The Cardinal

Megan Brady, OFLA Beginning Teacher Committee Chair
Spanish Teacher, Northwest Local Schools

The OFLA Beginning Teacher Committee is working hard to connect with new teachers and to support them in becoming excellent, innovative, resourceful, and long-lasting world language teachers. Our goal is to provide a network of resources, strategies, and tools for new teachers. We want new teachers to know that they are not alone and that OFLA is here to help them. To this end, we will be interviewing new teachers throughout the year and highlighting them in The Cardinal. Kaylen Sanor is a Spanish teacher at Alliance High School in Alliance, Ohio. This is her first year teaching Spanish.

Avoiding Teacher Burnout in a “Post-Pandemic” World

Lauren Racela, OFLA Technology Integration Committee Chair
French Teacher, Milford High School 

It’s no secret that after two pandemic years, getting adjusted to the “new normal” has teachers feeling burnt out. This school year has been characterized by a return to in-person activities and the shedding of mask mandates. Most of us are back to the configurations we had built before COVID interrupted our routines. 

The 2020-2021 school year felt like peak chaos – we were in survival mode, just trying to know enough to get through the week, the day, or even the class period. Personally, I spent the 2020-2021 school year teaching in hybrid form. I was in two different buildings teaching five grade levels, and in each of those grade levels I had a mix of online and in-person students. It had me feeling frazzled, and just delivering the material seemed to take all my energy. Now that we are “post-pandemic,” our communities are returning to normal and our calendars are filled with all the activities that were canceled during the pandemic.

Better Together

Marcia Davis, OFLA Secondary Language Learning and Diversity Committee Chair
World Language Middle School, Columbus City Schools

Ohio’s Learning Standards for World Languages and Cultures describe what learners should know and be able to do while building language proficiency and interculturality. While there is not one perfect way to do that, strong relationships between teacher and learner provide a powerful foundation.

My entire career had been in urban education – in elementary Spanish immersion and traditional middle school and high school settings. Grammar had always been something I enjoyed and did well with as a student, and as such, it was a focal point of my instruction as a teacher. 

Alondra Pacheco, Ohio Buckeye AATSP President 
Spanish Teacher, University School, Hunting Valley

We are delighted to announce that Ryan Casey and Nadine Jacobsen-McLean will serve as National Teach Spanish Week co-chairs of the 2022 event. NTSW aims to promote the teaching of Spanish as a profession and highlight the importance of Spanish as a world language.

The 104th AATSP annual conference will take place in Puerto Rico, and to get everyone excited we hosted a virtual Puerto Rico Trivia night. Over 70 teachers participated, and during the event they tested their knowledge of Puerto Rican culture while competing for amazing prizes.

In partnership with Avant Assessment, AATSP co-hosted a special webinar on gender-inclusive language with a panel of K-16+ educators. Participants were able to share their own experience while listening to the current trends used in various languages.

How 3 Teachers in Stark County Created a Travel Team to Get More Students into the World

Megan Brady, OFLA Beginning Teacher Chair
Spanish Teacher, Northwest High School

What are we doing to motivate our students to learn languages when many of us are lacking the motivation to do much at all? A group of us decided that travel was the way to inspire more language and cultural learning. Although traveling with groups from across the country has its perks, we decided that banding together with the goal of filling a bus with local schools was something worth looking into. It has been wonderful to see it come to fruition! Many of our smaller schools in Stark County haven’t done much traveling recently, so we decided to come together as a group to help inspire kids (and their parents!) to do just that. 

Dr. Roger Anderson, Assistant Professor of International Languages & Cultures, Central State University

In the 18^th century, French aristocrats fleeing the violence of the French Revolution were lured to the Ohio River Valley by scammers, who succeeded in swindling them.

Subsequently, a French community sprung up around the present-day Gallipolis, in the southeast part of Ohio. 

A 2021 article to The Cardinal highlighted this history as well. Click here to read.

