¡Hola
clase! Me llamo Dann. Oh, ¡perdón! Inglés, sí, es cierto, My name is Dann. Yes, you read that right; double-N Dann, or as some call me, Dann-nuh-nuh. This is me!
I've been at GVSU for a long time, for numerous reasons. I started out as a business major, but I learned real quick that business wasn't for me. Since then, I've fallen in love with Education, and since then, I've been dedicated to my craft. I'm a Secondary Education and Spanish major, and I absolutely love both. In addition, I study English and Applied Linguistics as my minor.
In the future, I hope to study linguistics for my Master's, or possibly even TESOL (Teachers of English to Students of Other Languages). I would love nothing more than to live in anther country and teach English or Spanish, the two languages I do know. In the meantime, I've been self-teaching myself Japanese thanks to the Internet and Italki. If you're interested in learning a foreign language, I would highly recommend the site! Currently, I've been learning Hiragana, which is basically good-to-go now, and soon I'll be teaching myself Katakana. Hiragana and Katakana are syllabaries of the Japanese language. Syllabaries differ from alphabets in that each character represents a syllable and not just a sound. For example, に represents the sound /ni/ whereas か represents the sound /ka/, and so forth. It's fun stuff! Well, at least for a language nerd like myself! Check out one of the ways I've been learning Hiragana:
For my teacher assisting semester, I assisted at Union High School in the Grand Rapids Public Schools district. At Union, there was very limited technology, so I often had to come up with my own non-digital technologies to better my students' learning. In addition, this past year or so, I've been substitute teaching. I've taken two long term sub jobs teaching Spanish in the Grand Haven Area Public Schools (GHAPS) district, one at Lakeshore Middle School and one at Grand Haven High School, in which I'll be Student Teaching this fall. GHAPS is a one-to-one Chromebook school district, so it has a stark contrast when compared to Union High School. Each classroom, also, has a Smartboard. During these long-term sub jobs, I've had a lot of experiences using the technology in the classroom. When learning a language, learning vocab is probably one of the most tedious things to do as a student; however, with the smartboards, we were able to play vocab games you just normally can't do on any ol' whiteboard, such as "matamoscas". In addition, with their Chromebooks, students were able to work together, even at home, when they were not physically together at school. It made the learning process a lot easier.
Last but not least, I'd like to tell you about something that's happened to me recently, and why I've been doing this blog post later than I had wanted. Don't take this a something sad, as I'd rather celebrate her life, but today I had to put my dog down. Her name was Tipper and she was a love. She has been with me through thick-and-thin since I was 11 years old! Today, I'm 28. She would have been 18 years old this July 4th. As you can see from the video posted below, she was stricken by cancer and it started to develop big open sores all over her body. So, the video I posted is from yesterday when I decided to spoil her to no end giving her one of her favorite things, human food! Enjoy the video below!
