Risky Spanish

One of the main challenges of any instructor is keeping students engaged in what's going on in class. This is especially true if what you're doing in class involves a lot of repetition. We want to keep students engaged because research has shown that they learn more when they are paying attention and care about what's going on in class (duh!) Now, ideally we want them to be engaged with the material itself (Whoa! these verb conjugations are so cool!) But let's face it, sometimes we have to have them practice stuff that they really don't care about at all (especially in Gen Ed courses). So what do you do then? Well, often we try to spice things up with games, group work, competition, etc. But even Jeopardy and Family Feud get boring after a while. That's when I like to play Risk!

Now, for those poor souls out there who don't know what Risk is, it's a classic game where you compete to try to take over the world country by country. Now, obviously the original version of Risk isn't going to be much use in class, so that is why I created an online version*. In this version of Risk, you simply click on the button for a color, and then click on a country to make it that color. And that's it! So how do you use it in class? Well, what I like to do is have a lot of questions (some easy, some hard). Then I break up the students into groups. The groups take turns trying to answer their choice of an easy or hard question. If they answer an easy question correctly, then they get to take over a neutral (white) country. If they answer a hard question then they get to take over a country that already belongs to another group! Since I'm a Spanish teacher, in this version of the game you can only capture countries where Spanish is an official language. But don't worry, I'm planning to come out with a less field-specific version of the game over the summer.

I've used this game several times in my own classes and I can tell you that my students really get engaged! You wouldn't believe how excited they get when they find out that they've conjugated the verb "tener" correctly! I hope that your classes enjoy it too!

*This game has been deprecated. Please see the new version described here.

Random Sentence Generator using Excel: Take 2

In a previous post I presented and discussed a way to use excel to generate random sets of vocabulary words for students to use to create their own sentences. In this post I am presenting and discussing a new way to use Excel to actually create the sentences for the students, who then have to interpret / translate them. The benefit to this approach is that the students are being provided with input rather than being forced to produce output. Research has shown that, while output is very helpful for language acquisition, only input is necessary for language acquisition.

In this template you will find three sheets.

Let's discuss the third sheet first. In this sheet you will enter in your lists of sentence fragments. So, in the first column you put the first part of the sentence (say the main verb and subject), in the third column you put the second part of the sentence (say the direct object), and in the fifth column you put the third part of the sentence (say the adverb(ial phrase)). The second, fourth, and sixth columns are for you to put in the corresponding translations if you're going to do a matching activity. And that's all you have to do!


Now you simply go to the first sheet to see your magnificent, randomly generated sentences!










And you go to the second sheet to see randomly generated sentences that your students can match up with their provided, randomly arranged, translations!







Now, to keep you from accidentally changing the code used in the template, all the cells except the ones where you enter your words are locked. However, if you're feeling brave and want to look at what's going on behind the scenes, then feel free to use the password (which is "password") to unlock the sheets and mess around.