This entry is part 5 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently This semester I am teaching the second semester, second year language class for Spanish. You know the class… the one that has all of the gnarly bits of grammar that were left over from the first semester of the second year sequence. The(…)
This entry is part 6 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently For the past 5 years, I have had the extraordinary good fortune to work with creative and talented people who value not only the need to create tools that facilitate learning, but tools that also are open, available for sharing, and heck, are(…)
This entry is part 7 of 35 in the series Teaching TransparentlyBefore the semester comes to a crashing halt, and we all go off to hibernate for a while, I wanted to get out at least one more post here on LLU to thank the people whose incredible work with technology has made my job(…)
This entry is part 11 of 35 in the series Teaching TransparentlyA few people have asked to have a peek at the blogging tool that I use for my Spanish conversation class. Knowing that, I had great plans to make a photochop images with arrows and numbers and what nots….and then gave up and just(…)
Looks like the holidays mean lots of video-trolling here on LLU … This evening while browsing YouTube, I stumbled across a veritable treasure trove of Disney videos in other languages, and the vast majority of them are TV themes or scenes from movie musicals that anyone born in the appropriate era can probably sing by(…)
Classes began here last Tuesday. On Monday the fotocopier was whizzing away, printing out syllabi at a mad clip (we have already had the repairman in once, sigh). Ah, the syllabi, that sacred road map for classes. Our “contract” with our students. Our promise to behave for our department. Our explanation (albeit sometimes not terribly(…)
Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to spend two days asking “I wonder what THIS button does?” and “Gee, I wonder how I could make THAT happen?” in the (virtual) company of two of my favorite people – the Right Rev Jim Groom, and LLU’s own Barbara Sawhill. Our official task was to re-imagine a fully-online language(…)
This semester some colleagues and I are putting together a series of presentations called TechnoTuesdays. I blogged about this previously and I am pleased to say that project has grown to include others on this campus who work in Ed tech, not just moi. I love looking at tools from the perspective of a teacher.(…)
I became aware of FlickrPoet via a tweet on Twitter, and have been playing around with it a bit. Here is how it works: you type in a poem or a phrase and it searches Flickr’s public collection for images tagged with those words, and then voila! it constructs a series of images in a(…)
This entry is part 22 of 35 in the series Teaching TransparentlyAs I mentioned here, I am a center director first and a teacher second. As a center director I teach faculty and students how to use technology for teaching/learning. (Well that and when they need to stay farrrr away from it.) Like many of(…)
This entry is part 23 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently www.flickr.com This fall we had an overabundance of enrollments in the first semester of 2nd year Spanish class. And with that came the opportunity for me teach in the fall as well as the spring…something that I have been hankering to do for(…)
February 20, 2009: On Fridays, my students in HISP 205 have decided that we should play games…games that stimulate thinking and conversation in Spanish. They had a couple of suggestions like Taboo. I was thinking more diabolical thoughts… thanks to the games like those played at UMW Faculty Academy: aka Deck Wars(scroll to the middle(…)