Jacqualine's all things Italian blog

Flicker, photo by Funchye

One of the things I enjoyed most about Dean Shareski’s video, Sharing: The Moral Imperative, were his examples of how sharing could affect the lives of people very far away from each other and in completely different contexts. The example of the blog about the little girl’s pictures posted by her father receiving all these comments and also the different schools organizing similar identity days after learning about the Alberta school’s event show that we have everything to gain and nothing to lose by sharing information, insights and ideas. I think that is the part I have liked most about this course. I have learned so much from reading and listening to everyone involved with the POT program and I now look forward to learning even more from the web at large. Like Jean, sharing always came easily for me as I child and I suppose in that way it’s not a surprise that I went into teaching. I always enjoyed working in a group rather than working alone and my ideas have would become more focused and clear after a good discussion with others. As an undergraduate, I often did better in courses where I had someone to study with than when I went over the material alone. Graduate school did provide some opportunities for interaction with colleagues from other schools, such as at conferences, but the possibilities were still much more limited then than they are now. I can now see how much better my own experiences at a graduate student could have been if I had shared more at different points in my early career. At this stage, I agree with Dean Shareski about that sharing is not really optional, but rather imperative, because it is through our efforts to share and make connections that we model such experiences for our students. As I said in my post from last week, I don’t think that connectivity should necessarily replace one on one interactions between an individual and the great books and ideas of the past, rather, I think they should complement one another so that the sharing portion of the learning process can add something to everyone’s close reading, The great advantage of today’s technology is that those interactions aren’t limited to the members of a single classroom, but can include anyone interested in the topic. I think a great example from this semester was when Cris Crissman allowed us to view and enter her space in Second Life and showed us some of the interactions between her students and the authors of the books they were reading for her course. What 19th century scholar wouldn’t have given anything to debate with Plato or Shakespeare about the meaning in their works?

Gardner Campbell’s suggestion that students have space on university servers for a personal cyberinfrastructure so that they could “experiment with server management tools via graphical user interfaces such as cPanel or other commodity equivalents, [...]  install scripts with one-click installers such as SimpleScripts, [...] play with wikis and blogs, [...] tinker and begin to assemble a platform to support their publishing, their archiving, their importing and exporting, their internal and external information connections” (Gardener Cambell, A Personal Cyberinfrastructure) seems like a very creative solution to the problem we’ve discussed this semester about a student’s body of work in online learning being enclosed within the course management system and therefore inaccessible to them after the course is over. With students maintaining their own networks and serving as the administrators, they would surely be driving the content and how they wished to represent themselves, yet with much more freedom that they have probably experienced on social networking sites since while these do allow for some personal choices, they are still defined by a specific structure and format. My favorite quote from Gardner Campell’s piece is about how “students must be effective architects, narrators, curators, and inhabitants of their own digital lives.” As in Alex Couros’s diagramof the networked teacher, I agree that teachers must model this practice for learners. Although I am just at the beginning of this process, I think I am coming closer to defining and finding what my own digital presence will look like. This course has been a great first leap for me, but I am looking forward to learning and sharing much more in the years to come. Years ago, I took a course in the applied linguistics department at UCLA on Technology and Language Teaching. It was workshop based, full of sharing and it revolutionized how I taught my classes since I was a relatively new teacher with only a year or so of experience who needed more insights and ideas. Even though I have now been teaching for over ten years, I feel like I will look back at this course and my trajectory during it with the same sort of feeling about it revolutionizing my own thoughts on teaching and learning. Thanks to all of your for sharing what you have learned over these past two semesters.

For my presentation, I am thinking about preparing something for the course I would like to teach online and then making a video of what I have accomplished using the principles of course design we’ve learned this semester, I haven’t decided on what format I will use yet, but thanks to Jim for his guidance and to Jean for a great first example of this weeks presentation.

Sorry for the late posts, but I have bit a bit under the weather the past two weeks. When I was able, I’ve enjoyed reading all of your posts and hearing about your plans for the presentations.

I agree with the notion of combining the topics from weeks 20 and 21 as Jean suggested in her post, Combined weeks 20 and 21, since I also felt that there was quite a bit of overlap in the ideas covered over these two weeks.

