Week 2 Reflection

For my BYOD activity, I decided to create a short beginner Spanish quiz. I imagined myself teaching an intro lesson where students are just starting to pick up greetings and simple everyday phrases. I used Socrative for this quiz, and my room # is LANG2242. The quiz included four questions: multiple choice, short answer and true/false; inquiring about easy words and sayings like “I love you”, “How are you?”, etc. In a real classroom, I could see myself using this as a warm-up activity to get students engaged and thinking in both languages right away.

As for my reflections this week, I’m finding the blog format to be an interesting change of pace. It feels strange knowing I’m writing to an audience of classmates instead of just turning in a private assignment. I think that makes me consider tone and clarity differently. Using Socrative was surprisingly easy and kind of fun - it didn’t take too long to set up a quiz and launch it, and I liked how simple it was to imagine students logging in and answering on the spot. I’m currently a TA, and I think it would be so fun to use this for an exam review game in the coming weeks.

Thinking about Dale’s Cone of Experience, I’d place the blog more on the abstract side since it’s mostly raw, up-in-the-air text-based reflections, while Socrative leans more toward the interactive middle. With Socrative, students get a chance to actively engage and get feedback, which makes it more concrete than just reading or writing alone, even though it’s still not as “real-world” as doing something hands-on.

In terms of Siegel’s idea of “computer imagination,” I think both tools can be pushed further than just their basic uses. With blogs, for example, we could go beyond the traditional digital journal style usage and consider using them as collaborative spaces where students comment on each other’s posts, share media, or even link to outside resources, making them more like an ongoing conversation… as if we channeled our diaries into social media threads or a big group chat. With BYOD tools like Socrative, I could see using them in a language class for cultural immersion activities - I imagine pushing out quick polls in Spanish and having students vote on what sounds most natural, or using it to share authentic content like ads, signs, or short dialogues for students to react to in real time. This kind of activity takes advantage of the immediacy and interactivity of BYOD in a way that paper-based quizzes never could.

If I think about Postman’s question, “what problem is this tool really solving?” I'd say blogs help with the problem of reflection and visibility/collaboration within classrooms. Normally, students write in notebooks or turn something in that only the teacher sees. A blog makes that reflection more public and shared, so classmates can see what others are thinking and even respond, similar to how discussion posts do. On the other hand, Socrative solves the problem of keeping everyone engaged in the moment. Instead of just one or two students answering out loud, every single student can respond at once, and as a teacher I’d get instant feedback I can actually use to adjust my teaching. Put together, both tools show how technology can make learning more interactive and visible in ways that old, low-to-no-tech methods can’t do. I’ll definitely be implementing tools like this in my lesson plans!