With the end of the semester upon us, it’s a great time to take stock of teaching and technology accomplishments in 2016, and to look forward to goals and projects for next year. I’ve put a few resources together here with the thought that winter vacation might present some good opportunities for exploration and discovery.
First off, congratulations to a few faculty members who’ve been in the spotlight recently in teaching and technology news: Julia Titus has recently appeared in the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Spotlight series, on the topic “Low Stakes Quizzing in Canvas;” Theresa Schenker has a new article in the journal System, “Syntactic Complexity in a Cross-Cultural E-mail Exchange;” the summary is still accessible from Sarab Al Ani’s poster session at the 2016 Yale Technology Summit, “Creating Interactive Maps to Fulfill Language Learning Goals“. Please also be sure not to miss other new posts on our blog: Sybil Alexandrov, Angela Lee-Smith, Maria Kaliambou, and Julia Titus have shared some reflections on their ACTFL roundtable session “Heritage Meets Heritage at ACTFL 2016” (and catch September’s Teach Better Podcast episode with Sybil here). Please comment to this post or email Dave if you know of others who might like to be featured here.
Secondly, a big thank you again to everyone who participated in our CLS Technology Mini-Summit on November 3. Many materials from the event, including notes on telecollaboration from our keynote speaker Sarah Guth, are still available on this Google document.
On our campus, there’s more and more support available to help you with the transition from Classes*v2 to Canvas, and to the new Media Library (Panopto). If you’re looking to orient yourself to Canvas, or to build upon what you’ve already started this year, a good place to start is the Canvas @ Yale Frequently Asked Questions page. Help and feature introductions for the Media Library can be found here. Upcoming workshops, where you can learn more in person about how to use these tools, are announced on the Canvas @ Yale News page. Oh, and speaking of media for your classes–if you haven’t checked out the new streaming video service with lots of feature-length films and documentaries (in many languages, too), make a nice hot cup of tea or coffee and plan to sit for a while in front of Kanopy, which is now available to everyone with a Yale NetID.
A few other significant resources at Yale to keep an eye on as you plan projects for the coming year: the CTL’s technology-focused Rosenkranz Grants for Pedagogical Advancement, and grants from the Annual Instructional Enhancement Fund. More on these coming soon through other channels…(and a big hat tip to Christine Costantino @ CTL for the links in these paragraphs!)
Beyond Yale, there are several learning opportunities related to technology and teaching available online, ranging from the short and small to the longer and more involved. The next in the IALLT free webinar series, “Optimizing Tech Options for Study Abroad,” is next Tuesday, December 13th at 1pm ET. There are a number of (open, free) online courses related to technology and teaching that have either just started or are starting soon on the MOOC platform Coursera: “Performance Assessment in the Virtual Classroom” (UC Irvine, started Dec. 5), “Blended Learning: Personalizing Education for Students” (Clayton Christensen Institute, Dec. 5), “e-Learning Ecologies: Innovative Approaches to Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age” (U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dec. 12), “What Future for Education?” (U of London, Dec. 19) are just a few. After the New Year, you might also like to consider joining the National Foreign Language Resource Center’s Project-Based Language Learning (PBLL) Symposium from January 11-12 (did we mention it’s free?).
Lastly, a few invitations to write: here at Multilingual Commons at the CLS, we welcome your perspectives on questions and projects of language pedagogy and research including, but not limited to, technology. Other venues to write about language teaching and technology-related issues include several academic journals, of course (Language Learning and Technology, the CALICO Journal, and Computer-Assisted Language Learning are among the many) but also places like the University of Colorado at Boulder ALTEC’s Foreign Language Technology Magazine (FLTMAG), where articles are now being solicited for the March issue (see the submission guidelines).
Please let us know about other opportunities or ideas for developing your approaches to technology use for language teaching and learning in the comments, and have a great winter break!
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