As many of you mentioned in your posts, I too can relate to the metaphor of the teacher as curator. One real life example his description brought to mind is how the actual job of museum curator seems to be executed in different parts of the world and how much this can effect, both positively and negatively, a museum goer’s experience. Here in the United States, it is commonplace for curated exhibitions to have elaborate explanations of the historical period, contemporaries, artistic movements and influences, in order to help place a given work of art or artist in a particular context. One thing I noticed when I began traveling in Europe, and in particular in Italy, is the relative or complete absence of this type of exhibit. For instance, the Vatican museums, which undoubtedly house one of the largest collections of artwork in the world, are impossible to navigate without an excellent guide book or a personal tour. There are countless rooms of busts which are identified by a number and perhaps the time period they are from but no other pertinent information. I think that a lot of this has to do with the sheer volume of artifacts that must be cataloged and glossed. However, I also think it has to do with fundamental ideas about learning and what sorts of knowledge are valuable. When I think back about my university experiences in the US and in Italy, one important difference I noticed immediately is a greater emphasis on memorization and the depth of one’s knowledge on a single topic in Europe as opposed to more breadth of knowledge and a general mastery of a greater variety of topics here. If I return to think of the metaphor of the online instructor as curator, it also reminds me of how much I’ve learned this semester about how to effectively guide students in online activities so that they get the maximum benefit out of their time spent online. Knowing how to make videos, screencasts, record voice for my presentations etc. are all activities that I can use to show students I really care about their learning and acquisition of the material as well as give them a road map for how to effectively use the internet to do research and/or produce high quality academic work. Even though the “hole-in-the-wall” experiment, as George Siemens mentions, “demonstrate clearly the natural potential of humans as self-selecting learners”, I agree with his reminder that sometimes learners “walk unproductive paths [...]that someone with experience can readily direct them around.” After viewing Jim and Lisa’s presentation, Adventures in Online Pedagogy, I also thought about how is a “curator” different from an “instructivist” type of teacher, and I believe that Siemen’s offers a good definition of the “a curatorial teacher” as one who “acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map.”  Like Lisa mentioned in her presentation with Jim, I would be most inclined to pick and choose elements from each of the Instructivist, Constructivist and Connectivist theories in order to have balance in my online courses much in the same way as I shift between teacher fronted, small group and pair work in my F2F language classes.  For me, a teacher as curator provides stimulating content and some directions on how to interact with it, while still allowing students the freedom to interpret that content in a variety of ways so that everyone can benefit from each others contributions.

Flicker, photo at Vatican Museum by Tripu

Can you tell who’s who? Is that Trajan o Tiberius on the right?

Are these copies of Roman busts from the 19th century?

When I read Sanger’s article, Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age, I could see how much of what he discusses near the end of his piece, namely “that liberal education and the Western enlightenment ideals that it inculcates not only are valuable but are essential to our future”, is in many ways dead set against the connectivist teaching theory and the idea of the networked teacher or learner in Alex Couros’ diagram. As the product of a liberal arts education which was heavy on individual work and reflection requiring me to “read increasingly difficult and important books” in a number of languages, I can’t help but agree with many of Sanger’s reservations about an entirely connectivist approach to education. At the same time, however, I have also seen that while many students do struggle with applying critical thinking skills to the works of the “canon”, they can be quite adept at critiquing other types of media, such as films. I first noticed this teaching simultaneous courses in Italian Literature and Cinema. Whereas I would have to coax responses when it came to a close reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy in one course, students couldn’t seem to say enough about whether or not they loved or hated Fellini’s films in the other. The importance of basic skills and an understanding of what in Italy they call the “patrimonio culturale-cultural patrimony” of society can’t be denied.  At the same time, students’ and society’s needs have changed incredibly since the advent of universities and instructivist teaching methods. Therefore the necessity of learning how, as Jim mentioned, to create learning environments, could be as important, if not more important to today’s students than the mastery of the great works of the canon of Western Civilization. It doesn’t seem good to abandon either set of knowledge, but rather, to find ways to allow them to overlap and interact with one another.

Flicker, by Alex Couros

Sorry about the late post, I was out of town for about ten days and my access to the internet was limited at best, so I am back and plan on catching up with the rest of you over the next few days.

