I never thought I would teach fully online Spanish classes, but then a friend connected me with an online education company and my school district needed online teachers. Both programs come with pre-made curriculums, so my role is to grade and provide feedback and support. The self-paced independence that comes with fully online learning is so great for certain students, but it can be hard to get them to actually engage with the language and culture. So I’ve considered it my goal to get them using the language as much as I can. This has meant that I’ve made adjustments to the programs I use, I rearranged materials so I can spiral content and have adjusted instructions to promote more interaction with the language. But it is still hard when I usually never meet my students in person, we meet virtually and email, but it isn’t the same. Because of this I’ve spent a lot of time going through the curriculum and providing helpful support information and enrichment opportunities.
The first thing I created were these grammar documents that follow the topics covered by the curriculum: Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Spanish 3. They include links to helpful articles and videos, notes from my in-person classes and practice links. Creating these documents in the order that the grammar was introduced has helped me stay organized and know what students should be able to do at certain points in the curriculum and also gives me a home page where I can grab those same links and paste them directly into the online curriculum. I do this before most of the formative quizzes or assignments during the modules. Students also have access to these documents on their course landing pages.
Once I had the grammar documents created, I focused on creating enrichment activities lists by level: Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Spanish 3. As I went up by level I added more variety and advanced activities. I want to encourage my online students to become life-long learners and use Spanish on their own, so I tried to provide a little bit of everything for them. Students have access to these documents on my course landing page, but also see them at the beginning and end of the course. I introduce the enrichment opportunities as one of the first assignments and have them create a goal around which new activities they want to use. Then at the end of the course I ask them to reflect on their original goal and make goals for how they could use more resources in the future. This has been especially powerful with my higher level students, as they discover how much they can actually do with the language!
