SPANISH 402 - Fourth Year Spanish
Raquel Flores is in her first year of teaching advanced Spanish in Middlebury College's summer language program. She believes the web is an obvious tool for foreign language instruction and was frustrated with older modes of foreign language instruction used in her graduate program. She would like to use her online course to bring Spanish alive for her students.
The curriculum is developed around various texts that illustrate the use of Spanish in various Spanish-speaking countries. Grammar principles are reviewed through extensive spoken and written use of Spanish in context. Raquel likes to encourage outside research and interpretation
of cultural aspects of the course. She finds students learn more when they evaluate each other and are more motivated when they work together on projects.
Pedagogical challenges to address in the online environment:
¿ Students must use Spanish 24 hours a day and posts to the online course environment may only be in Spanish.
¿ Students must ask all questions to the class, using one of the Sakai tools.
¿ Students must submit weekly essays for review
¿ Students are often asked to participate in online surveys or take pop quizzes through their course environment
¿ During their second semester, students must work in groups on a current social issue facing young people in a Spanish speaking country today. They must also present their findings to the class. Projects may be in the form of text, images, blog entries, multi-media narratives or vlogs.
Notes from the group discussion:
- Need to have some kind of real-time/synchronous communication with Spanish-speaking students in other countries (IM chat, video) This could allow for highlighting of different dialects/colloquialisms/etc.
- Could have written collaboration in a blog (wiki?) Could use the blog/wiki/forums to record this information. A wiki could be used for students to collaborate/correct each other's writing in Spanish (probably would need to allow some assistants/advanced students to help review grammar principles)
- Integration/connection to Wimba or other third-party product
- Possible use of newsfeeds from European and Latin American countries (especially audio feeds) -- could benefit from podcasts
- Possibly convert all the CMS navigation features to Spanish (technically difficult? can this be done out of the box, and/or could it be done a course-level basis?)
- Use Resources to allow an easy way of providing links to external information/files (resources: can groups be defined with resources, but only those members of the gruop could post yet everyone in the class could still view these group-specific resources). Another option would be to have individual project sites (allow for more group-specific customization of the entire site)
- Use Web-content linking for social networking (possibly even a virtual cafe/locale in SL -- virtual host). The assistants/graders could be the potential "hosts". Over time, each person would be asked to take on a different persona. Would be great to have the virtual activity linked more directly for grading, or a reflection that could be captured in a portfolio: could record online chat, and then post that as a log for reflection)
- Could have peer reflection (grader, other students) and personal reflection. Different levels/layers of assessment (the instruction may want to "grade the graders")
- Given this is fourth-year spanish: evidence of "real world" immersion (e.g. letter to the editor of a Spanish-speaking newspaper); students could choose the manner in which they'd meet this requirement
- To meet the "twenty-fours-a-day" immersion component, students could record themselves (audio/video). Example of IU program: 4-6 week program where students are expected to stay together as a community, to help facilitate this immersion (group is in class all day, living in same dorm)
- Focus on portfolio tools: put some of the related portfolio tools into a project site: integrate the Sakai assignment tool with the goal management tool, which will build a matrix-like view for tracking/measuring competencies (this could also allow for facilitation of weekly essay reviews). This could allow for the individual viewing of grades/comments by the respective students, with the larger discussions (wikis/blogs/forums/etc.) being viewable by the entire course.
- Various group-space functionality could be utilized (discussions, for example, are group aware).