I think one of the most important issues that came up in the readings and the webinar I watched on Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography course page is that any use of technology must be relevant to what you and the students want to achieve and must not be optional. Something that really struck me about the study we read by R. Graham, J. Hilton, P. Rich, D. Wiley, Using Online Technologies to Extend a Classroom to Learners at a Distance. Distance Education, 31(1), p. 77-92, (2010), was the fact that many of the exclusively online students and the in class participants really didn’t seem to get too much out of interacting with each other since the instructor didn’t require or facilitate such interactions with this particular cohort. In a previous cohort of students, a group of Italian students wrote their own paper about how much they enjoyed this open source online course, perhaps because the instructor made interaction relevant and required it at that time. I think these are some very positive results of this study, since for me, it shows how the importance of the instructor’s role as facilitator is not diminished, but most likely enhanced, in the online environment. Which means that content area experts will always be needed to teach courses in any discipline and the expertise and insight we bring to our courses is an essential part of their success, regardless of the format in which they are offered. In a F2F course, we often help students to organize into groups and give them a set of tasks and or roles to fulfill, and I expect that this type of facilitation could be even more important in an online environment. This is why I am somewhat surprised that Wiley expected students to “self-organize” into groups in his course. I understand that students use social media all the time and often “self-organize” into various groups based on their interests or beliefs. It seems like that doesn’t always translate perfectly into their academic coursework. I found it curious too, that the online only students in Wiley’s study reported that they benefited most from interaction with the content rather than with their peers. The fact that the interactions were not required recalled  Ko and Rossen’s advice in bold reminding us that “making use of the Internet optional rather than incorporating it into the curriculum dooms it to failure” (Ko and Rossen, p.371). I think that even things like interactions, as we have seen in our course during the weeks concerning facilitating discussions and classroom management, really need an instructor to guide them and if they are not required course elements, they make be put at the bottom of a busy student’s list of priorities.

In contrast, after I viewed the webinar about how Michael Wesch’s runs his Digital Ethnography course and the rationale from which it was conceived, I thought about what an incredible model it was for how to integrate online and in class work in a truly meaningful and relevant way. I really enjoyed watching the students working on the World Simulation and their reactions to what they had learned in the youtube video on the use of Twitter and Jott during this project. Wesch repeated at several points how much knowledge his students had acquired about world systems theory, which many students wouldn’t have learned about until grad school, by putting it into practice during the simulation in this introductory course. Seeing this course in action, as well as reading about the definitions in Ko and Rossen about web-enhanced, hybrid and completely online courses, has really made me reflect on how well I currently use technology in my F2F (web-enhanced) course. I know that I can do better and I believe that I am improving all the time as a result of participating in the POT program. Over the last week or so, I asked my students to prepare a weather report for all of Italy for a single day or for a single city over several days. I gave them many different examples of videos online of both actual weather reports and one fun creative video of a song done by a Spanish student on youtube in order to inspire them to be creative. Yesterday they gave either an in class presentation or made a video for the class to watch. I was so impressed with the overall quality of both the presentations and videos they made. I think this had a lot to do with the fact that the video examples I provided made it seem a relevant, interesting and fun task to complete rather than just another homework assignment to check off. I will definitely be doing more project based work using technology for the rest of the semester and I am interested in investigating project or content based language instruction using technology. I am even thinking about this type of project for our final presentations. What are all the rest of you working on?

This week we were asked to continue reading about classroom management and facilitation in Ko and Rossen, but also about the advantages and disadvantages of the course management systems that are currently available. I enjoyed Lisa’s article, Insidious Pedagogy, because I think it really got to the heart of many of the issues we’ve been exploring this year with the POT program, especially with regards to how to select the best tools that serve our pedagogical needs. I decided to explore Moodle since I have been using Blackboard for a very long time, I began to use it as a Teaching Assistant at UCLA around 1998, and although there have been many improvements over the years, I still wanted to look at something which seemed completely different. I have also used webCT and webCT Vista at another campus, and I wasn’t really a fan of either since even the simplest tasks, such as uploading and keeping track of word documents, seemed more complicated than they needed to be. I can definitely attest to the fact that as a “novice” with this type of CMS, I primarily limited myself to those features which most closely mimicked the kind of things I would do with students in class, such as reminding them of assignments via the Calendar function, or posting text documents such as quiz reviews. Even though I have still not had the opportunity to teach online, I have been able to see over the course of the last semester that if I were to teach an online course, there would be so many more things to consider in terms of how to deliver content and how to best support students in their learning objectives. I feel that I have already made so much progress, even in my F2F classes,  by participating in the POT program, since I now have a much better understanding of what it means to fully integrate technology into an existing lesson and how to choose the right tools in order to do so. I really enjoyed the Moodle tool guide for this reason and this is exactly why I chose to tour this particular CMS. Since Moodle is organized with Constructivist principles in mind, I also spent some time exploring sites which deal with the notion of constructivism and teaching, especially as they apply to my field, foreign language teaching. I found an interesting article, Constructivism and Applied Linguistics, which discussed how language learners might benefit from “grappling with raw data, as opposed to representations resulting from someone else’s having grappled” and that these exercises “are not just generally ‘better’ in some vague way but specifically are more successfully transferred to novel contexts and form a better preparation for further independent learning.” Another article I found, Constructivist Teaching and Learning, describes how constructivism informs teaching practice and what are the features of this type of classroom environment.

