PACE Roundtable: Ideas for infusing technology into the language classroom

Friday, April 28, 2017
12:20 - 2:00 p.m.
Bruininks Hall 420B
Register Online (required)

Lunch Provided by AfroDeli

Looking for ways to integrate technology into your teaching to enhance students’ learning experience? Please join us for an afternoon full of ideas and great conversation. This roundtable will showcase five projects in a roundtable format. Participants will have a chance to engage in informal, small group conversation with the presenters and learn new ways to incorporate technology into their teaching.


Featured Technologies and Projects: VideoAnt, Radio Ambulante, Flipgrid, Apple Numbers and PlayPosit


Interactive listening with VideoAnt
VideoAnt is a University of Minnesota-created web-based video annotation tool. Its simple interface makes it easy to create discussion board activities directly linked to authentic web-based videos. It has the potential to turn the often solitary experience of at-home listening homework into an interactive, social experience - one in which students can collaboratively work to understand, analyze, and assess second language audiovisual texts. This roundtable presentation will cover the basics of setting up VideoAnt, student reactions to using VideoAnt as outside of class listening practice, and a discussion of pros and cons of the tool from the instructor perspective.

Radio Ambulante in the Spanish classroom
Radio Ambulante is a weekly Spanish language podcast from NPR that "tells Latin American stories from anywhere Spanish is spoken, including the United States.” The unique content, combined with the fact that each episode has an accompanying transcript make this podcast a great tool for the Spanish classroom, from beginning through advanced levels of instruction. This roundtable presentation will show how an instructor used an episode of Radio Ambulante on Peruvian cuisine in her intermediate Spanish class to create a four-day multiliteracy lesson to accompany the textbook chapter on food.

Using Apple’s Numbers app on the iPad to speed up grading with rubrics
With a little investment in setup time, Apple’s iPad spreadsheet application can help speed an instructor through scoring multi-criteria rubrics like those used for oral exams. The Numbers app has a little-used feature called Forms that can make entering and adding all the numbers from a rubric faster and less frustrating than using a calculator (and trying to remember if you just added the score for fluency or task completion, or do you need to start over adding from the beginning again!). This presentation will include a brief reflection on evaluating this technology use via the SAMR model. Interested participants will receive a copy of the Numbers spreadsheet file used by the presenter as well.

Using Flipgrid as a tool to create video discussions
Instructors register for a Flipgrid account and then create a grid for the classroom and can add unlimited discussion topics. Instructors can pose questions or prompts – students can create video responses, watch each others’ videos, and respond to each other. Video responses can be up to three minutes long, so this is a good way to promote sustained speaking. This roundtable presentation will cover the basics of setting up Flipgrid, and discuss practical applications for its use in the beginning and intermediate language classroom both to promote discussion among students and conversations between students and instructors.

Improving the interactivity of listening materials with PlayPosit
Working on listening activities can be a monotonous or tedious exercise for students. Through tools such as PlayPosit, what is traditionally considered passive content can be transformed into an interactive experience for students, with time-embedded activities. In this roundtable, participants will work on their choice of audiovisual materials and use various tools available on PlayPosit to create an interactive exercise with questions targeting specific segments of their material. Examples of time-embedded questions include: Multiple Choice, Free Response, Fill in the Blank, Polling, and several others. Finally, participants will also explore ways to closely monitor the progress their students are making.

Presenters: Stephanie Hernandez and Sara Mack, from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese; Beth Kautz and Ginny Steinhagen from the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch; Sean Killackey from the Department of French and Italian; and Hossam Elsherbiny from the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures

The PACE Project is funded by a grant from The Language Flagship.