This entry is part 1 of 35 in the series Teaching TransparentlyThe purpose of education, in particular higher education, is to teach creative, intelligent, thoughtful, capable people the skills needed to go into the world and do amazing things. The purpose of a college level Spanish Conversation class, it follows, is to give students the(…)
The MOOCs are coming. Be very afraid. And did you hear them say that they are coming to take over language teaching???…. OH THE HORROR! <Yawn.> As language teachers we have been here many times. And as I have said before, (over three years ago!) if our teaching practices are such that they could be(…)
This entry is part 2 of 35 in the series Teaching TransparentlyOne of the reasons I love to teach is that I get to learn. Be it from my students or the people who come to our class… every semester I acquire new knowledge, ideas, and perspectives thanks to what happens in the classroom. As(…)
The first week of the second semester is done and over… I could tell because I was face down on the couch at about 6 p.m.last night wondering if it really was too soon to go to bed (the answer: no). I am starting this term a bit off kilter. Our Educational Technology Specialist(…)
This semester I am teaching second semester second year Spanish. You know the class… the one where you have to finish out the textbook and all that is left to cover are such grammar points as the hypothetical conditional (If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?) and random bits of (…)
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(…)
Last month, I had the extraordinarily good fortune to be able attend the EUROCALL Open Educational Resources SIG Conference hosted by the Centro Interfacoltà di Linguisitica Teorica ed Applicata (CILTA) at the University of Bologna (Bologna, Italy). The title of the conference was “Learning Through Sharing: Open Resources, Open Practices, Open Communication.” The venue(…)
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 8 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently We are at the 1/2 way spot in our semester. It’s midterm grading time (here the grades at midterm are pretty simple: Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, Really Unsatisfactory and Never Seen This Person). It is also a perfect time to ask the students to evaluate(…)
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Teaching what you thought you knewHISP 205 is a conversation class. As the teacher, my goal for the inclass portion was that whatever I brought for my students to see, hear, witness… that those things needed to be catalysts, springboards, starting points for comments, conversation,(…)
A lovely video that touches upon some important topics… the global reach and influence of the TOEFL exam, disappearing languages and the globalization of English, equating a knowledge of English with intelligence, the problem of translating knowledge, the great divide between those who can afford standardized tests and those who cannot….. And this very worrying(…)
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(…)