I ended up making a short Jing of what I explored in Moodle, and I have been trying to upload it for the past hour. It seems that screencast’s web site is down, so I will try to add it to this post later today. Thanks for your patience.

When I add it, you’ll be able to see it here:

Exploring_Moodle

Flicker, photo by Tpapi

It seems as though many of the readings, presentations and subsequent discussion on classroom management focused on great tips for how to organize and manage an online course in the most effective way possible. Many thanks to Lisa Lane, Lisa Moon, Pilar Hernandez and those of you who’ve already taught online for sharing your triumphs and some of your pitfalls with the rest of us. I especially appreciated how succinct Lisa’s Seven Things I’d want to know were. I felt like it was just the online instructor FAQ I needed. In Lisa Moon’s presentation, I enjoyed when she and Pilar showed us their actual course pages and let us see examples of the topics they were discussing, such as how to let students know you care about them but also carve out some time to get things done without having so many emails to respond too. They both gave some very concrete examples about using announcements, being very specific about communication at the outset of the course, and addressing the class as a whole instead of just writing back to individuals, which were echoed in the Ko and Rossen reading as well.

Two points from Ko and Rossen which I personally found intriguing and wanted to investigate a little further were the debate over the ideal course size for online instruction (p.p. 317-318) and the effectiveness of modular self paced materials with built in assessments (p. 314). As for the debate, I found a number of articles from the last decade and a few investigative studies whose purpose was to try and answer the question, what is the ideal class size for online courses? One study, from the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, compared both F2F and online instruction in terms of faculty load and time spent, the delivery of instruction and the assessment methods used. One of their conclusions was that “online teaching demanded a minimum of 20 percent more time than traditional instructions, most of which was spent presenting instructional content.” This seems to be something that all of the instructors we’ve been hearing from this year would agree with wholeheartedly. Their calculations for identifying the ideal class size, 17 for F2F and 12 for online, seems a little convoluted, but the discussion of how they conducted the study and what they found is still interesting. You can read the entire article here. I also found a really good blog entry on this topic. The author of the blog Flexknowlogy, Jared Stein, is the director of instructional design at Utah Valley University. In his post, “Online Class, what size to you want to be?”, he poses some interesting questions about how people from the instructional design camp are looking at things such as “Is learner success reliant on instructor-student interactions?” He goes on to respond “Some courses thrive on learner interaction with informed and knowledgeable experts. If so, decreasing class size may increase instructor-student interaction.” I think where he put a “may” in his answer, most instructors and the Ko and Rossen book would put “will”. This reminded me of what Lisa emphasized in her “7 things I would want to know” about how we, the content experts, need to put the emphasis first our pedagogical goals and then find the technological tools that best serve them. Pilar’s use of voicethread is a great example of this at work. The goal of most any language class is to get students listening and speaking in the target language as quickly as possible, so what better way to do this than to have them use something simple like voicethread from the very beginning of the course.

I don’t know all that much about modular self paced materials for online courses except for some personal experiences with them as a learner. Last semester I completed an online course offered by the counseling center on how to identify and refer at risk students with psychological issues to their services. The course was presented using interactive avatars in which I played a Professor and then was given information about a fictional set of students and then needed to first select the most at risk students based on their profiles. Afterwards, I engaged in individual modules with conversations between myself and the students in which I had to select the response I believed was most effective and I received feedback along the way, help if I selected incorrectly, praise if I selected correctly. I really didn’t think too much about this mode of delivery at the time except that it was very unique. Now that I think about it in the context of this course, the opportunity to role play those situations with immediate feedback was a powerful learning tool for me. I can even remember the look of the simulated student avatars and some of the problems they faced. So, I think that for certain types of online courses, those for which situational awareness or social intelligence are important such as a language class, these types of role playing experiences could be a valuable way to have students interact with the content without requiring the instructor to be present at all times. I wonder if any of you use modules like these in your courses and what, if any, have been your students’ reaction to them.

Hope you all are having a great week.

