Thing 18

Widgets:

For Spanish, I embedded a widget to help students with verb conjugation. They could use it if they are working on publishing information in Spanish to a wiki or trying to blog in Spanish. If they knew the wiki website, they could use this widget while they are doing homework, too. I give them verb books already and they have plenty of notes, but if they forget to bring home their verb books, I think this widget could be very helpful because it shows charts of the various tenses of verbs.

Widgets might be a useful way to get kids interested in the subject matter, thus forming them into "intrinsic learners." For example, I found a widget where kids could play a game called "running of the bulls"- it looked fun, but I soon learned it is violent and therefore not appropriate. However, I like the idea of using games to learn. A website students go to when there's time leftover in a computer class is freerice.com. They like the challenge of seeing how much vocabulary they know and they can test it out in foreign languages, too, like Spanish and French. They compete against each other to get the highest rankings. Widgets could potentially be used in that way.

A map widget would be very useful for the wikispaces project I'm working on. I've already embedded a link to the lonelyplanet website using a map. I'll have to look into more ways of using a map. Kids love using Google Earth right now. That might get them interested in Spanish-speaking countries.

I'm not sure what's on my widget wish list. I got the weather widget to work today! Wish list: Proofreading for English, Famous poets, Games related to the literature I teach (Speak, Night, 451, Ender's Game, Romeo and Juliet), Spanish vocab quiz, and Spanish verb conjugation quiz.