All I can say is WOW!  I came back to my classroom so inspired. 

I attended the IWLA 2016 conference for the first time this year and learned so much.  I came back and used 2 ideas right way.  I had never heard of Duolingo and at lunch, I talked with other teachers.  By Wednesday after the conference, I had all my students signed up and playing.  Some of my students are addicted.  It is awesome!! 

In my upper-level classes, I took an idea from a TPRS/CI  session and recreated it to a vocab practice in the upper levels.  Students had to choose a 6 genre, 6 characters, and 6 settings.  Then I had my class choose 6 random numbers between 5 and 20.  We then rolled dice to establish the basics for our script.  The number that was chosen was the number of vocabulary words they had to use.  One of my classes wrote a script for a romance, with a character named Nathan Drake in Madagascar using 19 vocabulary words.  The other class chose a horror script, with a Spanish teacher at the train station using 19 vocabulary words.  I actually ended up doing this activity while my administrator was conducting her formal evaluation.  She was impressed. 

Thank you IWLA for putting this on every year.  It was fantastic and I can't wait until next year.