The Week at a Glance

Monday: The positives and negatives of students' use of technology.
Tuesday: Teaching culture and language and motivating students through online activities. Brainstorming for your own activities.
Wednesday: Digital storytelling in the language classroom.
Thursday: Finding ready-made video and audio online, "tailored" versus "authentic" video and audio. (virtual class)
Friday: Student productions: how to encourage and evaluate student-produced media

Skills for this week

1. Learn how to channel students' use of technology in positive ways, while discouraging inappropriate uses of technology.
2. Learn to create activities to accompany online audio and video.
3. Learn how to create an original "podcast"
4. Develop skills for evaluating students' audio and video projects.
5. Evaluate online activities for students.

Readings (Please note that due to copyright issues, those readings marked with [APP] can only be accessed from an App State computer or through a proxy connection)

For Monday: Williams, Lawrence. 2006. Web-based Machine Translation as a Tool for Promoting Electronic Literacy and Language Awareness. Foreign Language Annals 39:4, 565-577. [AsULearn]
For Tuesday: Motivating Students' FL and Cultural Acquisition Through Web-Based Inquiry
For Wednesday: Digital Storytelling in the FL Classroom.
For Friday: Sildus, Tatiana I. 2006. The Effect of a Student Video Project on Vocabulary Retention of First-Year Secondary School German Students. Foreign Language Annals, 39:1, 54-70. [AsULearn]

Goals and assignments

For Tuesday: Bring your own ideas for creative online activities. Start looking for online video or audio that would be appropriate to use in a classroom setting (or as part of an assignment)
For Wednesday: Reflect on whether digital storytelling would work in your classroom, and why.
For Thursday: Visit YouTube, Vimeo, iTunes and other audio/video sites and explore the videos, podcasts and other materials that are available free of charge.
For Friday: Think about how you might evaluate student-created audio and video projects; come up with a short list of criteria you believe are relevant.