Fall 1999 Newsletter
Fall 1999 Newsletter
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// Dec. 5, 1998 Tech Fair Summary |
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On Dec. 5, 1998, about twenty of us gathered at Trinity College
for a CTW Mellon Tech Fair to share ideas about FL instruction and
learning with technology. Here are notes of some highlights:
Mary Louise Ennis reflected on her integration of "HyperNews"
on Wesleyan's web server to facilitate on-line exchanges of
information and opinions among students in her French Fairy Tales
class at Wesleyan. See her course web page(s) at:
http://www.wesleyan.edu/~mennis/fist255s.mle.html
and
http://condor.wesleyan.edu/HyperNews/get/spring98/fist255.html
to read the on-line discussion. MaryLou's students had the chance to
develop their own web pages and fairy tales as part of their final
projects. She observed that students who write traditional papers
well tended to have organized web sites with few pages and fewer
hypertext links, whereas students who organized their traditional
writing poorly tended to use hypertext links a great deal, such that
each page in a site might contain only a short chunk of text with a
brief thought linked to other pages with other very delineated
thoughts.
Wesleyan faculty interested in a HyperNews forum like the one Mary
Louise used can contact Pat Leone in ITS (pleone@wesleyan.edu).
Cathérine Ostrow reported on a pilot project in which
long (30 minute) audio recordings for the French In Action
instructional program were digitized and posted on the Wesleyan web
server as audio-only QuickTime movies. She noted that the QuickTime
version 2.5 and 3.0 plugins for web browsers and corresponding
versions of the MoviePlayer application provided no easy way for
students to search back and forth within the audio files, and that as
a result, students felt that they had less control over locating and
repeating particular segments of the audio track. As a result, few
students regularly used computers to access the files; most took
advantage of the control offered by the Language Lab's audio tape
decks. (The current QuickTime Player, version 4 solves this problem
by providing a "time code" counter readout on-screen.) See http://www.apple.com/quicktime/
for your free copy of QuickTime version 4 for MacOS or Windows. By
mid-semester, each lesson had been divided into 5 QuickTime files,
each corresponding to a workbook section of listening comprehension
exercises. In future trials of these digitized files, we anticipate
better reactions from students due to an improved user interface
(with time counter) and the segementation of the files into the
smaller units. An extension of this model to include digital versions
of the French in Action video materials will be facilitated by an
initiative underway at Wesleyan to allow streaming both digital audio
and digital video files over the network.
Françoise Weaver from Trinity discussed the development
and use of her web site (http://www2.trincoll.edu/~weaver/)
for an advanced conversation class with eleven students. She pointed
out that with the proliferation of electronic versions of French
magazines on the web, she has been freed from making photocopies of
often outdated printed versions arriving from overseas.
Françoise built her own site in order to bolster her students'
vocabulary so that they could speak of daily topics in "higher level"
ways. Her pages offer useful expressions and some links to approprite
sites. Take a look at some of her pages linked to:
http://www2.trincoll.edu/~weaver/#second
part
Since most of the major press agencies and magazines carry the same
major stories, the variety and repetition of expressions used in
those reports helps students in acquisition of appropriate phrases
and in oral production as they re-tell and relate the stories in
class. Françoise reports that her web site has helped her
structure the class so that she now has a better basis on which to
grade students' oral performances.
Future additions to our electronic toolboxes for such classes might
include an on-line text chat module via software such as "Yap" at
Trinity or "Web Board" at Wesleyan.
Rieko Wagoner showed her HyperCard stack designed to help
students learn verb conjugations, declinations and inflections. She
based it on Lisa Frumkes' stacks for learning Russian verbs, and
initially entered the data for 10 verb forms for each of 200 verbs.
These data included each verb's meaning, a sample sentence to
illustrate every verb in context in each form, 3 classes of verbs,
and also Chinese characters. Her stack tracks student's mistakes,
scores each student's work by percentage of correct answers and at
the end of the work session, presents a student with a summary of
score and what types of mistakes (s)he made. This stack requires the
HyperCard software and Japanese Language Kit for Macintosh. Contact
Rieko via e-mail at: Rieko.Wagoner@trincoll.edu
Lin Domizio from Connecticut College has helped students in
intermediate level 2nd year students of Chinese to improve their
understanding of stories. Based on the book 100 Chinese Idioms and
Their Stories by Yang Liyi (Lanier Young) (ISBN 962 07 10800), Lin's
treatments use HyperStudio software to present the story in printed
and audio form to the student. Students then answer questions about
each story in activities developed with the Libra lesson authoring
software.
Levana Polate, teaching Hebrew at both Trinity and Wesleyan,
showed her Ha'Tikva lesson, built with MacGalt software. Listening to
the "Ha'tikva", meaning "The Hope", is the national anthem of the
State of Israel. Levana uses text, and digital audio and video to
springboard her students into learning about the rich history and
culture of the homeland of the Jewish people who spent over 2000
years in exile and persecution. Contact Levana at
levana.polate@trincoll.edu for additional information.
Zaira Rivera-Casellas and Steven Smolnik spoke about
the conversion of an unfinished hypermedia lesson from one software
template to another. Zaira started an annotated text treatment of
Garabatos, a short story by Pedro Juan Soto, with MacGalt software,
but it languished without the constant hands-on involvement of a
technical support person to assist her whenever she sat down to add
to the lesson. After an initial discussion of what she wanted to
achieve with a hypertext treatment of this short story, Zaira and
Steven decided to port the MacGalt lesson into the Guided Reading
template, running on xMediaEngine Classic software. With a template
tool that imposed fewer limitations on annotation of the text, Zaira
reported finding Guided Reading to be quite approachable; she learned
to manipulate the software to finish most of the lesson herself.
Steven continued to provide technical assistance and advice for
precision acquisition and manipulation of the digital graphics and
audio. The result is an annotated story in which students have
supporting photographs, other graphics, and an audio pronunciation
model correlating Puerto Rican dialect phrases to their printed forms
in a story which is not written in "standard" Spanish.