Group items tagged

"Seventeen instructors offer guidance for colleagues teaching an online course for the first time (and for those seeking a few new ideas)."

If you miss this year, keep it in mind for coming years! A workshop for Chinese teachers who teach online.

"Stephen Hersh outlines six steps for how you can create a community of active learning online if you 'use the medium.' "

Yes,Greg, Agreed, great resource!!! Will use often.

Zoom! I'm pretty sure Stephen Hersch is my neighbor! Teaches at Northwestern. "Stop talking so much!" Yes. Great take away. I saw this video when I looked up to see what TEACHx is since he's involved. Started in 2016. But this linked video https://vimeo.com/249442007 is 4 Northwestern students and how they use technology. Evidently they use Canvas as well. I want to look up want one student said about his Spanish class. But what I liked is one of the students talks about when she doesn't use technology. After having said that all her life she had never used her laptop so much, but still in class the expectation is to arrive prepared and be ready to discuss. Hersch says the same for the what is one of the best uses of Zoom... time for students to discuss. Now! How to really get them all to prepare!?

What to think about when starting development of an online or hybrid course.

Here is one certification program that has one course specifically about teaching languages online.

"Abstract Despite its obvious importance, it appears that in many foreign language programs, oral practice is not given as much time and attention as it deserves. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that foreign language professionals recognize the need for more oral practice, but do not have at their disposal a convenient means to provide it. An online oral practice/assessment platform, Speak Everywhere, has been developed to fill this void. It allows instructors without special computer knowledge to quickly create video-based speaking exercises and quizzes for their students to work on outside the classroom. The instructor can access the oral productions that the students submit to the system, and grade them or give individual feedback on them either in text or audio or both. Using its flexible and easy-to-use authoring sub-system, it is possible to create exercises of various formats (e.g. Q&A, repeat after the model, structure drills, role-play, and oral reading)."

Abstract: This case study is based on an investigation into the use that a group of language learners made of Livemocha.com, a Social Networking Site through which language exchange is enabled via social media applications. The learners created profiles in the website and proceeded to interact with speakers of their target languages, reporting back on their experiences over a 10-week period. As communication between language partners can take place through several different channels, and can be asynchronous or synchronous, written or spoken, it was considered that the preferences of learners with different personality types (as indicated by responses to a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire) might be accommodated. Several studies have suggested that the anxiety that some language learners feel when communicating in L2, especially when speaking, is reduced in online environments. Under the premise that a reduction in anxiety may lead to an increased "willingness to communicate" (MacIntyre et al., 1998), the principal objective of this project was to examine the type and frequency of online interactions that the participants engaged in with other speakers of their target languages in the Livemocha language learning community.

Building a sense of community is really important to online learning.

Developed with the support of the Lifelong Learning programme of the European Union, Arabic Online teaches basic Arabic.

"This video is a brief introduction to synchronous online learning. The following items are discussed: advantages, disadvantages, facilitation strategies, and tools that enhance student learning."

This is the first in a series - and altho hopefully you're not teaching a MOOC, these differences for teaching online may be applicable.

Ok - so this article isn't on the interpretive mode...but it makes some good points - pro and con. The author is an entertaining self-described rabble-rouser!

There are a lot of questions that are pretty obvious that teachers new to online teaching will ask. and then there are all the questions that they don't even know they should ask - until they get into things!

strategies for online teachers: how much to be "present" in an online class.

When I took online classes, doing projects in teams was one of the things I liked least - at the beginning - but after having done some projects that were well-structured, I have to say that those were the learning experiences where I learned the most.

More classes move to online environments; students need to evaluate learning styles.

A description of one teacher's exploration of online communities and social networking in class - she visits another teacher's class to see how she uses techonlogy.

for teachers who would like to build a digital portfolio - LinguaFolio is a good online app to do this - and here is set of free, online modules to teach you how to do it.