A thousand years ago when I taught high school Spanish, a colleague of mine and I used to make plans to pack our own lunches and meet for lunch. Philip was a wonderful teacher and a great friend. Where we taught was his second teaching career (or maybe third?) having already retired from the(…)
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 4 of 4 in the series Teaching what you thought you knewA thousand years ago, I studied at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. I went during college and then back again for a year after I graduated. Those were important years in my life and in my growth(…)
I don’t believe in the Digital Native, a position that does not make me an outlier here at LLU. Perhaps it’s the students I see, or those at my institution, but what I see is a large body of consumers and a small body of producers, with the exception of certain tools. When I have(…)
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(…)
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 20 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently In our shop we have WordPress MU installed and available for anyone (in the languages and elsewhere) who would like to use blogs for teaching. I am just now beginning to think of how I will use blogs in my “spring” semester class,(…)
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(…)
I have been flipping in and out of webstreams of two conferences that had the good sense to be Ustreamed or Elluminated this week. Webcasting conference content is indeed a wonderful tool in these cash strapped/no travel budget times…allowing folks like me out here in the cornfields to peek in and see what is happening(…)
I work in the turret of a castle-like building built in 1885. The building was scheduled for demolition several years ago, but thankfully the funding came together to save it. She is a beautiful place to work. The language departments are housed in this building. The computer assisted language learning center where I work is(…)
This entry is part 31 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently[ I apologize: this post has been sitting, completed, in the draft box for far too long…I really don’t know why it did not get to see the light of day until right now. Well, actually I do…it’s been a busy semester, and around(…)
This entry is part 32 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently February 1, 2009:I have spent the day crafting a document that ended up being less of a step by step syllabus, and more of a “what we want the outcome of this class to be” treatise. The document is parked over here with(…)