Group items tagged

ANVILL (A National Virtual Language Lab) is a speech-based toolbox for language teachers. Like the language lab console of old, it's focused on the practice of oral/aural language, but at its core are very modern web-based audio and video tools from duber dot com: Voiceboards (an asynchronous speech tool), LiveChat (a 4-way conversation tool), and Voicerecorder (a widget for instant recordings). Each really opens up the scope and sequence of spoken language tasks. Creating media-rich lessons in ANVILL is simple and straightforward. There are templates for audio, video, and image tasks; there are also tools for text-based discussions like blogs and forums. ANVILL's assessment tool,Quizzes and Surveys, gives teachers an easy way to assign and respond to spoken language tasks. In addition, ANVILL is a course management system. Teachers who are doing distance or hybrid courses have a simple means of managing their students as well as their curriculum. We think you'll find that ANVILL is quite flexible, and permits the kind of extra listening and speaking practice that language students need so much. ANVILL is a project of the Yamada Language Center at the University of Oregon. These tools are currently in use at UO and at a select number of K-12 sites around the Northwest. Thanks to our National Foreign Language Resource Center partners at CASLS, we are able to offer ANVILL to educators at no cost. Here is an overview of its features. If you think it would be helpful to you and your students, contact us to set up an account. Our two-year pilot study has just gotten underway and we're looking for language teachers at all levels to use it and tell us what they think.

In this paper, we describe how Tablet PCs are being used at Georgia Tech Savannah (GTS) to improve student learning in a distributed classroom environment. The Tablet PC is an attractive technology for use in synchronous distributed learning environments because of its mobility, and its ability to not only serve as an effective note taking device but also as a high-resolution course content viewing device and a tool for interactive assessments. The research questions addressed here are: 1) "What impact does the Tablet PC have on student perceptions of their engagement in a distributed learning environment?" and 2) "Can the Tablet PC be used to improve student learning in a distributed learning environment?" In this project, the instructor and students were given a Tablet PC to use during the semester, and surveys were administered to evaluate student attitudes about the use of Tablet PC technology as a means of receiving, processing, and learning course material. The significance of this work is that it serves as a case study on the use of Tablet PCs as an effective technology for implementing established educational practices in distributed education environments.

"This platform is aimed at supporting university educators and mobility coordinators to organise and run online intercultural exchanges for their students. In these exchanges, students from universities in different countries collaborate together using online communication tools to carry out collaborative projects and to learn about each other's language and culture. By taking part in such projects, students can develop foreign language skills, intercultural awareness, electronic literacies as well as learning more about their particular subject area. If you are a teacher working at a university in Europe or elsewhere, this platform will help you to find partner teachers and classes in other countries, to read about tasks, successful projects and evaluation tools and to exchange questions and experiences with an experienced community of practitioners."

"Hosted by: Dr. Abigail Grant Scheg (Elizabeth State University) Date: November 29, 2012 Text messaging, in and out of the classroom, is often viewed as a negative communicative mode which results in poor grammar and poor idea representation, let alone student procrastination from more important projects. However, as Web 2.0 technologies increase in number and popularity, these tools are changing the face of education, business, and communication at large. This session will discuss the pedagogical possibilities using text messaging and ways to incorporate texting into the classroom or as part of a class in a way that will make the instructor feel comfortable. Starting with the idea that our students are experts in the technology of text messaging, this session will allow the instructor to utilize students' skills in a positive light rather than dismiss them as unimportant. In this presentation, author Dr. Abigail Grant Scheg will discuss her IGI Global chapter, Textperts: Utilizing Students' Skills in the Teaching of Writing. Her research explores both the theoretical and practical implementations of text messaging into the composition of the classroom with careful consideration of the positive and negative impacts."

Learnosity's Voice-based products use the telephone to enable language students and teachers to interact on a one to one level. * Makes it practical for students to practice Oral and Aural skills, * Is efficient and effective for teachers, as they can listen to each student individually at a time to suit them, * Can be used for homework assignments or "High Stakes Assessments" Learnosity's OnScreen learning and assessment tools allow secure online testing across all subject areas. * Technology is mature and proven - over 5 million tests delivered, * Designed to work for "Special Provisions" students, * Extensible design allows new question formats to be added

"This customizable easy to use toolbar (See the toolbar in action in its video tour) seamlessly integrates with familiar applications including Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, and Adobe Reader, allowing students to access the support tools they need from within mainstream software programs. It highlights and reads text aloud using natural sounding voices and also includes a comprehensive set of support tools for reading, writing, studying, research, and test taking. Read&Write GOLD allows teachers to provide the differentiated instruction that is necessary to meet the needs of diverse student populations and ensure that all students reach their potential and achieve success. "

Free online tool for managing Q&A in classes. Students can submit questions; answers are given in wiki format (students can all edit 1 student-contributed answer, instructors can edit instructor-contributed answer). 

"Lingt Classroom helps teachers enable their students to speak. Create online assignments that make engaging and assessing spoken performance as natural as giving out a worksheet. Make oral exams that take a fraction of the time to administer and assess. Offer targeted feedback to individual responses to maximize student improvement. Incorporate video and images to create media and culture-rich exercises. Archive all your assignments and students' responses to reuse next time and track individual improvement."

