Cuentas Conmigo (Story 5) - Carlos Prickly

Hey everyone.

I had a yearning to do something fun that can be released to the masses since my other creative project (Súper Lápiz) is only for Voces Digital consumers..., and was inspired to do another Cuentas Conmigo story on Youtube on my storytelling channel.

The idea of Cuentas Conmigo (if you're new around here), is that it's basically a TPRS® story that is done completely through feedback via the comments section on Youtube.

There is a new episode each Monday and this requires voting on the question at the end to be done by Wednesday. I foresee this being used by classes, or learners of any kind who want to practice Spanish in context.

This is the 5th story like it so far. The most popular was probably with Juan Cena. Nevertheless, I have been proud of each and every one of them.


Here are some ways this one is new though!

• Narrator is voiced by a Native Speaker
• I wrote a theme-song
• I think my style is getting more established as I do these

Check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store for free Teacher notes on the first episode which includes some ideas on how to use the series, episode and even has a short quiz or guided notes page for students.*

And I hope you and your classes will tell the story along with me!

Check out episode 1 in the present or past tenses!

*I'm selling the other ones to hopefully eventually offset the cost of paying a native speaker narrator for each episode.

See previous Cuentas Conmigo stories on these playlists.

NTPRS - day 2 - Breakfast, reading Russian, & Mafia

*this is my attempt to keep track of what happened while I was at my very first NTPRS in Reno, Nevada 

So I get up Tuesday morning and Mike had told me the night before that we were going to eat breakfast with Blaine Ray and Von Ray! I was really excited. Unfortunately I woke up incredibly late and probably made a terrible first impression on Blaine because I was still groggy from the lack of sleep and wasn’t very good about making much conversation.

Regardless I think I held my own ok. We talked about TPRS, my new school and I thanked him for helping bring the method to the light so so many of us could use it and find such amazing results in our classrooms too.  He is an incredibly nice guy. I am surprised just how fun he is and how he is not afraid to be goofy.

We also talked about some ways for me to get more involved in the TPRS community (and more specifically NTPRS) in the future, which is exciting. I haven’t seen much value in what I do over the past few years. I know there is still so much I can learn. But I am glad that they see potential in me and we might be able to work together in the future!

After breakfast, I went back to the beginner’s TPRS class and learned more Russian! I also brought attention to myself and ended up having to act as Lady Gaga.  There are probably pictures and videos out there somewhere.  Again, I was amazed at Katya’s seemingly effortless way to tell a story to us and review prior information as well as introduce new information.

FLAM Conference St Louis 2012

So a few weekends back, I was given the opportunity to co-present two sessions at Foreign Language Association of Missouri (FLAM) with Youtube's Spanish and Portuguese guru, Professor Jason.  It all started on twitter since I had seen him at last year's conference and thought, "Wow.  That's the guy from Youtube!"  I know it's silly since Youtube is one of those things that anyone can get on provided they have a camera and some video-editing software.  I hit him up later on Twitter and we decided to give some sessions about our videos to foreign language teachers in Missouri at the FLAM conference in St Louis.

He covered the first part mostly about the usefulness of videos such as ours in learning and education in the future.  We are seeing a major shift in how the global classroom is.  People can learn many things on the internet that they couldn't before.

In the second session, we presented on our actual process of video-making.  I took the chunk of time up explaining my process because as the years have gone by, I have continued to hone it and it has gotten much more complicated.  If you would like to see more or less what I presented, here are some videos I made for those who had to leave the session early or wanted to see afterwards, click here.

FLAM was ok this year.  I really was hoping for more TPRS-friendly presentations.  I was talking to the guy that I've been conspiring with this year (post about that later) and I thought we should try to present next year at FLAM a few sessions on TPRS.  I would like to do three sessions.

1. Session 1: an immersion into TPRS (a class conducted in TPRS)
2. Session 2: a TPRS workshop (where we can learn about some skills and practice a few)
3. Session 3: How we integrate TPRS into our classrooms (with examples, possibly videos of students, etc)

I think it would help.  There seemed to be a lot of interest in TPRS, but many didn't really feel comfortable enough to use it for lack of seeing it in action.  Let's hope I can present on it next year!