Tag Archives: classroom

“Tuíter” wall

Posted by Crystal Barragán in In the Classroom, Participation and tagged with , , , ,

We had a huge anti- social media presentation at one of our inservices. We learned about how to do everything we can to avoid being in situations that compromise the student / teacher relationship. Enter my new classroom “tuíter” wall:

LOVE IT! I’m adding a class participation category into my grade book this year, and I hope this twitter wall helps my shy students use their language skills more frequently without having to be put on the spot. I’m thinking about limiting the amount of “tweets” to one tweet per class so that my first period doesn’t fill up the entire wall all at once. I used these Dry Erase Writing Strips:

I found them in the dollar section at Target last year, and bought several sets for $1 each. I haven’t seen them this year, though. What do you think?

New [School] Year Resolution #2: Classroom Revamp!

Posted by Crystal Barragán in In the Classroom, Posters and tagged with , , , , , , ,

I am unfortunately really particular about the way things look from a design perspective. I say unfortunately, because I almost always end up redefining a perfectly great rubric/activity/poster to meet my standards of preferred font type, image use, wording — the works. It’s a little bit of extra work, but it’s something I really enjoy doing, and I think it ultimately goes a long way in showing students the amount of passion, effort, and personalization we put forth in ensuring their success. So, when it came to decorating my old, smelly classroom this week (think overhead projector, combo desks, wood paneling) with the printed resources available to me  (like, 2 Teacher’s Discovery posters), I was totally depressed. My classroom was (and is — I’m not done yet!) in dire need of a revamp. Fortunately, I tracked down some illustrations with the potential to become awesome posters for my classroom. I hope they get the students talking!

Finding classroom-friendly illustrations

Here are some images I came across last week that I really loved! This gallery includes illustrations by Eduardo Salles, Joel Caracas , Frannerd, and others. I stumbled across most of these images either on Pinterest or on trocitosgraficos.tumblr.com, a wonderful compilation of Spanish-language illustrations by @ZJonesSpanish (thanks for everything you do — we love you!) Many of these images make reference to the Internet and “geek” cultures (I feel awful referring to it as such, but as an uber geek myself, I absolutely do not mind) that a perhaps my shy, tech-savvy students may respond to. Either way, they’re much nicer than my 2 Teacher’s Discovery posters. Another site to keep in mind is Infografías en castellano. Lots and lots of nice infographics!

I used a program called PosteRazor to create rasterized cuts of my illustration which later come together to make one big poster. Yay! It’s especially useful for large or long images. Here’s an example of one I did last week:

I hope they make decent conversation pieces, if anything. I created a few more that actually have text in them, but left them in my classroom somewhere. Maybe I’ll post later.