Modern Languages

Group presentations have always been a part of my classroom, but after watching numerous presentations where students aren’t prepared to present or engaged while viewing the presentation, I realized I needed to make a change.  My hope is that by having students present in smaller groups and present the entire slideshow, students will have a better understanding of the material they are presenting and their classmates will pay closer attention to the presentation. I hope that the discussion in a small group environment will also encourage all students to discuss the proposed questions.

Great ideas can happen anytime, anywhere. To make it easy to keep track of ideas for course/ lesson planning improvement, I developed a “Course Edits Tracker” worksheet in Google Docs for each ot the courses I teach. This document can be accessed anywhere, anytime, online. The form includes a field to track why the change is needed or how the idea will improve the course/ activity/ lesson along with a field to enter student performance/ measure/ outcomes of the proposed edits/ enhancements.

In the Fall of 2016, I decided to convert some of the many writing assignments in my online and hybrid CRE101 course to video submissions rather than written submissions.  Unfortunately, at the time, the recording tool in Canvas was unpredictable and made it very difficult for many students to successfully submit their video submissions.  Submitting by attaching video files was also problematic due to the increased time it took for the students to upload the files and the time for me to download them to grade.  It was so problematic that many students either contacted me about not being abl

For the on-line (SPA 117) course, students are required to submit a video recording of a role-playing situation for each of the course modules.  In the video recording students use the target language in order to complete meaningful tasks they will counter in the real world as health care professionals.  These task based role playing activities will assess verbal and nonverbal communication skills, mostly the students’ grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and speaking capacities learned in each module.

Quizlet is a free online tool for students, teachers, and learners of all ages that can be used in a classroom or on your own. It helps create virtual flash cards to study vocabulary and phrases of a language of choice. GER101 and 102 incorporated several sets of flash cards through Quizlet to help students learn new vocabulary. Each set offers several different sudy mode types: from spelling, matching, learning and testing to interactive games.

In my RDG courses my students complete weekly Reading Response Journals (RRJ). Students are required to read anything they would like and fill out a template with required information about what they read. They are required to format the information in a specific way. I observed that students consistently struggled with the correctly formatting the document and making sure they included all the correct information, and were losing many points as a result. I had provided detailed instructions on how to format the document/information but students were still struggling.

Every semester my students start class (both face to face and online) with the Getting Started Module.  One of the assignments is the "Meet Your Class" assignment.  This assignment is standard in Canvas and requires that students embed a picture into their discussion post.  Embedding a picture in Canvas is not the simple cut and paste or upload that the students are used to.  When I first started using this assignment (Spring  2013) the average score on this assignment was 16.44/20 due to an unsuccefully embedded photo.

For over three years, I have collaborated with peer mentors from the peer mentoring program in my developmental reading classes including rdg 081, 091, 095, and CRE 101 when the group looped up from RDG 091.  There has been a dramatic increase in student retention, course completion and completion of the next round of courses at the 100 level and above as compared to those sections without a peer mentor.  

When developing the online GER101 online piloted Fall 2015, I created modules in which students were presented with video, audio, & text content on a topic.  Various speaking & writing assignments were given, and then a Canvas Quiz was given to assess comprehension.  I soon noticed students were going straight to quizzes without accessing Canvas content pages first.  After unsuccessful exhortations to go through modules in order, I finally decided, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

My ESL students have been challenged to produce clear and coherent writing on a particular topic, even when the topic is on their own preferred choice. I came up with the idea of using a visual, a graphic organizer, and work step by step toward producing good writing. Dissecting and discussing the paragraph structure, looking closer into each of its parts helped my students understand the purpose of writing – how each part (beginning, body, and ending) contributes to producing cohesive and clear writing.