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Alicia Vallero posted an update in the group Design for Open Learning 11 years ago
Hi! I’m a Spanish teacher at Bond University in the Gold Coast, Australia. I have been using different types of technology in my classes with different levels of success. At the beginning most of it was trial and error. I’m so happy now to have places like this where we can share ideas and resources!
Hi Alicia. Can you tell us something about how you are using tech in your language classes? Are these online or on ground? I’m on a design team working on online courses aimed at three lesser taught languages: Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. I’d love to hear about what you’re doing.
Hi Mark,
I teach face to face, but I use online tools as well.
Some of them are:
1. We use Blackboard and I have EVERYTHING posted there: subject outline, assessment details, assessment submissions, videos, audios, weekly summaries, links to electronic dictionaries and online lessons and activities that I found useful and to resources such as Youtube videos, readings, etc. Students can also access assessment feedback and grades.
2. For written practice and assessment I use blogs and Facebook.
3. For oral practice I use Rich Internet Applications, an amazing set of tools developed by CLEAR (Centre for Language Education and Research (Michigan State University) http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/ria/ There is a particularly cool one for Chinese, Japanese and Arabic called Scribbles (http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/ria/support/Scribbles/RIA%20-%20Scribbles%20Flyer.pdf)
4. For reading and cultural information I of course use a variety of sites from newspapers, real estate pages, Wikipedia, food and recipes pages… You name it!
5. I encourage students to access online dictionaries and translators in class to keep up with the lesson when they don’t understand a word or an expression. I also encourage them to use voice recognition applications to practice their pronunciation.
6. I use links to grammar lessons and activities that are already created online when I find good ones (no need to reinvent the wheel!).
7. For one of the assessments students record a video and upload it to Vimeo o Youtube for submission. They are the easiest ones to use and they are free. I also accept any other form of submission that students might prefer.
I also work with the online TESOL program in my university and I find Blackboard Collaborate an invaluable tool to teach online. After doing the training I wanted to use it with my face-to-face classes as well! http://www.blackboard.com/Platforms/Collaborate/Overview.aspx
Sorry for the long response! When I write it down it sounds like a lot! But it’s not really, I’ve been adding things one at the time as I found them useful (I never use a tool unless I feel that it would enhance my students learning experience!).
Hi Alicia,
Thanks a lot. This is very useful to me, especially the Michigan resources. I’m sure teachers will be interested in Scribble. We are also using BB Collaborate and this is one of the tools instructors were interested in using for synchronous sessions.
One of the problems I struggle with, personally, is curriculum for language courses. I think that what we are aiming at in language instruction is an ability to use a foreign language effectively for whatever purpose the user requires, so it’s very difficult to build a curriculum around traditional delivery or product based models. I read this document this evening and it’s given me a good framework for conceptualizing this problem.
This identifies four styles or paradigms: transmission; product; process and praxis. Most language courses today are built on either a transmission or a product based curriculum.
What I do looks more like a process based curriculum, though my ideal would be practice (praxis) based. It’s difficult to fit either of these into institutional expectations.