…and what do they need to be successful in my course? I really appreciated Julie’s video introduction to this week’s topic. I started to think about my students and how the answer to this question keeps changing every year for each of my courses. When I came to MiraCosta college in 2007, I was often thinking about this because it became normal for me to have both a 70 year old and a high school student in the same class whereas in my previous teaching experiences, I didn’t have anything close to the diversity I would get to know at MCC. I think what I have learned is not to make too many assumptions or take anything, especially as regards technology, for granted. I really enjoyed the articles we read this week because they discussed something which I’ve often experienced where students who seem to be very technologically savvy outside of class still have trouble completing assignments which require them to use the internet. What I’m realizing through our POT experience, however, is that the way in which my younger students and I use and digest the information one can find on the internet is often very different. I am realizing that perhaps part of the problems students had in the past with assignments I had designed using the internet were also some of my own lack of experience in course design or clarity of instructions.

I was very happy for that reason with the video Lisa made on how to compose and hyperlink FAQ’s for a course website. I decided that I would try to put myself in the shoes of a student on the first day of class and get the answers to the things I would definitely want to know about my course. So this is where my First Day FAQ’s listed below came from. I also did a little search on youtube on “who are our students” and found the video I inserted at the end of my post. It was made by a group of students in a Sociology course in Kansas. I think it was pretty interesting, especially for the descriptions of how students use technology in their daily lives. Maybe some of you will let me know what you think as well. Have a great week.

First day FAQs

What kind of internet connection do I need for this course?

What is Blackboard and how do I access our course?

What should I do if I have technical problems?

Where can I purchase the textbook for this course?

Are there any additional materials that I might need for this course?

Where can I see a course schedule and/or list of assignments?

Where do I go to complete my homework/workbook assignments?

Where do I go to complete my blog assignments?

How is my grade calculated? Where can I check my grades?

Is there any extra credit available?

How can I contact you (the instructor)?

Answers:

What kind of internet connection do I need for this course?

This course requires a high speed (DSL or cable) internet connection. In addition, you may want to invest in a microphone for recording some of the required assignments for this course.

What is Blackboard and how do I access our course?

Your grades and course materials such as the syllabus and the calendar are available at all times on BlackBoard (http://blackboard.miracosta.edu). Other material such as instructions for assignments and announcements about our course may be posted there as well. To login to Blackboard, you will use the same user ID and password you used to enroll in our course with SURF. You should see our class as one of the classes you’re enrolled in.

What should I do if I have technical problems?

If you have any problems with Blackboard, you should try contacting their help desk at the following URL: http://www.miracosta.edu/Apps/StudentHelp/ For the Maestro Supersite which accompanies our textbook, there is also a help desk here: http://support.vhlcentral.com/ , and you should make sure to watch the student video tour of the website on your first visit.

Where can I purchase the textbook for this course?

You have two options for purchasing our textbook, (Cozzarelli, Julia, Sentieri: attraverso l’Italia contemporanea. 1st Ed. Boston: Vista Higher Learning, 2011).

You can either purchase it through our college bookstore, or you can buy it directly from the publisher at the website: http://www.vhldirect.com/store/miracosta

and you will receive immediate access to the v-text, a virtual version of the textbook and WebSam, the workbook for this course.

Are there any additional materials that I might need for this course?

Other recommended materials you might want to have for this course are a microphone for recording audio and/or video in order to complete the assignments for our class, an Italian-English Dictionary (or you can access them online, one that I personally like is www.wordreference.com which also has an app for use on smartphones and other personal devices.

Where can I see a course schedule and/or list of assignments?

A syllabus and a list of weekly assignments will be posted throughout the semester on Blackboard. I will also update the calendar section of Blackboard to make sure to remind you of any upcoming due dates. Late work will not receive full credit, so please try to turn in assignments in a timely fashion. The entire syllabus and assignments for the semester will be listed week by week in Blackboard on the first day of our course, so if you miss an assignment at any point, just scroll back to that week in order to catch up and keep up with the rest of the class.

Where do I go to complete my homework/workbook assignments?

All homework assignments will be completed in the webSAM supersite and due dates will also be listed there. Blog and other assignments will be turned in through our Blackboard class website.Our textbook comes with an accompanying web site, containing the Workbook, Lab Manual and Video Manual exercises. These are designed to enhance and reinforce the information studied in each lesson; they will give you the necessary practice of vocabulary and grammatical structures along with essential practice and evaluation of your reading and listening comprehension. The first time you login to this site, you will need to create a login name and password and enter the book key you have purchased to access the site.

Where do I go to complete my blog assignments?

All blogs will be turned in our our class wesbite in Blackboard. To complete a blog, select the link from the syllabus for that blog which will take you to the blogs page. On the right hand side, you will see an example of the current blog which I have posted. Read my blog and post a question for me, then you can go on to compose your own blog. It’s a good idea to save a copy of the blog on your personal computer. When you’re ready to submit it, click on create blog entry and enter (or copy and paste) your text in the dialogue box. When you are finished, click post entry and you should then see your entry in the list on the right. Your grade and the comments you’ll receive will appear in the my grades section of Blackboard.