Dr. Roger Anderson, Assistant Professor of International Languages & Cultures, Central State University

For those unfamiliar, Rick Steves is the U.S. European travel expert whose brand (empire?) encompasses travel shows on radio and television, annual guidebooks, and even touring packages abroad. Few Americans have visited Europe as much as Rick, nor know its numerous cultures as he does.

Always supportive of education, Rick wanted to present educators with a gift of some sort.

Richard Emch, Ohio Foreign Language Association President
French Teacher, North Royalton High School

Planning a conference, particularly one the size and quality of the Ohio Foreign Language Association’s Annual Conference, is always quite an undertaking. As you can imagine, it has been especially challenging during a pandemic. As the current President of the Ohio Foreign Language Association, I’d like to thank you for your flexibility, patience, and understanding as we navigate the continued disruptions in holding our conference. I am going to take this opportunity to share how we made the recent decision to postpone the 60^th Annual Ohio Foreign Language Association Conference.

First, we took a survey to see if the OFLA members were ready for an in-person conference or wanted to remain virtual. Then, we took a survey to see when the best time of the year would be for the majority of our members. We have traditionally had a spring conference, and that was the time the majority of the survey respondents said they wanted for 2022. Being a member of the OFLA Board since 2006, I am aware of the recurring suggestions to the board to hold the conference during other times in the year. The reasoning usually includes conflicts with spring break, conflicts with state testing, a feeling of a fall conference helping teachers get ready for the new school year, and a feeling of not being able to implement ideas from the conference during the last quarter of the school year with its plethora of activities. Moreover, as conference planners, we are always keeping our fingers crossed for good weather in March or April. Despite these disadvantages, the membership indicated in the survey that they wanted to move forward with an in-person, spring conference.

The Ohio Foreign Language Association voted at its February 12, 2022 board meeting to revise its Vision Statement.

The inclusion of the word culture puts OFLA in step with the Ohio Department of Education’s Learning Standards for World Languages and Cultures adopted in March 2020. This is from ODE’s website: 

In March 2020, the State Board of Education unanimously adopted Ohio’s Learning Standards for World Languages and Cultures. The addition of “Cultures” to the name reflects the essential role of intercultural communicative competence in one’s native culture as well as in global cultures. The addition of a literacy strand to the standards reflects how learning another language builds literacy skills in both the target and native language. These standards will go into effect in the 2021-2022 school year, but teachers may begin to use them immediately.

OFLA’s revised Vision Statement:

The Ohio Foreign Language Association is committed to articulated, standards-based world language and culture study beginning in the primary grades, so that every learner, from early childhood through adult, acquires a high level of language proficiency and intercultural competence.

Interested in becoming a member of the Ohio Foreign Language Association? Join or renew here.

Kaleigh Baker, OFLA Executive Vice President
Spanish Teacher, Butler High School

If you are newer to being 1:1 with Chromebooks or iPads in your school, you have probably come across the problem where your former Word documents or PowerPoint presentations just do not format correctly on the device.

The easiest “quick fix” for a Word document or PowerPoint presentation is to download the file as a PDF and then share it on your LMS that way. Students can then edit the document using Kami (or another tool like Notability). Of course with the Word document, some of your fonts may not transfer correctly, and with the PowerPoint presentation you will lose the animation factor, such as clicking to show the right answer, when moving to a PDF.

If you are like me, you prefer your worksheets and presentations to look polished and professional. I, personally, also love a good font and Google has so many to choose from that it is overwhelming! Google Docs can get clunky because you need to use tables to get things to line up and display correctly. 

Enter: Google Slides.

With Google Slides you can change the page set up to 8.5” x 11” and then create your worksheet from there! Google Slides is perfect because you can put text boxes and pictures all over and not have the fuss or worry of it messing up the layout like in a Word document or Google doc.

You can download the final product as a PDF (as mentioned above), or you can create a text box within the worksheet for students to type their answer into if you want to keep it all within Google.

Here is an example of a worksheet I made to go along with a song we listen to in Spanish class about love for Valentine’s Day.