Teaching with Technology Application
Project Title: Spanish 404-Bilingual Education and the Spanish Curriculum Archive
Beta Test Site: http://web.pdx.edu/~wubbold/spanish/
Team Members:

DeLys Ostlund- Associate Professor of Spanish

Ann Angel- Spanish Graduate Student

Mark Wubbold- Finance and Administration
Course and Learning Objectives:
Spanish 404-Bilingual Education is a service learning course that places Spanish language students in Barnes Elementary School in the Beaverton School
District, where they work with classroom teachers and their Spanish speaking students. In addition to typical service learning objectives, this class has a unique feature that enables students to make a lasting contribution to language scholarship. As the culminating experience of the class, every student produces a lesson plan for a unit of Spanish language curriculum appropriate to the age and grade they are working in. This lesson plan is eligible to be adjudicated for the
Spanish Curriculum Archive.
In response to the Oregon Common Curriculum goals for Language Studies,
Portland Public Schools (PPS) now requires all students to learn a second language in the classroom, beginning in elementary school. Due to the number of Hispanics in the state,
PPS has chosen Spanish as the foreign language to be taught. They are currently using a video program called “Hola, hola” at the elementary school level
[,] and teachers are required to supplement the program with follow [-] up lessons. Many of these teachers are unfamiliar with Spanish and are overwhelmed with the burden of this responsibility. To address this need, PSU’s Spanish Department has developed a supplemental aid entitled the Spanish Curriculum Archive. PPS has established a series of benchmarks, which are curriculum and assessment guides that break down the competency-based Oregon
Common Goals so that they ca [n] be easily applied for lesson and course design as well as for testing. Although there are other archives of Spanish activities (including interactive websites), none of them contains activities aligned with benchmarks [,] thus making the Spanish Curriculum Archive a unique resource to our community.
Technology Implemented in and out of the classroom:
If a student’s lesson plan is selected for the Spanish Curriculum Archive
[,] it is posted to an interactive database published on the Internet and available to all. The website’s innovation is that it only contains lesson plans which have been aligned with benchmarks [,] so a teacher using these lessons can be assured they meet Oregon
Common Curriculum goals for Language Studies. Lesson plans created by Spanish 404-
Bilingual Education students are reviewed by the instructor for grading purposes and are then forwarded to a Graduate Assistant for editing and aligning with the Oregon
Common Curriculum goals for Language Studies. [OMIT THIS Once the lessons have been aligned with benchmarks they are reviewed by a Professor in the Spanish
Department who validates this alignment before ] They are then sent to the Spanish

Curriculum Archive administrator for coding and inclusion in the database. The database is a Mysql database housed on PSU’s Odin server. The website that serves as the portal for this database was created using Macromedia’s Dreamweaver web development software as well as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat.
Results and student learning?
Having Spanish 404-Bilingual Education prepare the materials included in the
Archive has both its strong and weak points. The strengths are as follows: Students acquire first-hand experience working with children developing Spanish language skills.
Also, the teachers in whose classrooms they volunteer provide them with excellent role models for successful activities. In addition, it allows [OMIT my ] students the opportunity to develop an activity that is meaningful beyond the parameters of their experience in the schools; in essence, their activity, upon its inclusion within the website, becomes part of a legacy and its impact is ongoing. [I HAVE REWRITTEN THIS
SECTION: During the first year of the course, weaknesses became apparent.
Although students are provided with guidelines for preparation of the activities and are required to familiarize themselves with the Benchmarks, these students are almost exclusively Spanish majors and have had no formal training in language methodology and curriculum development. While some of the activities submitted to date have been excellent and have aligned with the Benchmarks, many have required revisions and editing before they could be included in the website. In any case, the Archive provides students with an incentive to do their best work [,] and as it builds in size and recognition the possibility of having ones student work placed in the archive may be attractive to students interested in Spanish language education.
What was the assessment process used to document results?
Students that participate in Spanish 404-Bilingual Education and submit lesson plans to the Spanish Curriculum Archive go through the assessment process common to all language study classes [.] [OMIT – IT REPEATS PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH , plus…the lessons they submit are reviewed for their potential for inclusion in the archive.
Many lessons need additional work to meet the standards for submission.
] [TO DATE,
ANN HAS BEEN DOING THE EDITING AND REVISIONS. ONCE THE
COURSE BECOMES A CAPSTONE, I WILL WORK WITH THE STUDENTS
TO HELP THEM EDIT THEIR OWN ACTIVITIES. This means students are asked to revise and in some instances rewrite lessons if they wish them to be considered for the
Archive.
] The Archive adds a new level of assessment that has “real world” expectations and implications, something a typical class without this technological teaching tool does not offer.
What have you and/or your team learned about using technology in teaching and learning?
Technology lends itself to teaching in a variety of ways. Many of its applications can distance students from the collegial and collaborative learning experience that language students seem to appreciate. Our use of technology as a repository for lesson plans strikes us as being a more natural use of technology in teaching because it serves to both inspire learning and capture knowledge in a way that is accessible to all.

How have you and/or your team presented your experiences and results to peers?
Spanish 404-Bilingual Education is an ongoing class which has been offered every term during the past two academic years .
[OMIT It continues to build in size and ] It has been accepted as a Senior Capstone beginning in the 2004-05 academic year . As a Capstone, the class will attract a wider range of students [,] which can only improve the quality of the lesson plans that are submitted to the Archive. As an Internet site, the Spanish Curriculum Archive has a physical presence on PSU servers. This makes it accessible to mainstream academics and available for peer review. Because we have not got enough aligned lesson plans to release the public version, the current site is a
Beta test site. We have reserved the domain www.sca.pdx.edu
on PSU’s Odin server and as soon as we have approximately 75-100 aligned lesson plans (enough material to be useful to a classroom teacher) the site will be made public and we will begin to publicize it. As an archive that is aligned with Common Curriculum Standards, the Spanish
Curriculum Archive is unique. This makes it a potential subject for professional seminars, regional or national meetings, journals, book chapters, etc. Because we have been busy developing the project, its infrastructure and its technology, we have not taken these next steps, although we intend to.