For students without the resources to see the world, a foreign language classroom is often their only window to cultures and experiences outside of their own. I teach Spanish as a foreign language and a heritage language at a high school in rural North Carolina. Our particular population of students is quite poor and isolated from cultures and experiences outside their own communities.
My challenge: take a group of kids with a necessarily narrow world-view (they don't have any extra money to travel) and try to help them experience the wildly varied cultures of Hispanic countries. With my heritage language students, my mission is to try and restore and maintain lost or faltering knowledge of Spanish. For both groups of my students, I have to bring to life the different accents, traditions, smells, tastes, and sounds of Spain and Latin America and ignite a sense of curiosity, compassion, and pride in them. Unfortunately, it is difficult to light any kind of fire under students with stale textbook activities and grammar exercises.
My kids need something that will allow them to interact with the material I teach, with each other, and with the wider world around them. They need a data projector. With an LCD projector, my students could do more interactive presentations of the information they are learning and trying to convey to each other. They can experience cultural artifacts of the Spanish-speaking world that go far beyond looking at a picture in a textbook. They can begin to relate to and assimilate what they are taking in, instead of memorizing for a test and quickly forgetting what they "know". A data projector would allow me to provide my students with video clips, music, online presentations, speech samples with visual representations of pronunciation, and even interactive grammar exercises so that more students than just my auditory learners can succeed in Spanish class.
With your help, students from rural, small-town North Carolina who want to experience the outside world can do so through a language classroom. They will do more than memorize vocabulary--they will be so much closer to actually being multilingual and multicultural in a world that demands it. They will be more competitive, well-rounded, intellectually-stimulated, and ready to become the young American adults that they will be very soon.
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