Using technology to teach foreign languages: Teacher of the Year Jessica Garner shares secrets

This article, the product of an interview with North Carolina's 2008-2009 Teacher of the Year, shares tips and best practices for engaging students by integrating technology into teaching. Includes links to tools, products, and websites recommended by Ms. Garner.

By Dan Lewandowski

Jessica Garner, North Carolina's 2008-2009 Teacher of the Year, teaches Spanish at Porter Ridge High School in Union County. (Photo by Kevin O'Connor/Captivations. More about the photograph)

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Over the span of a single year, Jessica Garner, Spanish teacher and foreign language department chair at Union County’s Porter Ridge High School, has become an education technology enthusiast.

More than an enthusiast — a devotee.

More even than a devotee — a convert, a proselytizer, a true believer.

She’s also, by the way, the AT&T North Carolina Teacher of the Year for 2009-10.

Ms. Garner has not developed her zeal for classroom technology in a vacuum. Union County and Porter Ridge school administrators have invested heavily in both digital equipment and teacher training. “If it hadn’t been for a county initiative called Team 21,” she states unequivocally, “I wouldn’t be where I am now.”

The leaders of the initiative, Ms. Garner explains, took an unusual approach to technology training. They selected a small number of teachers, equipped their classrooms with, among other items, a Smartboard, and simply told the teachers to “play with” the new stuff.

“Some of us were frustrated with that approach,” she says, but admits it was the correct choice because, when the teachers received their week-long formal training sometime later, “… we had a clue. We had experimented and so knew enough to ask specific questions.”

Using technology selectively

For all of her enthusiasm, Ms. Garner is aware of how easy it is for teachers to become captivated by technology without regard to its educational value. The trick, she explains, is to use technology selectively, not for its own sake but rather to better engage students and thus enhance lessons.

For example, every day when her students arrive in class, the opening slide of a PowerPoint presentation is already visible on the whiteboard. Listed on the slide, in the students’ target language, are the day’s goals and objectives and a short recap of an earlier lesson that previews the upcoming lesson. Also listed is a homework review, which until recently, Ms. Garner explains, was one of the most boring aspects of class.

“Then a colleague suggested I take a look at Wallwisher,” a free, virtual space where students may post “sticky notes” that contain comments, screen shots, and hotlinks.

Ms. Garner immediately liked what she saw, created her own “wall,” and invited her students to post homework-related items to it. Since then, the first part of every homework review in Ms. Garner’s classes is a visit to Wallwisher to see the items posted there.

“The kids are much more engaged in the homework section now,” she says, “because they’re able to contribute, drive discussion, and, to a degree, determine the direction of the lesson.”

Many of Ms. Garner’s early experiments with technology involved the Smartboard she received via the Team 21 program and, she reports, the addition of videos and other web resources to her teaching repertoire has been invaluable.

A section of her unit on pre-Colombian civilization, for example, features the Mayan pyramid El Castillo, the temple of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza, Mexico, whose precise construction creates a shadow — as the sun descends every spring and autumn equinox — that resembles a snake slowly slithering down the monument’s steps. Ms. Garner found a Youtube video that shows the event as it happens. “Reading about this event is one thing,” she says, “but seeing it changes the experience.” And the experience sparks discussions on subjects as disparate as mathematics, masonry, and astrology that Ms. Garner ensures are conducted entirely in Spanish.

Giving up control

The Smartboard, though, for all its advantages, keeps Ms. Garner at the front of the classroom. Similarly, when she wants students to use its interactive features, they need to leave their seats and work at the board, one at a time.

A remedy she discovered is the AirLiner — a wireless slate that allows anyone to interact with the Smartboard from as far as 50 feet away. Not only does this device permit Ms. Garner to teach from anywhere in the classroom, it also allows more than one person at a time to interact with the Smartboard. A student at the back of the room, for example, may address the same problem at the same time as Ms. Garner at the front of the room, while the rest of class watches and comments.

