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"When it's student-paced, no one gets left in the dust and no one gets bored waiting for the class to move on. HyperDocs are purposefully designed digital lessons and can transform your class. The creators of HyperDocs - Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis - describe them as a transformative, interactive Google Doc replacing the worksheet method of delivering instruction, the ultimate change agent in the blended learning classroom. https://hyperdocs.co/about"

Megan Smith wrote about ways to adapt a lesson about houses for a traditional class to one for an online class. She included interpretive, interpersonal and presentational activities.

I love the way she set-up these examples. Has anyone done something similar? What was your experience with the 20% Free Time? I'm considering something similar in the "fall"... which is coming up quickly. No matter the schedule, I've always liked the idea, 20% Free/Genius Hour. If you have experience with this, I would love to hear about how you set them up.. and assessed them.

From a post in the ACTFL distance learning SIG: "It is a free tool. Class Kick allows you to add interactive elements to synchronous lessons. You can monitor and see student activity in real time. You can also use it to communicate with individual students in real time." - Angela

Abstract This study contributes to the body of research that aims to understand the relationship between online communication and foreign language (FL) learning, in particular when teachers seek to provide authentic opportunities for interaction for their learners. The study was motivated by efforts made in the New Zealand context to overcome the geographic limitations of interaction between FL learners and native speakers. We report on the findings of an exploratory study into an online reciprocal peer tutoring program established to enhance the FL learning of a group of beginner eleven-year old students of Spanish, with particular focus on the benefits of written corrective feedback. The project aimed to examine the processes by which students tutored each other in the online environment as they responded to each other's texts. The analysis of the students' messages focused on (1) the aspects of language corrected by the tutors, (2) the frequency with which tutors accurately identified and provided input on errors, (3) the types of feedback provided by the tutors, and (4) what the learners did with the corrections and feedback. The findings indicate that the students were willing to contribute to peer correction and used different strategies and correction techniques to foster attention to linguistic form, although they were not always capable of providing accurate feedback or metalinguistic explanations.

Flipped or inverted classroom (IC) models are promising for foreign language instruction in that they appear to promote well‐regarded practices that bridge both sociocultural and cognitive theoretical...

"You have no idea what people will do to reach the United States - until you hear their stories". (From reviewed tool NPR Borderline Stories)

I have been using this app as a smart board. The advantages are: you can add/edit notes as you teach, highlight vocabulary or grammar elemen, you can also use notes from previous lessons and you could also email the presented material on the Ipad to students. Students love it and it makes learning more interactive.

This sounds cool, my husband has been really happy with using the evernote. I'm going to try this out too. :D

I use evernote all of the time for a personal "to-do" list but I never thought of using it for class. Thanks for the great ideas!

Discussion on how technology is being used and why we're still struggling to give more control of learning to students. A good read!

"A 2014 paper by researchers at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, provides a tangible example: Teachers and students in the small-scale study were found to be making extensive use of the online word-processing tool Google Docs. The application's power to support collaborative writing and in-depth feedback, however, was not being realized. Teachers were not encouraging group-writing assignments and their feedback focused overwhelmingly on issues such as spelling and grammar, rather than content and organization." This really gets to the heart of the idea of combining education and technology: the technology has to serve the goal and it doesn't sound like the teachers' goals were the same as the stated goals of the assignment. So obviously Google Docs is a fantastic tool, but it has to be utilized appropriately for it to be effective.

I must say I have sat through many workshops in my tenure at my university that included the modification of some practices and even included, to my frustration, the basic structure of a lesson from stating outcomes to assessment. The problem with our particular situation is that usually it is directed to a "one-size-fits-all" use of a given technology that may not apply to many disciplines. I have found them somewhat useful for upper-level courses at times, but the language classes often pose the need for a kind of collaboration and interpersonal technology that isn't presented. Hence my desire to take this course. Another difficulty is the overwhelming number of technological applications presented--I can't tell you how many--and the students really become overwhelmed, since they often have to learn new technologies in almost many courses. Some work and some don't, and since they are the guinea pigs and there are no guarantees that everything will work as planned, and given the astounding changes in tech, the newness never seems to end, neither for the student nor the teacher. So focusing on just 1 or 2 to begin with seems like the only way to deal with it. Finally, I think that, at least in our university, the huge courses found often in the sciences reflect the slowness to adopt meaningful change. Many in these disciplines have simply used the tech to deliver more lectures on topics students must memorize, perhaps adding clickers for comprehension checks. There seems to be a great disconnect between what happens in the classroom and the amazing advances in tech they have made for their hands-on work--labs, collaborative work, etc.

I like this blog because of the activities and strategies that she suggests

Best practice lesson plans, activities, and strategies for World Language courses (by Martina Bex)

Word of the Week from DW.de. Highlighting & annotating for creating a lesson based on this material.

Create different color QR codes in order to separate the groups by task. Differentiated instruction but more discreet with the use of QR codes.

A look at the videos from YouTube that this teachers uses. Five years ago YouTube officially launched?? Doesn't it seem like it's been around forever?

I found this by chance just exploring around. If you check the SUPPORT section on the VoiceThread site, you will find a list of publications. They posted a collection of abstracts with links of scholarly articles written about using VoiceThread for language learning, K-12, higher education and professional development. I just skimmed through the lists, and some of the articles are accessible, while some are behind a password.

"Facebook" option for elementary?

This looks pretty promising. I also think the connections you made on this site are great - asking for resources and someone commented back with great resources on kids safety on the internet. Awesome!!

I also liked the description. I will make an account to explore it and see if it is something we can use with older students as well.

"Over the past academic year, my students and I have been experimenting with the use of a number of web based applications (often known as Web 2.0 tools). My aim has been to enhance our schemes of work by providing our students with new and exciting learning opportunities. In my opinion, using technology effectively has clear benefits for both teaching and learning and can help to improve motivation by engaging pupils in activities which, perhaps, step out of their ordinary school experience and which show them that it is possible to teach and learn about a subject using tools similar to those they use daily outside school. In other words, we have tried to use the types of tools with which they are often already familiar. I have written about each of these individual tools in separate posts, but I thought it would be useful to list the ten most used internet applications on one post. As ever, I aim to provide, not only a list of the web applications we have used, but also examples of practice which you may wish to follow or, indeed, improve upon. Therefore, each of the entries below has links leading to lesson plans which have incorporated the tools as well as working examples of students' work where appropriate. Without further ado, and in alphabetical order, my ten tried and tested internet tools for teachers are:"

from a FL teacher in England - who tries and tests a number of tech tools. Here are his 10 favorite web 2.0 apps.