Spanish Backpack

Spanish Backpack is a basic course management system (CMS) offered free of charge to Spanish faculty at all levels with their students. The home page for Spanish Backpack states: “Our goal at SpanishBackpack.com is to provide Spanish teachers and Spanish students with a fun tool to complement the classroom.”

Getting Started: Once a teacher account is created (and a student account for the teacher is also generated at this time in order to see what the student sees), all features of the program are available for use. At log in, the user immediately sees a message board. The messages on this board may be informational (i.e., new “How To” videos which have been created by the owner of the site or an announcement of a free webinar on a topic that is about how to use the site) or they may be messages about different activities that someone has created. It appears cluttered as the message board is not split into categories and therefore everything is mixed together. Also found on this initial page are the main components of the site: 1) My Classes, 2) Students, 3) My Toolbox, and 4) How-To Videos.

Students: Before beginning to set up classes, the instructor must manually add individual students with their first and last name and a valid email address that is unique to that student (i.e., no two people can have a shared email address).

My Classes: Once the teacher has input all of the names and email addresses of all students, classes can be created by clicking on “New class” and filling in all of the pertinent information for that class, including adding the students by populating the class with students from the list provided. Once that is done, the class is ready to be used.

My Toolbox: This section is the principal part of the program. Within this section there are six subsections, five of which are related to classroom explanations and activities.

The first subsection is titled “Grammar.” This section states: “The grammar areas and lessons below are taken from El Conversador, Conversa’s textbook written by David Kaufman.” The textbook itself is out-of-print, but it appears that some, if not all, of the content has been uploaded here in Spanish Backpack.

There are seventy-eight chapters of grammar, each chapter one or two pages in length. Each chapter contains an explanation of the grammar point, a practice activity (called a “quiz”) and then the answers to the quiz. It should be noted that all of the explanations and instructions are in English throughout the entire book. The explanations are generally clear and easy to understand. The quizzes provided after each of the grammar explanations are either single words out of context and/or individual sentences out of context to translate. One problem should be noted. One of the grammar topics is entitled “The Spanish Subjunctive Tense.” The subjunctive is not a tense but rather a mood.

In addition to the seventy-eight grammar chapters, there are also four appendices, each one broken into sections. Appendix I deals with verbs and provides conjugations, uses of different forms (i.e., the infinitive), special verbs such as gustar, verbs with prepositions, adverbial expressions, and verbs and expressions that cue the subjunctive. Appendix II treats special uses of vocabulary, including time expressions, diminutives, compound nouns, false cognates, and vocabulary expansion. Next, Appendix III discusses thinking in Spanish, sayings, riddles, and translation practice. Finally, Appendix IV provides a number of cheat sheets (i.e., reference guides) for verb tenses and the uses of pronoun with those verbs.

The second subsection is Vocabulary. An instructor has the option of creating vocabulary lists from pre-existing vocabulary, his/her own vocabulary, or a combination of both. It is possible to add images and audio for each word that the teacher adds; the pre-existing vocabulary automatically appear with both an image and an audio clip with the pronunciation of the word. There is a plethora of common and not so common vocabulary items available for use. This section is very helpful, although there are...