Group items tagged

This is a collaborative workspace for the development of instructional items for the use of MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, GuildWars2 and others, in a school setting.  Examples of how to incorporate World of WarCraft in school.  Great resources which can be transferred into the WL classroom

Contact us with comments and questions about this collection. Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction web site for educational and research purposes only. Any other use of these materials, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly reproductions, redistribution, publication, or transmission, is strictly prohibited without written permission.

Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction is a free gallery of images hosted by the University of Pittsburgh's Digital Research Library. The gallery contains nearly 500 drawings of people conversing, scenes in houses and buildings, and objects commonly found in houses. You'll also find drawings scenes in cities, in stores, and in nature. The visuals are all drawn cartoon style without any text or speech bubbles. Applications for Education If you're looking for some visual prompts to use in your language lessons, take a look at the gallery at Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction. You can search the gallery by keyword or simple browse through the collection. 

A slew of resources to help learners of all ages learn how to read and report on charts and graphs.

Lingro is an online dictionary tool that allows users to link any URL address or uploaded document and have all words be linked to the available dictionaries in 11 languages. Once the URL address or document is linked to the Lingro dictionaries every word becomes "clickable" and linked to the program's dictionary to view either a definition in English or a translation in the other languages. This site can be used by World Language teachers and students in a variety of ways to encourage reading comprehension in L2. For teachers use, Lingro can be used for created guided practice activities with L2 readings, such as in an online newspaper or uploaded document. The teacher guides students through the target vocabulary to be learned and promote the discussion of its context use and correct translation. For student use, vocabulary lists can be created with the click of a button which can later be reviewed as flashcards or word lists with examples of use in contextual sentences. This tool aids learners with a quick reference for the meaning of words without having to interrupt a lesson or reading exercise for lengthy amounts of time.

This webinar explores the purposes and uses for performance assessment in world language classrooms. Many language instructors and learners want to know the extent to which an assessment can capture how well a student will be able to complete real-life tasks when using the target language (Bachman & Palmer, 1996; Stoynoff & Chapelle, 2005). The webinar will begin with a description of performance assessment, how it aligns with learning and teaching purposes, and its uses for the classroom. Next, we will explore how to integrate performance assessment into language classrooms, including developing tasks and rubrics that will support such activities (Norris et al, 2008). During this part, we will examine one or more typical performance assessment tasks, and we will discuss how to adapt them to your needs. Finally, we will discuss the logistics of performance assessment and brainstorm ways to integrate meaningful performance assessment within the constraints of available resources

Today's Front Pages is a dynamic feature of the Newseum website, providing pdf versions and links to prominent newspapers around the US and around the world. To access today's news in another country and in another language, view the collection via the "Map"view which allows you to choose the region of the world you want to explore. As an activity for world language students, have them research a current event that appears on the front pages of several international papers, in English and in the target language. Use this activity to not only learn about current news and culture, but to explore how a singular event is reported differently by different newspapers.

embed-ible resources for all sorts of visual learning.  One could use some of the data visualizations to show the importance of learning a second or third language.

I like how visual the site is. Other than infographics it incorporates videos and other interactives. I even saw Venn Diagrams. It has a lot to offer to use in the classroom for students and outside the classroom with other teachers or administrators.

Many of us have been talking about how it is hard to find time to take advantage of all the technologies that are out there. I thought this page offered an interesting perspective on how 21st technology can be incorporated into daily life.

This is a "master" list of all kinds of educational technology tools in the areas of social netowrking, teacher's web resources, educational apps for the iPad, 21st-century teaching resources, google tools, and content area resources. Lots of things to see and review!

students work together to accomplish a task - and this is done in the target language.  Students can also change the language of the game they are playing, and log onto a server in a target-language country.  They then learn how to communicate with them.  You can ask students to write about their experiences and perhaps give a narrative about the quest they went on (in the TL, of course)

There is no denying the fact that the type of students we teach today are completely different from last century. Today, we need to look at some of the skills we, as teachers, need to equip ourselves with to better live up to the challenge. Among all the challenges we have in education, we need to catch students' focus and get them engaged in the learning process. Here is a list of some important digital skills that you, as a teacher, need to seriously consider if you want to pave the way for the 21st century teaching.

My favorite one is the use of infographics to visually stimulate students! I am aware of the importance of such a skill and it is the only skill that I haven't tried to acquire yet! I hope that those abe will get me there. Thanks for sharing.

This is a great website. Web 2.0 tools divided into oral, listening, writing, vocab, language specific, IPad Apps, Android Apps, 21. C teaching and learning and more. What is great about this source that everything is neatly organized. Information includes cost of the tool, target audience, usefulness and ease of use rating.

I checked out the author's blog and found lots of interesting topics for discussion. Thanks Sabine!

Sabine, this is a great tool. I checked the apps for practicing listening skills and found a very interesting idea.I shared with my colleagues of Italian language.

The purpose of this site is to share information about free resources that teachers can use in their classrooms. In 2008 Free Technology for Teachers was awarded the Edublogs Award for "Best Resource Sharing Blog." In 2009 Free Technology for Teachers was again awarded the Edublogs Award for "Best Resource Sharing Blog" and was awarded the Edublogs Award for "Best Individual Blog." In 2010 Free Technology for Teachers was awarded the Edublogs Awards for "Best Resource Sharing Blog," "Best Ed Tech Support," and "Best Individual Blog." In 2011 Free Technology for Teachers received the Edublogs Award for Best Ed Tech Blog. Free Technology for Teachers is read by an audience of more than 45,000 daily subscribers (current as of April 1, 2012).

This is one of my favorite sites to find out what's new in tech for our use.  The April 11th blog post discusses typing accents in other languages.  It also presents 2 virtual keyboards for WL students. Also presented are links to learning languages, activities, and image-based language lessons.  

Teacher and author Larry Ferlazzo shares some great resources for creating visuals to accompany short texts.  This could be used by both teachers and students at all levels of instruction to address differentiated learning and to offer students options for demonstrating their learning.

Barbara - Thanks for sharing this blog article and the teaching tip. What a great idea for differentiation and integration of digital literacy. This provides students with the opportunity to demonstrate their digital literacy skills with respect to appropriate use of images, citation, etc.

Great video resources for all learners with multiple languages and varying topics and proficiency levels. The video library includes and introduction and illustration of standards and the 5 C's, models that cover the interpretive, interpersonal and presentational modes of communication and assessment stragegies

A huge resource of many types of data visualizations 

Shared by Cindy Kendall on Twitter. Lots of examples of formative assessments that you might be able to use/modify for 610 projects.

This resource from el Centro Virtual Cervantes provides video interviews with individuals from a number of regions or cities in Latin America and Spain. Each interview is accompanied by a description of the linguistic characteristics of a particular way of speaking, a text transcript, and information on where the region is located geographically. I personally find this fascinating! I also think it could serve as a resource for students who might not be aware of how many variations there are when Spanish is spoken.

This is a link to Douglas' book on a new culture of learning. I only read the first chapter and thought that it was a good follow up to one of the video's discussion points, formal vs.informal learning. I do not know how it is that the entire book is available to read online, but it is.

article dealing with the state of the art German Museums online presence