Sep
20
Spanish Toolkit: 6 web sites for Spanish teachers
If you’re a Spanish language teacher worth your salt, you’re constantly on the lookout for high quality, varied learning materials to present to your students. With a new school year already underway, here are six sites that should be on your radar if you teach Spanish. And if you’re not a Spanish instructor, no problem, these sites still offer plenty of content for avid Spanish learners of all ages and backgrounds.
La Casa Rojas magazine
Learning and Teaching Scotland
Click on “MORE” to get a more detailed description about each site.
BABLINGUA
Spanish Level: Elementary, Intermediate, Advanced
Appropriate for: Middle-school and high school Spanish teachers
Bablingua is a Spanish-language instructional video company with three categories of products: Videos, Icebreakers (very short videos that range in length anywhere from 1 minute to 8 minutes in length), and Vocabulary Cards. Included in the purchased video packages are activities teachers can use with students to build background knowledge before the class watches the videos. There are also Spanish subtitles available. Here is an entertaining video Bablingua did recently about the body language of Spaniards.
Find more videos like this on Classroom 2.0
What stands out: You can select videos based on both topics and grammar points presented. The overall presentation is excellent, the videos are short, to the point and well produced.
Price: Varies, from as little as $3 for an “icebreaker” video activity up to $45 for a DVD + book package
BrainPOP Español
Spanish level: Intermediate, Advanced
Appropriate for: Children who are native Spanish speakers in third grade and higher or highly motivated pre-teens learning Spanish
BrainPOP Español is the Spanish version of an educational English web site that teaches children about math, science, art and history through the animated adventures of Moby the robot and Tim, his human friend. It’s clear that the Spanish site is designed for native Spanish speakers so the rate of speech is fast and the vocabulary is not targeted at children just learning the language. That said, the animation and overall production of the content is impressive. BrainPOP Español offers fascinating material for young students in a format that is entertaining and unique.
Price: Varies, depending on your country and whether the purchase is for individual use or for a school.
La Casa Rojas
Spanish level: Advanced
Appropriate for: High school, university, continuing education
La Casa Rojas is a bi-monthly online magazine that takes you to all corners of the Spanish-speaking world. There is an astonishing variety of articles and topics from daily life to food to history and politics. Recent topics have included a Spanish teacher’s perspective on teaching, an essay about the Colombian Tarzan and a first-person account of walking El Camino de Santiago. Each article is written by a person, usually a native Spanish speaker, living in that country.
What stands out: The majority of the articles are read by their authors giving you a variety of speakers and accents from across Latin America and Spain.
Price: $14.99 quarterly for individuals. Different pricing for schools. Consult web site for details.
Learning and Teaching Scotland
Spanish level: Upper intermediate, Advanced
Appropriate for: High school, university, continuing education
This web site has an excellent collection of videos of young Latino immigrants talking about their life in America. Each one is very short (four minutes or less) and includes English subtitles.
Price: Free
What stands out: The authenticity of the speakers. The young people featured in the videos are very personable and the videos are just the right length to introduce a topic for a classroom discussion. Click on the box below for video of Ricardo Avalos from Hayword, California talking about what it’s like to be gay, Latino and an immigrant in the U.S. (May take several seconds for the video to load. Video is roughly 3 minutes.)
Pancho & Pita
Spanish level: Beginner
Appropriate for: Very young children
Pancho & Pita are two adorable little trolls who enjoy reading, playing and exploring the world around them with their bilingual pet named Flan. The trio take children on a series of interactive computer adventures where they learn how to count, recognize colors and shapes and pick up other basic developmental skills in a fun and entertaining framework. The entire interactive game is available in both Spanish and English, so parents who aren’t bilingual can still feel comfortable using the material with their children. There is only one adventure currently available, “¿Dónde están los pollitos?”, but more Pancho & Pita adventures are in the works.
What stands out: The voices are so adorable, the animation is very colorful and the pacing of the game is such that children can go at their own pace. Also, there is plenty of repetition of key words and phrases in both Spanish and English.
Price: $9.95
The Spanglish Lex List
Spanish level: Upper intermediate, Advanced
Appropriate for: University-level students, continuing education
The Spanglish Lex List is the brainchild of Matthew Bennett, a Spanish-English translator in Spain. It consists of a free weekly three-page worksheet that Matthew promises can help you improve your professional Spanish.
What stands out: Matthew takes complex and controversial topics in the news and boils them down to the essentials. The worksheets reduce a teacher’s prep time for a class discussion and students get exposed to an extremely high level of business Spanish.
Here’s how he describes it:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Matthew Bennett and Karen. Karen said: RT @matthewbennett: Cool, Voices en Español highlighted Spanglish Lex List in list '6 Websites for Spanish Teachers' http://bit.ly/13VlQH [...]