How is my grade calculated? Where can I check my grades?

Grades will be calculated using the following scales. The breakdown of the grade is as follows: Participation/in class activities (10%), Workbook & Lab manual (15%), Diari/ Journals/Blogs (15%), Quizzes (4) (15%), Exams (4) (20 %) Final exam (15%), Speaking Exam/ Oral presentations (10%). The following scale will be used to calculate your final grade: A (90.0 – 100%) B (80.0 – 89.9%) C (70.0 – 79.9%) Credit (73.0% or more) D (60.0 – 69.9%) F (59.9% or less). You can check your grade at any time throughout the semester by going to Blackboard and clicking on check your grades on the left hand side.

Is there any extra credit available?

There is extra credit available for this course. You may watch an Italian film and write about it or record your thoughts to share with our class. You may attend an event, such as a festival or concert related to Italian culture and share this with the class. You can make a short recording or video as well. I am open to discuss any ideas you may have.

How can I contact you (the instructor)?

The best way to contact me is by email at jdyess@miracosta.edu. I check my email at least once daily and will reply to you within 24 hours maximum.

A vision of students today

I never had any idea of how many mind mapping platforms there are, but I explored a little bit and there is even a wikipedia List of concept and mind mapping software. It makes sense that Prezi is listed among them, but since we had already explored this tool last semester, I guess that’s why we were asked to try out some other software such as Mindmeister. I did try for about an hour to get something together using Personal Brain, but it just wasn’t working too well for me, so after seeing Trisha’s post where she did a beautiful job with a mind map in powerpoint, I decided to go back to Prezi, which I had explored a little last semester, in order to make a mind map. In making this decision, I also thought of the ease of use for my students and I think that Prezi was much easier for me, as a student in this course, to use and therefore might work better for my students. Part of why I say this is because our current textbook for Italian actually has an exercise for an idea map, which is essentially the same as a mind map, as a prelude to a writing exercise. This particular mind map’s theme is the family and so I made my map as an example for students to give them ideas for their own map and also for something interesting to present to them in class to go over the vocabulary terms related to family. In an online setting, I could envision assigning a mind map of each student’s family as an extended project on family involving both writing and speaking as they presented their own materials. Since students would then listen to and comment on their fellow students family mind maps, through this assignment they would be able to engage in all the four skills of speaking, reading, writing and listening. As a follow-up, or depending on the vocabulary which has already been presented, a type of ice breaking activity, I created a survey in Italian about the family for the class to take. We could compare the results as a class or in smaller groups and learn more about the composition of the families of our class members.

Here is the survey:
Click here to take survey

Working with Prezi was fun, although very time consuming because I was trying to find and insert both visual and video components into this presentation and that took a lot of time for me since it was all pretty new. I finally got the correct type of microphone to record more high quality audio, without all those audible clicks (yet I did still notice a little bit of audio breaks when I was going through the prezi). I then made a jing of my prezi which I have included below. This whole process took quite a lot of time, but I think I will try it out this semester in class so I will get to see how my work paid off when I present it to my students.

So here it is:

http://screencast.com/t/XLMkwLI9NNdC

This week we explored a little more the world of video and synching audio and video to make a more dynamic and hopefully polished presentation for our students. I don’t know if I achieved the second part, but I gave it my best effort and I am sure with practice I can make things better in the future. I think I learned quite a bit by further exploring youtube and taking a first look at vimeo and blip.tv which I’d never really looked at before. The amount of creativity and interesting materials you can find for pretty much any subject is astounding. I am getting better all the time in my F2F courses at effectively selecting videos and integrating them into my lesson in a way which supports rather than distracts from what I am teaching. This is something we all touched on several times last semester when we discussed the importance of choosing the right tool that serves the needs of your course given the objectives you have set for the students and the material you are teaching. It seems that when teaching the same course online, the use of images, audio files and videos is essential to the delivery of the course material in order to vary the delivery methods and to reach a wider audience with different individual learning styles. I know I still have a lot to learn but I am glad to have made a first step this week by creating my first slidecast.

The slidecast linked  below is for a Italian recipe which I use in class to illustrate the imperative mood (used to to give commands and make requests). Usually I have students in class work in groups to match the written instructions with the illustrations in the power point after reviewing the recipe with them. Then they must modify all of the verbs in the recipe to give instructions to one person rather than a group and also they have to use both informal and formal modes of address. But with online students, I would need to present the information with something like a slidecast in order for them to hear the recipe before having to work with the text version. Of course in this version of the audio for the POT group, I provided the translations in English of the instructions, something which I would not do for my students.

