- Taking the 20,000 foot view on my class
- Ending the semester, Lessons Learned (Part 4: Assessment)
- The Backwards Syllabus
- Low hanging fruit
- VoiceThread as Final Exam
- Teaching outside of the textbook and inside of the museum
- Digital Storytelling and Language Learning
- Blogging their scholarship
- Professional development: Simple, small-scale, and cost-effective
- Why I teach.
- Teaching Transparently: Scuba diving in 2nd year college Spanish
- Ending the semester, lessons learned (Part 3)
- Social Networking and Octegenarians
- Ending the semester, lessons learned (Part 2)
- Ending the semester, lessons learned (Part 1) … (of what will be many)
- Midterm assessment: My turn
- What’s under the hood: letting the outside in
- Informal Assessment, Disruption & Repair: Making change happen.
- Week 4: What? You don’t want me to write a paper?
- Welcome to the free fall
- Struggling with the Syllabus
- Imagining a college without grades
- Reflections from the Chair Swing, Moving into the Summer
- Syllabus Hacking with Bryan and the bava
- Well this is embarrassing
- There is no mystery in grading
- Using Can-Do statements for student self assessment
- El Proyecto Personal: Creating Conversations, Taking Risks, Learning to Prepare for the World Outside the Classroom
- Creating Radio in the Language Classroom
- Teaching Acceptance through Storytelling
- Improvisational teaching
- Fear, Motivation, Social Consciousness and Language Learning: the graph
- Using Radio Ambulante in the Spanish language classroom
- Creating, Uploading, Commenting and Sharing Audio via SoundCloud
- Notes I jotted to myself at the end of the term
- Student-centered, project-based learning…and a medical emergency
- Taking a tour of the HISP 205 class blog
- Let’s go bowling!
- Cooking with Drag Queens: Teaching Inclusion and Discovering the Limits of the Spanish Language
- Tune Up and a Smack down (part 2): The gringa returns to Bogotá
- A tune-up and a smack-down: The gringa returns to Bogotá
- Rethinking the role of the language textbook
- Our WordPress Class Blogging Tool: Now Yours Too
- A few shout outs and a woof
- Mid semester evaluation: Do it.
- What we did in class today, and no I can’t get you the notes.
- Searching for blogs in all the wrong places.
- Planning for HISP205-09… in Second Life
January 3, 2009: Before we broke for the Winter Break, I was lucky enough to converse with language and technology colleagues from Case Western Reserve University. Case has a large and growing presence in Second Life, and when I received an email from my colleague Tina at Case that she worked with a Spanish instructor who wanted to use Case’s space for Spanish conversation practice and was looking for others with whom she could collaborate. And since this is exactly what I was hoping to do with my students, well, I was happy to have the invitation and even happier to jump in.
What follows are a couple of Machinima videos captured by Second Life Guru Sue at Case of our conversations. The first video is of Sue, me, Carolina from Case and the ever present, ubiquitous Dafne from Venezuela (well not us, of course, ’twas our avatars) sitting in the café that Sue set up specifically for language conversations.
[Ah Dafne: I have taught this Spanish conversation course using social software for three years now and Dafne, somehow, someway, has been a presence in every single one of these classes. I never plan for it, but she, like others whom I have come to know virtually through these tools, is always willing and more than able to share her expertise, her talents, and her language with my students. I often where I would be, where my teaching would be, where my students’ learning might –not– be without the kindness of strangers such as Dafne.]The second video is a snippet of a tour that Dafne gave us of Ciudad Bonita, a remarkable immersive environment for Spanish language learning created by the folks at LanguageLab.com.
Here is a blog post from ll.com that talks about Ciudad Bonita and Dafne’s efforts to make it happen. Here is yet another blog post about this location
I am still trying to figure out whether one has to have an account with languagelab.com to go there, bring students there, explore there. I am looking forward to speaking with Paul Sweeney (the head of Languagelab.com) later in the month.
Here are the videos of our “meetings” (Man, could I have more work meetings like this…like meetings where I can fly?…please?)
CWRU Language Café
LanguageLab.com’s Ciudad Bonita (Bank) Video
Dafne has since sent me this info about an upcoming in-world conference in Second Life for Language Educators… enjoy.
More to follow….
