 
Even though there is not a lot of material on the connected language classroom, keeping the classroom connected by creating a collaborative environment where students use realia to actively engage with the language and giving the students a voice in their learning can be the key. Opening the doors for them to take ownership of their learning is our job. We must step aside and let them take the steering wheel. We are facilitators of their learning.

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Here is the final video, if you would like to the process I went through to make it please scroll down.

​I really enjoyed making this video. I liked the steps we had to take in the development of the video. I think outlining, mapping and storyboarding are important steps to making a successful video. I liked receiving feedback and even though at the beginning I had not been inspired on what my video was actually going to be I think the process got my gears turning. It got me thinking about what I wanted the video to be.
I am really glad the video turned out well and I enjoyed your feedback. I learned how to work with a green screen, which is a lot easier than I thought. I also learned how to put in a picture within a picture. And to make my boxes full screen is a very simple switch. I think what I mostly took away form this are ideas to use in my classroom. My students always have trouble pronouncing words so I can have the word or a picture flash up on the screen while I record myself saying the word and a close up on my face.
I learned that it takes a lot of edit and patience, either you record perfectly and put those clips together or you just record and take out he bad clips. I learner that if you have one long reel you should work with white balance and color before editing. I forgot to that and then I spent a couple of hours editing and then I realized that I could not get the white balance to match so I had to just leave it all with the yellowish hue.
I saw a couple of my classmates videos and there is not much I would change about my video in comparison to theirs. I really liked what I did and I though it was different. Two videos I saw where just powerpoints and the one I liked better was Rebeca Helms’. I liked how she did have her tutorial parts as full screen. I could have put the tutorials in full screen and have a Picture in picture box of myself. This woud have made those parts more effective. 

 Here are some web tools I believe can be useful in a World Language Classroom. I have categorized them int, General Use, Games, Websites useful for language help and websites that could be used by students to make projects will call that category Projects. 
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I have never really worked on editing pictures. I used GIMPshop and I did not find it difficult to learn how to use it. I was able to quickly find easy to follow tutorials online. I decided to take a picture of my son and I and edit it into what I was feeling when he was about one month old. I felt good and warm inside, I felt like everything was good, like as if I was on a beach. So I cropped our image out and set it in a beach background. I learned how to crop an object out of a picture (using the lasso tool) and make the rest of that picture be a transparent layer so I can layer pictures (useful when making a collage). I was very tired in the picture as I did have a new born so I decided to some editing on my face and I blurred the wrinkles and dark circles under my eyes.

I took pictures of s stuffed koala and I uploaded them as layers onto GIMP. I arranged the layers in the order I wanted them to appear in the GIF. After that I went into Filters/Animation/Optimize for GIF. Next I went to Image/Mode/Indexed and choose color dithering :Floyd-Steinburg (reduced color bleeding). Finally I exported the file as .gif and it gave me the option of animation so I clicked it and exported. I had never made a GIF before so this was a learning experience, again a simple tutorial made things very simple and explained why I took the steps I did in creating the gif. At first I tried to make the gif with GIMPshop but it would not export correctly so I switched to GIMP and it worked fine. ​

The only online editor I have ever used is shutterfly. I am not big on editing. I used Phixr and PicMagick because I did not have to sign up for them and I was curious to see what I would get for that price. I used Pic Magick first. It was not very complex. It had simple commands and there weren't many. Most had to do with colors and hues. There was not much to do with editing or adding to the picture. On the other hand Phixr was a lot more like a real photo editor were it has more options on what you can and can't do o the picture. The Phix button is the key feature in this editor. It has a lot of presets. I also liked how this editor has a preview screen before you apply the edit. I think this could be used to make memes and if need be or quick posters for Standard Operating Procedures or things of that nature. I don't think PicMagick would be as useful in a work environment. Phix also has a collage tool which could come in handy in a work environment. I think overal Phixr is a good program to use if you are in pinch and need and online program to edit a picture. It is easy to follow and if you don't understand the icon you can hover the mouse over it and the description pops up. 

I choose to create a collage. I had an idea of creating the word Jazz using notes and making them sparkle but I was crunched for time. I try to mindful everyday but as a teacher sometimes we get caught up in the daily hustle and bustle and we forget to stop and smell the roses. Recently I have been having a lot of conversations with my colleges about how since the beginning of the school year we have not has any time to be real people. Right now I think is a time to be mindful and to see the potential that is there and what we already have in our lives so I choose the quote: "If we could see the miracle of a single flower our whole life would change" -Gantama Buddha I choose the picture of one of my favorite flowers and a vector of glasses and I was able to put them together and put the quote on top in different colors. I think the colors make each part of the quote pop out in a distinct way. I choose the glasses because sometimes some of us need help to see things in a different way. Like I said before I am not big on editing images and every time I tried to think of something to do I thought of something that was moving or in a clip or could be a GIF. I will now do more picture editing. I think it can be beneficial and it is not as difficult as I thought it was at first. Also GIMP has changed a lot since the first time I tried to use it and it is a lot more user friendly now.