I did not record the audio using Audacity since I had previously recorded audio using the Garage Band program on my Mac and I felt pretty comfortable with that. It allows you to save files you’ve created in this program as Mp3′s which you can then email or use in other applications. I’m still no expert with it though and that part took me the longest along with synching the audio and the slides together on the Slideshare website. I did also join Audioboo and explore their site since at first I was going to record the audio with them because before I looked at the site I thought it was like Audacity and then realized that it was more like an audio version of twitter, something which I can appreciate given my old cellphone and abysmally slow texting skills.

So here’s the slidecast (I tried to embed it with the embed code but it is just providing a link instead. I hope you enjoy and again I apologize for the clicking sound in the recording. I tried to buy a microphone at the mac store but it wasn’t working right and I am now again on the search for a new one, any suggestions?):

Happy New Year to all the POT group. I liked this week’s blog assignment because I think it is a great segue from some of the issues we discussed at the end of last semester about copyright issues as related to materials and images we use for educational purposes in an online environment and also how to model fair usage for our students with the materials we use to teach them in our class.

I didn’t previously know about the Mac Grab utility and I am very happy to have learned how to use it. I put it to use for my students right away when I got some questions about how to access and complete assignments in our textbook website, since we now have a workbook and lab manual which is completely online, and I was able to make a few quick screen shots showing them exactly where I wanted them to go. It found Mac grab a really useful tool for providing a series of show and tell type instructions for students.

Later I went on to explore Flicker and realized that although it does support some blogs, edublogs is not one of them. So unfortunately, I will be posting my image below as well as the annotations and the link to find it within in Flicker.

From Flicker’s FAQ page, these are the blogs they currently support and there are  instructions for adding these blogs to one’s Flicker account so that images uploaded in Flicker could also be shared in blog posts.

• Blogger *
• LiveJournal
• Meta Weblog API Enabled Blogs
• Tumblr
• WordPress**

There are also some instructions on how to upload images to your blog using Flicker on the WordPress support site, however, these must be a little bit old because the Extending Flicker section of the site works differently than what you see in WordPress.

I think that so much that can be achieved when incorporating images into a lesson or curriculum, especially in an online environment. I felt that the suggestions on where to find and how to use images in Ko and Rossen just scratched the surface of the myriad ways images can be used, especially after taking a look at some of the sites and tools posted by other POT group members in the past. I also thought of Pilar’s example of how an image, or a series of images, can be used with a tool like Voicethread to stimulate discussion amongst students. This made me think about a similar assignment with writing as its focus using Flicker since this is not a terribly difficult site to navigate and is also free and easy to access. In my own F2F courses, I often use images for which students must provide descriptions. With Flicker, I could even upload a series of photos for which students would need to provide the narration or perhaps even write a dialogue to record. These are just a few examples, but I am sure there are many more ways in which Flicker or other image sharing sites could be useful for online courses in Foreign Languages. Images of gestures, which are very important for speaking Italian, could be paired with their meanings. This would be a great way to present more of the cultural nuances which help students’ overall fluency in a language.

The Flicker photo which I posted takes this blog back to Florence and the Ponte Vecchio which is somewhat appropriate since the image at the top of my blog is of that very bridge. Here you see my image and below it you can read my annotation as it appears in Flicker.

Lucchetti d’amore- Locks of Love

The tradition goes that if any couple attached a lock to the bridge and threw away the key in the Arno river, their love would last forever. The practice is now forbidden since an excessive number of these locks began to damage the famous bridge. A few still remain and they say that hopeful couples still try to touch these remaining locks in order to get a little bit of good luck for the future of their union.

Week 1: Introduction- This week’s post was short, but what I was personally excited about at this point was the fact that I had successfully set up my blog and had started using it. I was really happy to have been able to personalize my site a little bit with a picture of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence that I took in 2006. I was also happy to start reading my fellow POT participant’s posts since I knew from the beginning this was going to be an interesting and valuable experience.

Week 2: Teaching and Learning Online-This week the entire county had a reality check about how much we rely on technology for all kinds of things and that theme dominated this post. I enjoyed learning about RSS feeds and how much they reduce the amount of time one spends surfing the net for a specific topic without a road map of where to go. It makes me think of how I began doing research, by casting the widest net possible, until I found resources, including helpful librarians to guide me and find exactly what I was looking for. I think an RSS feed would be a great way to help students and guide their online searches for a given assignment and I am glad to know how they work for future reference. I also started to try and post photos along with my observations. I kept with my Italian Gastronomy theme with most of them and most were photos either my husband or I had taken.

