Latin Grammy website gets a cool makeover... and nominations!

The website of the Latin Recording Academy has undergone a serious makeover, and I have to say it is COOL. More importantly, the nominations for the Latin Grammys are out!! This is an important way for me to see what's new and what's popular-I'm always embarrassed at how few names I even recognize on the list! Gives me hours of entertainment on YouTube trying to figure it out though. :-) Check it out!

Songs for the elusive 3rd pers. sing. preterite

Certain things are super easy to find songs for. Reflexives. Present tense, particularly yo y tú. Preterite yo y tú. That's about all love songs do, right? Talk about you and me in the past, lol. But the other day my colleague asked if I knew of any songs for 3rd-person preterite, and that was tough. I went through my whole lyrics file (which I'll email to you if you DM me @wandermami on twitter) and I did find two songs. The first I don't recommend for below Spanish 3. The song is Mojado by Ricardo Arjona. It's very politically charged and full of the poetic layers of meaning typical of Arjona. Please note that videos on YouTube were not uploaded by SonyBMG--I'll keep my eyes out for that one.

But my colleague teaches Spanish 1 and 2 so my quest continued. I did finally come across a good one--Arroyito by Fonseca. It has 9 occurrences of 3rd person preterite, 7 of them unique. And it's a good song by a good guy with a good video with no copyright problems.

I just made my first Yodio

I love professional conferences, particularly KWLA! What could be better than a bunch of awesome teachers getting together and sharing their best practices? That's how I found out about Yodio. My students in Spanish 3 today wandered the school taking pictures of teachers and staff "commanding" people to do things. They've written the commands and tomorrow we'll add the audio. I'd share it but I think I should keep photos of my students off this blog. But meanwhile I made my own, just with two pictures. Grab your kids, a camera, and a cell phone, and tell your own digital story!

My Voki uses impersonal 'se'

One of the cool tools I was introduced to at the KWLA conference was Voki, a tool you can use to make a talking avatar. It's easier for me to show you what it is rather than explain it. We will be trying this out this week in my classes! :-)


Get a Voki now!

KWLA Fall 09 Conference presentation

This is the presentation I did for the fall conference of the Kentucky World Language Association.



And here is the handout.

Found Juanes on Twitter

You should follow Juanes on Twitter! He's tweeting right now about his ground-breaking concert for peace at the Plaza de la Revolución in Cuba. He's @juanestwiter; note that there's only one 't' in the middle of twiter.

For you French teachers

This weekend I was at the fall conference of the Kentucky World Language Association (phenomenal!) and after I gave my presentation on YouTube and pop music, it occurred to me I should have offered the French teachers present the url of my favorite French-teaching cyberamiga Diane (@parisprimrose), Foreign Language Fun.

Bilingual toy giveaway, gracias a @mamitati

Check out this post at one of my favorite blogs, WannaJugarWithMigo to see how to win a cool bilingual toy from one of my favorite cyberamigas, @mamitati.

Abecedario video from YouTube

Turns out my school blocks tu.tv as 'adult/mature content' so here's the same video on YouTube if your situation is the same.

Hysterical video involving the abecedario à la Who's on First

Tu.tv is the Spanish version of YouTube and this was one of their headlined videos this week. SO funny. This is absolute gold even for Spanish 1... I mean, it involves the ABC's and 'la sé' what could be more Spanish 1??

Keeping your eyes open for gold nuggets

My husband is a bit of a tennis buff and so we were watching the US Open final yesterday and watched Argentinian Juan Martín del Potro defeat Federer in a stunning upset. In the awards ceremony, del Potro gave a short speech in Spanish (at 1 mins 15 sec). I thought, that'd be very interesting to my class--I have a tennis player in my AP class--and I wondered if it would be up on YouTube. Do I love YouTube? Yes I do.

This is authentic audio you could even use in Spanish 1-- he's thanking family members. What Spanish 1 class is complete without a lesson in family words?

CNN launches Latino in America

Follow them on twitter-- @LIACNN

Bob Esponja on Mundonick

I'm not sure why, but in my students' flurry of Spanish-language corporate sites they used for this project, we didn't run across Nickelodeon's Mundonick.com, probably because I was looking on Nickelodeon's US page and not finding a language change, so I figured they oddly didn't have one. But then recently I googled 'nickelodeon español' and what a cool site! Games! Fun! It surprised me how much my teenagers knew, all the characters' names and such, and instead of thinking it was a goofy kid thing, they really enjoyed the throwback and clamored to be the one to choose where we should go. Enjoy some Bob Esponja or Los Pingüinos de Madagascar.