An aspect of the AirLiner that Ms. Garner first regarded as a flaw has turned out to be an unexpected asset. “Whatever you write on the slate does not appear on the slate,” she explains. “It appears on the whiteboard.” Learning to write legibly this way, therefore, is tricky because if you watch your hand, you can’t see the product of your writing and if you watch the board, where the writing appears, you have less control of the pen.

“And so, learning to master the AirLiner has become something of a game among my students,” she says. They tease each other when their writing goes awry and they compete for opportunities to practice. The result is not one but two surprise benefits: first, the kids are more than normally engaged in the lesson and, second, because so much banter is going on, they’re more amenable to accepting correction or criticism regarding vocabulary or grammar.

Ms. Garner speculates that when she first began teaching, she would have regarded similar developments as distractions. Now, though, she not only welcomes them but also seeks and exploits them. “Find ways to use and develop anything the kids show interest in,” she advises. “Don’t be afraid to lose a bit of control. Allow your students to take the lead — especially with technology — because often they know more than you do.”

The AirLiner has one more advantage teachers in schools with tight budgets should know about, she suggests. The device “… isn’t tied to the Smartboard but rather to the Notebook software, which means if you have an AirLiner and an LCD projector, you can turn any classroom into an interactive classroom at a fraction of the cost of a Smartboard.”

Another piece of relatively low-cost technology Ms. Garner recommends is the mimio bar, which, when combined with a computer and an LCD projector, converts any standard whiteboard into an interactive whiteboard.

Moving beyond the challenges

Two reasons teachers often cite for failing to fully implement education technology in their lessons are (1) the “digital gap” between students — some have computers and internet connectivity at home and some don’t — and (2) the difficulty of accessing — thanks to legally mandated internet filters — the full range of web materials in school.

Ms. Garner’s solution to the first objection is twofold. First, she doesn’t require students to do anything vis-à-vis technology that can’t be done with school resources. And second, if students need equipment to complete projects outside class, she loans them what they need. For example, when one of her students asked to do an extra-credit project, Ms. Garner loaned him the school’s Flip — a cell-phone-sized video camcorder that contains editing software and connects to a computer via a USB port — and suggested he create a music video for a song with Spanish lyrics.

The student, delighted with the opportunity, produced a product — currently available on YouTube — that Ms. Garner pronounced excellent.

“If you know your kids and they respect you, then you should trust them with school resources,” she recommends. “There’s always a chance something will get broken, but it’s worth the risk. Thanks to that camera, this student, while making his video, probably learned as much Spanish — and as much about Spanish — as he did during the rest of the semester.”

Ms. Garner’s solution to the objection that students are unable to browse the entire internet at school is to circumvent restrictions by capturing files at home and downloading them at school. The practice is perfectly legal and many free versions of video converters are available on the web. (Ms. Garner recommends Any Video Converter Freeware.) If, for example, a student working at home finds something she needs for an assignment, she can post a note containing the link on Wallwisher and Ms. Garner retrieves it for her.

Two more of Ms. Garner’s favorite technology tools are Photo Story, the free software package that allows anyone to import and edit digital pictures; create slideshows that include music, captions, narration, and limited animation; and share the shows via email, and Timeliner XE, proprietary software that allows users to gather information from many sources and organize it visually in timeline, sequence, or cyclic formats.

An ongoing education

From the tone of this article, readers might assume Ms. Garner is a bona fide geek. She’s not. “I’ve learned by playing, experimenting, asking questions, listening to my students and colleagues, and following leads on the web.” Nor have all of her gizmos and gadgets been gifts of her school or LEA. “If I hear of a contest whose prize is a useful piece of technology, I enter it. If I can find an educator discount, I take advantage of it. If I can acquire a new tool by writing a grant, I write it.”

Nor does she consider the time she spends researching and learning how to use new devices and software an imposition on her private time. For any modern teacher, she says, “That’s part of the job.” It’s also, she says with a wink, a lot of fun.