Week 3: Pedagogy and Course Design- I think this week’s post was interesting and sparked a little discussion via comments which compared the merits of F2F and online instruction for foreign language courses. I had been surprised by the results of the survey because I was more on the presentational side than the constructivist one, but I thought that this would need to change should I begin to offer my courses online and I talked about how some of the standards for foreign language instruction, including the idea of building cross cultural communities, might be better implemented by an online course.

Week 4: Materials for Online-Even though it seemed challenging at the time, I really enjoyed the opportunity to brainstorm about the course objectives for Italian Gastronomy and to learn more about the differences between course goals and objectives. I think this was one of the strongest chapters of Ko and Rossen because of all the great examples they provide to illustrate these concepts. This was also the week we were introduced to Prezi and I still think this is an incredible tool. I really enjoyed seeing some of the fellow POT participants Prezis, they were awesome. I will definitely be spending more time on this site over the break.

Week 5: The Online Syllabus-This week I posted on why I love, love, love (I cannot say this enough) the interactive syllabus. It is one of my top priorities over the spring break to invest time in creating one for each of my courses. I really benefited from all the great examples which Lisa, Pilar, Jim and the book provided of different ways to accomplish this in different LMS and formats. Having taking online courses myself, I definitely thing an interactive syllabus is a great guide to the course which helps students succeed throughout the semester.

Week 6: Creating Presentations- This week I remember feeling a but overwhelmed and my shorter post reflects this. I really like Jing and Prezi but I know I need many more hours of time on task before I will feel like an expert at either of them. Another thing on my to do list this break is to buy a microphone for my computer since this was the week I realized the limitations of depending on the laptop mic because you could hear my clicks throughout the video I recorded for Slidecast. At the same time, after trying these new tools, I sure felt a sense of accomplishment at how much I had already learned in the past six weeks.

Week 7: The Online Classroom-This week I remember that I really liked Pilar’s workshop on building community in an online class because it was so hands on and our assignments for that week seemed really hands on too. I made an effort to reach out to more people in our course by commenting more on their blogs and I even had a little discussion going on in the comment section of my blog since I posted a question to the POT group about whether anyone had ever had a situation with an online student offending another student by their comments and how they handled it. I was happy to know from Tami’s comment that this was a rare occurrence in her experience and I learned so much from what she shared with me.

Week 8: Creating Community-This was a shorter post, but still a very important week for understanding ways to build community amongst a group of online students. I really enjoyed using Voicethread and plan to develop some activities for my F2F courses next semester using this platform. I liked that it is nonlinear in structure, more like an actual conversation,  and that you can use images to spark and stimulate conversations. I can see I really need to get on buying that microphone since once again this week the absence of the microphone limited my ability to participate in the Elluminate live session (especially since I am not the best typist in the world).

Week 9: Student Activities- This week I reflected on the value of role playing after having attended the  back channel room of the synchronous session in Second Life. It was one of the most unique experiences of the semester and it made me wax philosophical about how the spirit of Carnival and role playing itself can truly be a “socially transformative” process that opens up so many possibilities and new learning experiences for both students and their instructors.

Week 10: Open Platforms for Teaching and Learning-This was a fun week. Even though it took some time to do it, I really was  happy with exploring Google sites and trying to set up a welcome page for my course. Thanks for the tutorial Pilar : ) ! I also learned a lot from the readings this week in Ko and Rossen. I think they made some great points about how to create activities that students will inspire students.

Week 11: Class Resources and Intellectual Property- This week I mostly addressed the issues brought up in Lawrence Lessig’s video. I spoke about an online activist, Cory Doctorow, who came to MCC in 2007 to give a talk on the history of copyright and how it’s being applied to the the sharing and reuse culture of the internet and its users. I also reflected on how much I learned about what constitutes fair use practices for educators and how I would like to model such behavior for my students.

Week 12: Resources online/ Mid-year Self-Assessment Check- Here I am in the twelfth week and I can’t believe how much I have learned so far. After taking the mid-year assessment, I think the area I still need to work on the most is my participation and belonging to the POT community, whether through more comments on others’ blogs, participation in the Facebook group or updating my diigo bookmarks. My goal for the next twelve week session is to be an even more active member of our online community by participating more fully in all of these areas rather than just keep my comments and observations to my blog and comments on others blog posts. I hope everyone enjoys a well deserved break and I look forward to hearing from you all in February.