These pages hope to provide tools to assist people in learning and using the beautiful Chinese language. From the novice Chinese language student to the advanced programmer, I hope there is something here for everyone. Rather than being a Chinese language course, it provides tools to people who are already studying and using Chinese. Please check out the DimSum Chinese Reading Assistant, Character Flashcards, the Chinese/English dictionary, the Chinese Namer, and the Western/Chinese Calendar Converter.

"With ThingLink's easy-to-use editor, teachers can create immersive and engaging experiences by adding tags to any image in a few minutes: Create authentic, valuable, and rich interactive stories around historical events using media (video, sound, photos, written words, etc.) found online. Annotate graphs and timelines. Record an instructional message to students inside an image. Embed interactive images into student blogs. Enable students to curate content inside an image to demonstrate understanding of a topic."

"PeerWise is an online repository of multiple-choice questions that are created, answered, rated and discussed by students. Typically, at the beginning of a term, a course using PeerWise begins with an empty repository. This grows gradually as the course progresses and students author and contribute relevant questions. All activity remains anonymous to students, however instructors are able to view the identity of question and comment authors and have the ability to delete inappropriate questions."

"Does listening to something, perhaps once, perhaps more than once, perhaps over and over again, mean that it is learned in a way that is useful to the student and that they can retrieve and re-use in an appropriate context at a later date? It is a proposition that seems to conflict with the situated learning theories of researchers like Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989), which assert that learning always lies in the interactions between people rather than in the content itself or in the minds of the individual learners. The general premise that listening is often more engaging than the written word and that diction, intonation and inflection add meaning might be acceptable at face value, but as Hargis and Wilson (2005: 6) point out, 'there are currently no examples which clearly indicate proven foundational pedagogical uses and outcomes for podcasts.'. Though the technology is quite recent, it may tend to lead teachers towards outmoded, didactic approaches to delivery rather than the constructivist, collaborative activities recommended by more recent learning theorists."

"In 2010, a team of approximately fifteen volunteers from seven different CSU campuses and one from the UC system to evaluate the accessibility of Google Apps. The team also recruited student volunteers and screen reader users to assist with the automated, manual, and screen reader testing. We discovered a number of accessibility issues during our testing. These issues are outlined in the report as well as "workarounds" that can be used to improve the user experience for persons with disabilities. When campuses choose to use Google Apps, they are required to provide an equally effective service for people with disabilities and it is critical for campuses to ensure that the "workarounds" meet the educational needs of the student and/or faculty. The March 15, 2011 USA TODAY online news article "Complaint: Google programs hard for blind students" illustrates possible legal problems that may result from adopting the Google Apps for Education suite. "

This profile tool will help you to compare your current instructional practices with a set of indicators for engaged learning and high-performance technology. This is not intended to be a rating of your skill or ability as a teacher, but rather as a tool to help you think through the kinds of activities you use to help your students learn. Use the graph to help clarify your thinking about what types of activities you would like to use more frequently in your classroom. This activity frequently takes about 30 minutes to complete.

Wenlin is CD-ROM software for the Macintosh and MS-Windows operating systems. Wenlin tackles the most frustrating obstacles for students, scholars, and speakers of Chinese with its versatile and easy-to-use interface. It is like having a seasoned scholar on your desktop! An integrated solution, Wenlin combines a high-speed expandable Chinese dictionary, a full-featured text editor, and unique "flashcard" system all in one intuitive environment. Wenlin is a comprehensive tool for beginning students, life-long speakers, and scholars alike. Wenlin 3 includes an expanded and improved version of the already huge ABC Chinese-English Dictionary edited by John DeFrancis, giving it a total of over 10,000 characters and approximately 200,000 words and phrases.

"CorpusLAB is a new FREE site for language learners and language teachers. CorpusLAB is designed to promote language learning based on real English used in different settings. Students can use the site to take a variety of exercises created by teachers. Go to the Student pages and select a topic area (phrasal verbs, Academic English etc.). If you register, you will be able to keep track of your progress. Teachers can use the site in different ways. The central engine of the site is a series of exercise authoring tools. The exercises, which include fill-the-gap, multiple-choice, matching, reorder, and categorise, are designed in a way that promotes the learning of collocations and phrasal patterns. For example, the matching exercise allows up to five columns of items rather than the usual two. One of the aims of the site is to build up resources for specialised English: Medical English, English for Tourism, and so on. "

Praat Language Lab was developed to help students and language teachers learn to use the Praat software to improve spoken English. Many colleges and universities use Praat to provide visual feedback to spoken sound. However, support to use the tool outside the language lab has been limited. We hope that this site supports your use of Praat on your own to improve your spoken English.

iRubric is a comprehensive rubric development, assessment, and collaboration tool. Designed from the ground up, iRubric supports a variety of usage in an easy-to-use package. Best of all, iRubric is free to individual faculty and students.

"Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary - Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate. Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections. * It's a dictionary! It's a thesaurus! * Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists. * The online dictionary is available wherever there's an internet connection. * No membership required. Visuwords™ uses Princeton University's WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers."

Whether you're administering an ESL entry exam, evaluating the language and cultural skills of an offshore customer service representative, managing executive candidate assessments, conducting foreign language proficiency tests to students studying abroad, or teaching languages to students of ANY age, OWL Testing Software can simplify and expedite test authoring, administration, and scoring in ways you never thought possible. What's more, no technical or programming skills are required.