GR 101, 102 First-year Modern Greek
George Stephanopolous teaches first year modern Greek at Amherst College. He was introduced to Sakai through his department, which began using it as a collaboration tool last spring. He believes the web's ubiquitous and global nature make it an obvious tool for foreign language instruction.
He would like to use his course environment to expose students to the richness of Greek language and culture and he believes he can motivate them through the use of multi-media files and web based interaction. His course is addressed to students with little to no prior knowledge of Modern Greek. It places equal emphasis on the acquisition of speaking, listening, reading, writing and cultural understanding. He would like to replace the standard in-class grammar drills with online activities that help students grasp key grammatical structures so that they can apply these when they meet together in person.
Pedagogical challenges to address in the online environment:
- Students must use Greek as much as possible in the classroom and in their web-based course environment.
- Students must spend significant amounts of time listening to Greek passages and commenting upon them with the class.
- Students must practice reading passages aloud and are evaluated by both their peer and their instructor
- Students must produce a final web-based multimedia project showing off their