Spanish & Illinois

by Ann Abbott Students work in the community and don't always know just how much others appreciated their work.  Here is a note from Ronnie Kahn at La Casa about students who participated in the event for Latino families. Hi Beth and Anne,   I want to thank you for putting out the call for background checks for students to work with the younger siblings for Latina/o Family Visit Day.  A separate sibling track allows us to create programming that they enjoy, while relieving child care duties from parents or older siblings.  Your call for volunteers allowed us to have enough people to hold the younger sibling program throughout the day.   Thanks for your support of this important retention program; I am sure the committee will outreach to you in future years, Ronnie 

by Ann Abbott In yesterday´s blog post I shared what students want to do in my Business Spanish class which is also a social media marketing consulting workshop. One student indicated that he-she would like to learn more about Pinterest. Since I have a limited amount of time in class, I want to share these tutorials with students and let them access them if they want and when they want. Tutoriales en SlideShare "Guía rápida de Pinterest Guía rápida de Pinterest from Ricardo Llera ¨ "Uso colaborativo de Pinterest"   Uso colaborativo de Pinterest from Melisa Penélope ¨Pinterest para empresas¨ Pinterest para empresas from María Bretón ¨Pinterest para marcas¨ Pinterest para marcas from Claudia Díaz Tutoriales en YouTube ¨Caso de éxito¨

One student team at work during class. by Ann Abbott In a previous post I explained how I allowed students to choose the chapters of the textbook that we would study this semester. That is one way to give students voice in the course. Yesterday I walked into class and said (in Spanish), "Pull out a piece of paper and a pen. Write down what you want to do during today's class. In other words, what do you need at this point in the semester and at this point with your consulting projects?" These were the results, in descending order of frequency: Spend time working with their team. Discuss their posts. Specifically, some people wanted to inject more variety in their posts and get new ideas. Manage client relationships. Specifically, one person wanted to change the frequency with which the team sent posts to the client (from every week to every two weeks), and another simply wanted to work out a better process for communicating with the client. See the work tha

Latina/o Family Visit Day: Sunday, October 13 Contact: Ronnie Kann, v-kann@illinois.edu, 217-244-5941 I am reaching out to you personally and to your organization to volunteer for Latina/o Family Visit Day on Sunday, October 13 th .   We are in need of people to work two hour or more timeslots.  We are in dire need of people who have been background checked to work with the younger children.  If you are able to work, can you indicate hours that you are free (between 8:00 and 4:00). Every little bit helps. I have attached an excel chart for your name, contact information, hours you would like to work and whether you have been background checked or not.  Those students who have been background checked (Education majors; America Reads, America Counts; volunteer activity in school) will be assigned to work with the little kid. Please share this excel with members of your org and  other students who might be willing to help us out (they don’t have to speak Spanish). As always

Writing clear, actionable subject lines in your emails to clients can provide real value. by Ann Abbott As the semester progresses and my experiment with turning my traditional Business Spanish course into a hands-on social media marketing consulting business continues, this is my top lesson so far: In this new territory, I need to learn precisely what my students need to learn. So far, I see that they need to learn things I never imagined I needed to teach.  I'll share the list of things that students need to learn in a future blog post. For now, I want to zoom in on one area of professional communication about which students need explicit instruction: the subject lines of emails to clients . When looking for some guidance on this issue, most of the information that popped up on Google was about internet marketing; in other words, how to send e-mails with subject lines that make people want to open them so that they will read your email newsletter, sales offer, etc