Free Spanish Resources from Miraflores
www.miraflores.org
Miraflores publishes content-based, cultural materials for learning Spanish and French in both printable and downloadable formats, but in addition to material that is available for purchase, it also offers a number of free resources in Spanish. Under the section called Sharing, teachers will find photographs and videos free for downloading. By clicking on El Libro Total under free resources on the Sharing page, they will also find Spanish books that are organized by country, author, and title. These are free to educators and students because they are now in the public domain.

Free Thematic Units for French, German, and Spanish Students
flnews.cortland.edu/flteach/thematic_units/
This site has two downloadable CDs with approximately 130 thematic units that are a result of the collaboration between Paul Garcia, an ACTFL Past President, and his students at the University of South Florida, where he is a visiting professor of second language education, and the University of Kansas, School of Education, Second Language Education, from which he is retired. Garcia notes that the materials are suitable for English learners, as well as K–12 students of French, German, and Spanish. In addition to an extensive unit on Argentina, there are units on science, social studies, art, music, and health, as well as songs, games, and sponge activities.

French Holiday Activities
www.fete-enfants.com/index.html
The Fete-Enfants site has activities related to seasons, holidays, and other celebrations, including Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandmother’s Day, April Fools Day, Mardi Gras, and Carnival. The activities include stories, crafts, puzzles, quizzes, and recipes. There is even a lesson on crepe making to celebrate Crepe Day in February.

The Rosetta Project Archive
rosettaproject.org
The Rosetta Project describes itself as a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages. The project’s focus is on long-term archiving, and its first prototype is The Rosetta Disk, a three-inch-diameter nickel disk with nearly 14,000 pages of information microscopically etched onto its surface. The disk is held in a four-inch spherical container, which the project says both protects the disk as well as provides additional functionality. As demonstrated on the website, the overall effect is quite impressive from an esthetic standpoint as well. [Note: The Rosetta Project is not affiliated with the Rosetta Stone software program.]

Information and Communications Technology for Language Teachers
www.ict4lt.org/en/index.htm
Created by Graham Davies, a retired British teacher of German and French, the Information and Communications Technology for Language Teachers (ICT4LT) website has a collection of training modules ranging from basic to intermediate to advanced level. There is an additional module on computer-aided assessment and language learning and a glossary of ICT terms. Davies says his aim was to provide web-based training materials in ICT for teachers of modern foreign languages. He also maintains a blog, which is available at ictforlanguageteachers.blogspot.com.

The Lives of Japanese High School Students
www.tjf.or.jp/deai/
"Deai: The Lives of Seven Japanese High School Students" was developed to assist secondary school students outside Japan who are studying Japanese as a foreign language. At this website, there are photos and stories told by the students about their daily lives. As language learners learn about the culture, the site notes that they will also encounter many topics directly relevant to language learning and acquire lots of useful information to assist them in their efforts to communicate in Japanese. The text of the stories is available in both English and Japanese when you click on "Photos, My Story & Message Video," and the stories can be printed as PDFs.

Site for Educators to Buy or Sell Books
www.classroom2classroom.com
The new online marketplace Classroom2Classroom says that it will provide the K–12 education community with a platform to buy and sell new and used classroom library books. Sellers can bundle books by theme, grade level, or reading metric and offer them for sale to
others anywhere in the country. Buyers can search for books or book bundles they may need for their classrooms or libraries. There is also an option for creating a wish list so that you can be notified when a bundle of books you are interested in becomes available. Theme categories have already been created for Chinese, French, German, and Spanish, but due to the newness of the site only Spanish has a few books currently available; however, in these days of tight budgets, this might be a possible option for cash-strapped teachers and schools to find what they need. It also makes sense to check back as the site grows.

Shared Activities for Teaching Chinese
www.quia.com/shared/chinese
The Quia website has shared resources such as quizzes, games, and cloze activities for teachers on a number of topics, including languages. The Chinese section, which currently has more than 460 listings, has reading, writing, and listening activities. The search feature allows teachers to refine their searches by activity and category. There are quite a few categories, and these include assessment, communication, and sentence structure, as well as topics such as culture, food, school, and family.

Essential Questions and Big Ideas in Education
www.authenticeducation.org/ae_bigideas/index.lasso
In the Authentic Education e-journal Big Ideas, Grant Wiggins, president of Authentic Education and co-author of Understanding by Design, discusses essential questions in education. Essential questions are broad in scope, timeless by nature, and not finally answerable with a brief sentence. He says these are the questions that cause relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content; provoke deep thought, discussion, inquiry, understanding, and more questions; stimulate ongoing rethinking of ideas and previous lessons; spark meaningful connection with prior learning and personal experience; and naturally recur. This topic and others are discussed on the website of Big Ideas.

Essential Questions in Foreign Language Education
tinyurl.com/glastonbury-eqs
Building upon the research and big ideas of Authentic Education’s Grant Wiggins (see above entry), the Foreign Language Department staff of the Glastonbury Public Schools in Glastonbury, CT, developed their own overarching essential questions to guide instruction in each grade level. This site has their essential questions for ancient Greek, Chinese, French, Latin, Russian, and Spanish.