Group items tagged

Free workshop from VoiceThread - Feb 10, 20116, 7pm (EST)

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

Here's your chance to learn more about working with VoiceThread - free workshops!

I don't have personal knowledge of these courses, but I've heard from others that they are good. OLC is one of the main organizations for post-secondary information about teaching online. See if your school has a membership that you can take advantage of for conferences and workshops.

ACTFL 2012 presentation Take a look at the wiki link for a lot of information Lauren has put online from this workshop

Description This podcast developed by The Center for Teaching and Learning for the use of The Executive MHA Program is a series of workshops designed to prepare faculty for online courses.

The why and how of using digital stories in language ed

Digital storytelling is so awesome! I got a chance to create a digital story through the Minnesota Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute and it was an awesome experience. I'd highly recommend looking into your local branch of the National Writing Project to see what resources or professional development are available.

Definitely one of my passions as a teacher- helping students get to the point where they can tell their own stories.

From the website: "NOVASTARTALK website, [is] an online resource that supports workshops and webinars designed to help teachers use technology tools and 21st century language pedagogy in the official STARTALK languages. In the face-to-face program, teachers of less-commonly-taught languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Hindi, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu) create technology-enhanced activities [..]"

Helpful source for creative ideas to enliven the classroom.

The blog consists of three parts: Blog, Teaching Toolbox, and Workshops. We can read about issues, tips, comments that are pertinent to language instruction. Teachertoolbox provides new resources and activity ideas. We can find where and what kind of PDs are available in Workshops. The world language consultants, Kara Parker and Megan Smith are the authors of this bog. They understand the challenges language teachers are facing and believe it is very important to provide and share resources and support each other to stay being an effective language teacher.

I love this! We can learn while enjoying reading. Thank you very much for finding and sharing it with us.

" self-assess their performance on learning tasks and formulate points for improvement. " Think about this is in terms of ePortfolios developed through professional development workshops.

From VoiceThread, for language teachers

This describes a really good setup for an online language course!

Seems pretty formulaic - so a good place to start!

Thanks for sharing this (and for the highlights). It's something I need to explore further.

I love this idea.

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.

Some recorded presentations from the LARC 2010 summer seminar. Topics include social media tools (PrimaryPad, VoiceThread), PhotoStory 3, blogs, Skype, Twitter, and more!

An example of Voice Thread used for a group discussion.