Videoconferencing with the school in Morocco

An 8th grade Arabic class partners with a school in Morocco. Through several video-conferencing sessions (using Skype) the students learn about each other’s cultures. Later in the semester the class will write a play in Arabic, while the school in Morocco writes a play in English. Students will exchange plays and perform them for each other via video-conference.

Upper School Launch Grant: Blogging site

The time and training I received to work on Haiku was very important for me. It was a new platform for me and I needed to have the time over the summer (and the year)  to learn how to use it and also explore whether I needed to use other platforms or not because of possible restrictions with using Arabic. I was (and still am) interested in making Haiku the second textbook for my classes. This grant helped me begin this project and explore options and figure out what will and won’t work for my classes.

My main interest was to offer the students a place to engage the language through blogging but that did not work out as I had imagined so I decided to use Haiku for projects instead and from there try to develop the pages where students find a place to engage the language outside of class time.

I use Haiku now to share links of songs and movies that we watch and talk about in the class…each class has access to material of the previous year and I also post my assignments and syllabus. I also found out the more I use Haiku, the more interest the students have in using it. It is also my goal for next year to connect grading with homework assignment to make it easier for students to keep track of their missing assignments and stay up to date with their grades.

-Amani Abu Shakra