Resources for Digital Equity for Spanish Speaking Students

Equity and diversity in education are important themes in education today. Paul Gorski, in defining multicultural education mentions that, “Every student must have an equal opportunity to achieve to her or his full potential” (EdChange Multicultural Pavilion). Linguistic minority students do not have the same internet resources available as English speaking students and may struggle with the technology to locate them. One of my goals with regard to multicultural education is to help close the digital equity gap. EdReform.net lists the five dimensions of digital equity as: Technology resources, quality content, culturally responsive content, effective use of resources and content creation (http://digitalequity.edreform.net/, 2003).With that in mind, I've added a page to my website for Spanish language elementary web resources (https://sites.google.com/a/adams14schools.org/mrfisher/resources). The resources presented on my webpage are intended for students, parents, and teachers of students who speak Spanish. Teachers are constantly searching for quality web resources for their Spanish speaking students and parents frequently ask me for web resources they can access at home to further their children’s learning. The purpose is to consolidate on one page some of the best Spanish language web resources for primary age students. I'd like to solicit your feedback on additional web resources available in Spanish that I could add to this.

References:
Gorski, P. C. (2003). : The Challenge of Defining “Multicultural Education”. EdChange Multicultural Pavilion. Retrieved October 11, 2008 from http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/initial.html

cross posted at http://principianteglobal.blogspot.com/2008/10/digital-equity-for-spanish-speaking.html

Virtual Manipulatives, First Grade

This evening we just had a great skype chat on Using the SmartBoard in the standards-based classroom. The focus was on what was working well and we talked about engagement, math, and literacy. The consensus was that there was a need for more training or refresher courses. Some ideas where bandied about regarding students teaching other students or creating short training sessions in peer to peer learning. I like the idea and I'm going to share some screen capture tips in one of my subsequent postings. Much of the focus was on math and so I'd like to show a short clip of some place value work we did this week using the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives at http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vLibrary.html.

Specifically we are using base blocks to represent place value. This address the Grade Level Essential Target of 1.2C: c) Uses objects to show meanings of = ,<, >, from 0 to 100. e) Uses multiple models to develop initial understanding of place value of ones and tens (base ten blocks, abacus, computer, manips). This is a great place to differentiate because while all first graders need to represent up to 100, many of my students can use blocks to show numbers in the thousands. (Please note this website is available in Spanish as well)What I like about the base blocks virtual manipulatives is that they are easy to move around, you get immediate corrective feedback from the number counter, and it is a fast way to demonstrate mastery of a difficult concept.

Here is a short video of my class doing some base block exercises. In the first two segments I am filming but for most of the class work my students film everything and do all the documenting with the digital cameras. Each week I assign a class photographer who take all the pictures and videos. They are filming the third segment. As you can see, it is a bit shaky (Note to self "Get tripod"). Mildly reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project.